You can't vote your way out of structural violence. The system is working as designed. A critique of reformism without nihilism.
Every few years, the same cycle repeats. Something terrible happens. Public outcry follows. Politicians promise reform. Commissions are formed, reports are written, minor policy tweaks are implemented. Everyone declares victory.
Then a few years later, the same terrible thing happens again. Sometimes worse. And we act surprised.
This isn't failure. It's the system working exactly as intended. Because reform, in the conventional political sense, isn't designed to fix broken systems. It's designed to preserve them.
Let's be clear about what "reform" usually means in practice: taking a fundamentally unjust system and making it slightly less obviously horrible. Not addressing root causes. Not redistributing power. Not dismantling the structures that create harm in the first place.
Just sanding down the roughest edges. Adding oversight committees with no enforcement power. Implementing trainings that everyone ignores. Publishing guidelines that are optional in practice. Changing the language in official documents while keeping the underlying mechanisms intact.
This is reform as pressure valve. Let out just enough steam to prevent the whole thing from exploding, then return to business as usual.
Here's a pattern you'll see over and over: progressive reforms get implemented, then quietly rolled back or undermined. But reactionary changes? Those stick. They become the new baseline.
Expand surveillance powers in response to a crisis, and those powers remain long after the crisis passes. Increase enforcement budgets, and those budgets never shrink back. Build new prisons, and they'll find people to fill them. Create new bureaucratic categories of exclusion, and they'll be used more broadly than initially intended.
The ratchet only turns one way. Systems expand their reach, their budgets, their authority. And reform efforts focused on making incremental improvements within that framework just accept the expansions as given.
"We need better training for ICE agents" accepts that ICE will continue to exist and operate at scale. "We need more humane detention centers" accepts that mass detention will continue. "We need clearer guidelines for enforcement priorities" accepts that enforcement at current levels is inevitable.
See the problem? The premise of the reform already concedes the fundamental point.
Reformist politics loves expertise. Policy wonks, think tanks, detailed white papers explaining the seventeen-point plan to improve outcomes by adjusting budget allocations and tweaking regulatory frameworks.
And sure, expertise matters. You need to understand systems to change them. But here's what the expertise trap does: it shifts the terrain of political struggle from "should this system exist" to "how can we optimize this system."
It turns normative questions into technical ones. Instead of asking whether we should have mass incarceration, we debate the most effective recidivism-reduction programs. Instead of asking whether immigration enforcement at this scale serves any legitimate purpose, we debate which enforcement priorities are most defensible.
The experts are usually smart people with good intentions. But their expertise exists within a framework that takes the system's fundamental legitimacy as given. They're optimizing the machine, not questioning whether the machine should exist.
The reformist position goes something like this: elect better people, pass better laws, and systems will gradually improve. It's a seductive narrative. It's also ahistorical nonsense.
The most significant expansions of harmful systems often happen under ostensibly liberal administrations. Why? Because they're trying to prove they're "tough" on whatever issue the right has weaponized. Because they inherit the institutional machinery and find it easier to use than dismantle. Because the underlying economic and political incentives that shaped the system in the first place haven't changed.
You can't vote your way out of structural violence when the structure itself determines which reforms are politically viable. The system selects for candidates who won't fundamentally challenge it. Campaign finance, media access, party gatekeeping: all of it filters out anyone who might actually threaten the status quo.
This doesn't mean electoral politics is worthless. But it does mean that treating elections as the primary vehicle for systemic change is a category error. You're trying to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, to borrow a phrase.
"We can't change everything at once, so we have to make incremental progress." Sounds reasonable, right? Pragmatic. Realistic.
But incrementalism assumes two things that are often untrue: first, that small changes accumulate into big changes over time. And second, that the system will allow reforms that actually threaten its core functions.
In reality, systems are really good at absorbing incremental reforms without actually changing. They adapt. They co-opt the language of reform while maintaining the substance of oppression. They implement just enough change to defuse political pressure, then quietly revert once attention moves elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the incrementalist strategy asks people to accept continued harm (continued deportations, continued detention, continued violence) on the promise that things will gradually get better. Just wait. Just be patient. Just vote for the lesser evil one more time.
How long are people supposed to wait while the system continues to grind them up?
Here's how systems neutralize threats: they incorporate them. The radical demand gets watered down into a policy proposal. The policy proposal gets negotiated into a modest pilot program. The pilot program gets underfunded and set up to fail. Then when it inevitably fails, the whole idea gets discredited.
Or alternatively: the reform gets implemented, but in a way that actually strengthens the system it was meant to challenge. Community policing was supposed to reform aggressive law enforcement. Instead, it extended police reach into more aspects of community life. Restorative justice programs in schools sometimes just create more opportunities to funnel kids into the criminal legal system.
The system doesn't need to destroy its critics. It just needs to absorb them. Turn them into stakeholders. Give them a seat at the table, a table that was designed to keep fundamental change off the agenda.
This is the most important thing to understand about why reform fails: the systems producing harm aren't broken. They're working exactly as they were designed to work.
Mass incarceration isn't a failure of the criminal legal system. It's a feature. Immigration enforcement isn't broken when it deports long-term residents and separates families. That's what it's designed to do. Economic systems that generate massive inequality aren't malfunctioning. That's the point.
Once you understand this, the futility of reform becomes obvious. You can't fix a system that's achieving its intended outcomes by doing more of what it's already doing. You can't make mass deportation humane. You can't make the carceral state gentle. You can't make exploitation equitable.
The problem isn't implementation. It's not that we need better people running these systems or smarter policies within them. The problem is the systems themselves.
So if reform doesn't work, what does? Before answering that, let's be clear about what definitely doesn't work:
Waiting for the right election. Trying to win over the center. Compromising on fundamental principles to build coalitions with people who don't actually share your goals. Accepting incremental improvements that leave the structure intact. Celebrating symbolic victories while material conditions worsen.
Putting your faith in institutions that exist to preserve the status quo. Believing that the people who benefit from current arrangements will voluntarily give up their advantages. Thinking that if you just explain the problem clearly enough, the powerful will see the light and change course.
None of that works. We know it doesn't work because we've tried it for decades and things keep getting worse.
Here's what actually produces change: organized people building power outside institutional channels. Direct action that imposes costs on the system. Mutual aid that demonstrates alternatives. Solidarity across the artificial divisions the system creates to keep people atomized and weak.
Not lobbying. Not white papers. Not waiting for permission. Building the capacity to make demands that can't be ignored and to enforce those demands through collective action.
This isn't about rejecting every reform. Some reforms materially improve people's lives and should be fought for. But the fight for reforms has to be part of a larger strategy aimed at building power, not a substitute for that strategy.
The goal isn't to make the system work better. It's to build enough power to replace it with something that doesn't require constant reform because it isn't built on exploitation and violence in the first place.
Reform struggles suffer from a horizon problem. The horizon of possibility is set by what seems achievable within current political constraints. But those constraints are artificial. They're products of power imbalances, not natural laws.
Abolitionist organizing expands the horizon. It makes demands that seem impossible within current frameworks, precisely because current frameworks are the problem. And in doing so, it shifts what becomes thinkable, what becomes politically viable.
The eight-hour workday seemed impossible until people organized to make it reality. Ending chattel slavery seemed impossible until it wasn't. Apartheid seemed permanent until it fell. Not because of incremental reform and patient negotiation, but because people organized to make the status quo unsustainable.
This is where it gets less nihilistic: you don't just tear down harmful systems. You build alternatives that meet people's needs better than the systems you're fighting.
Community defense networks that keep people safe without police. Mutual aid systems that provide material support without the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the welfare state. Collective care structures that address harm without carceral punishment. Economic cooperatives that distribute power and resources more equitably.
These aren't just protest tactics. They're prefigurative politics, building the world you want to see inside the shell of the current one. And they're strategic, demonstrating that the systems we're told are necessary aren't actually necessary at all.
None of this is quick. Building power takes time. Changing consciousness takes time. Creating sustainable alternatives takes time. This isn't a three-election plan. It's generational work.
But here's the thing: the reformist approach isn't fast either. It's just an endless treadmill of small improvements and major setbacks, crisis and recovery, progress and backsliding. At least abolitionist organizing has a coherent theory of change.
And in the meantime, while doing the long-term work of building power and alternatives, people are organizing mutual aid, providing direct support, reducing immediate harm. That's not nothing.
Success isn't getting the right people elected. It's not passing the perfect bill. It's not convincing the powerful to be less powerful.
Success is building enough collective capacity that you don't need their permission. Enough solidarity that you can't be divided and conquered. Enough alternatives that you're not dependent on systems designed to harm you. Enough power that your demands can't be ignored.
And then using that power not just to reform the existing system, but to create something fundamentally different.
So where does this leave us? With a choice, basically. Keep trying to reform systems that were never designed to serve most people's interests. Keep asking nicely for crumbs from a table built on exploitation. Keep hoping the next election will finally be different.
Or start building something else. Something that doesn't require constant reform because it isn't built on violence in the first place. Something accountable to communities rather than capital. Something that treats people like people rather than problems to be managed.
Reform will keep failing. That's what it's designed to do. The question is how long we're willing to pretend otherwise.
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