Non-Reformist Reforms and Struggles over Life, Death, and Democracy

From the abstract: “Today’s left social movements are challenging formal law and politics for their capitulation to a regime of racial capitalism. In this Feature, I argue that we must reconceive our relationship to reform and the popular struggles in which they are embedded. I examine the turn of left social movements to “non-reformist reforms” as a framework for reconceiving reform: not as an end goal but as struggles to reconstitute the terms of life, death, and democracy. Non-reformist reforms aim to undermine the prevailing political, economic, social order, construct an essentially different one, and build democratic power toward emancipatory horizons. Today’s thinking about non-reformist reform is both an effort to rethink the kinds of laws, policies, norms, relationships, and modes of organization that we might build to govern society, and an effort to democratize relations of power: to have fundamentally different people at the helm.”