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LPE Originals

The Demand for Transparency as Non-Reformist Reform

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The heuristic of non-reformist reform can help avoid ultra-leftism and create the possibilities for coalition, such as across groups who care about transparency. It can help us salvage the transformative potential of demands that seem to have lost their teeth. But to realize these ends without falling back into reformist pieties, the framework demands rigorous, context-specific thinking that eschews dogmatism.
LPE Originals

Abolition in the Interstices

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Within prison abolitionist movements and discourse, the idea of non-reformist reform often serves as a litmus test for assessing campaign goals and strategies. Yet even here, activists need to think holistically about their obligations and strategies, as pursuing non-reformist reforms will sometimes conflict with our duties to mitigate harm in the here and now.
LPE Originals

Emancipatory Horizons in Tenant Organizing

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Earlier this year, a landlord presented a group of Kansas City tenants with the following choice: renew their leases at triple the rent or move. But rather than accept these terms, the tenants came together and declared “we won’t go.” This rejection of the options presented to them, originally a reflection of their desperation, soon became an expression of their power.
LPE Originals

What Does Critical Race Theory Teach Us About Non-Reformist Reforms?

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Critical Race Theorists have long been concerned with the dangers inherent to legal reform. Drawing on their insights, we should approach the struggle for non-reformist reforms not as a search for some self-evident formula, but as a practice that requires close and disciplined engagement with the social and economic conditions we seek to change.
LPE Originals

What Non-Reformist Reforms Meant to Us

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Amna Akbar’s recent article on non-reformist reforms foregrounds a question that the LPE movement often bypasses: namely, how might systemic social change occur in the 21st century? However, in considering this question, the article erases nearly fifty years of theory-work, which has much to teach the legal left as it recovers the notion of non-reformist reform.
LPE Originals

A Horizon Beyond Legalism: On Non-Reformist Reforms

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Today’s left social movements are increasingly turning to a framework of “non-reformist reform” to guide their efforts to build a just society. But what do non-reformist reforms require? How do they differ from liberal and neoliberal approaches to reform? And what role do law and lawyers have to play in advancing such reforms?