AGAINST CONSERVATISM--FOR COMMUNISM

April 1, 2003  by Floyce White


If you no longer had to earn money to pay rent and buy food, would you ever
go back to work?  No, of course not.  Casinos and race tracks are full of
people trying to escape the misery of work.  So are bars and churches.
There are any number of self-help schemes and fantasies for evading
capitalism, for making the system "work for you," and for numbing one's
mind against harsh reality.  Whenever any of these methods partially and
temporarily succeed for a few people, many rush in and disturb the
conditions whereby the scheme formerly worked.  Thus, any self-help plan
strives to conserve the existing system in order to take advantage of its
contradictions.  For the masses, however, the choice is always to be a
hammer or a nail, and we all know what happens when a nail raises its head.

"Use or be used" is the false dilemma presented by the users.  Working-
class solidarity is the simple solution to create another possibility.
There is no reason to try to appease the exploiters, and it only encourages
them.  Nevertheless, traitors and sellouts within the labor movement try to
reconcile employee with employer, and underbid others with conservative
company unions or "get ahead" with liberal, "us only" unions.  Their anti-
solidarity approach neutralizes the labor movement.  When "labor" agrees
with management, it is hard to convince workers to bring their grievances
to approved, harmless channels.

Without anti-business organization, working-class dissatisfaction erupts as
mass riots and as millions of individual acts of resistance.  Police and
social workers have an easy time convincing isolated rebels that they
are "bad persons," and that a few rotten apples spoil things for everyone
instead of the issue being the sociopathic system of property exchange.
Demoralized and stressed-out youth are easy prey for the jailhouse
counterculture.  Just as with the hip counterculture of the Baby Boom
generation, its purposes are to provide a loyal opposition and scapegoat to
the mainstream culture, to confuse rebellion with living down to society's
lowest expectations, and to recruit an army of unpaid social activists who
disrespect and abuse themselves and others.  The jailhouse counterculture
appears as T-shirts and dungarees, tattoos, earrings, and goatees, foul
language, and a whole slew of affected mannerisms that glorify behavioral
disorders.  Alcoholism and drug addiction, homosexuality, bestiality, and
child molestation, exhibitionism and voyeurism, sadism and masochism,
womanizing, wife beating, and rape, greed and kleptomania, fear and hatred
of dark hair and skin, and adults without mental maturity become as
acceptable as locks and bars on windows and doors and security guards and
cameras following you through stores.  The jailhouse counterculture is such
a familiar aspect of developed capitalism that the airport closure
following the 911 attacks was explained as a "lockdown."  Homelessness is
mocked by games and fashion such as the "shopping bag lady" look or by
suburban skateboarders playing the street urchin.  Political postings and
graffiti are overwhelmed by "taggers" with wannabe gang messages and
advertisements for night-club acts.  The broader social effect of cringing,
pro-business ideology within the labor movement is a cowardly society that
taunts the mentally ill and suspects and criminalizes the unemployed,
pedestrians and bus riders, and anyone who seems to be spending less money.

Liberals see the anti-social aspects of capitalist development and call
these changes "normal."  Conservatives see the multitude of disturbed
individuals, ignore causality, and call them "degenerate" and "decadent."
By blaming individuals, conservatives deny that only a profoundly sick
system could generate mass mental illness.

To the capitalists, liberalism means changes that help the groups of
capitalists who are not currently in power, and conservatism means
resisting those changes to help the groups of capitalists who currently
rule.  The big-capitalist families are generally in firm control of state
power, and their attitudes define the conservative approach to current
affairs.  However, conflicts among various blocs of big and middle capital
result in one or another faction renting liberal politicians to line up
support for change.  Under dictatorships, changes are done by rewarding
generals for coup attempts.  The many small-capitalist families flip-flop
in support of whichever faction seems to help them accumulate capital
faster, but generally begrudge the big capitalists' ability to dictate
governmental policy.  In the same way, colonial bourgeoisies change their
business ties from one imperialist homeland to another, with every
realignment called "national liberation."

To the workers, liberalism means small, token changes, and conservatism
means no change at all.  Traitors and sellouts amid the working-class
movement falsely counterpose reform to revolution--as though they were
separate and distinct processes.  Perpetual reformism for reversible
changes tail-ends the liberalism of the capitalists.  Business
unionists, "community leadership," and liberal politicians paint each other
as working-class heroes for having advocated giving the dog a bone.
Conservative politicians sell flags, wax nostalgic over past glories that
never were, and warn workers to obey.  Neither liberalism nor conservatism
is the politics of working-class struggle.  To the contrary:  the goal of
liberalism and conservatism is to conduct business, which is capitalist-
class struggle.

Conservatives believe that social change occurs only through business
functions.  They foster reliance on labor-management schemes such as TQM,
ESOP, 401(k), or "Buy American" rather than on the united action of working-
class people.  This is an insular view of the world.  Individual businesses
are affected by the actions of masses--not the other way around.  Only by
crushing, corrupting, or co-opting organized resistance do businesses have
any power over the resulting mass of alienated individuals.  The problem
with conservatism in the labor movement is the same as the problem with
liberalism in the labor movement.  Both are concerned with motivating
workers to work, when workers really just want to stop being workers.

The only sure way to stop paying the rent or mortgage is to organize the
whole neighborhood to all stop paying rent at the same time.  Then, to make
sure no one ever returns to collect rent, destroy the records of banks and
insurance companies, of bill collectors, management companies, and credit
card companies, of document storage companies, and of the county recorder.
Homelessness ends as the homeless organize themselves to occupy empty
buildings and to build housing on vacant land.  Likewise, the only sure way
to stop buying food is to organize the whole neighborhood to tear down
fences and plant gardens, orchards, and vineyards.  Empty land becomes
fields of grain and cotton.  Neighborhood stores become mere storage
instead of merchant shops.  The same method must be applied to prisons, to
police stations, to military bases, and to all of the oppressive
apparatus.  In this way, business loses its ability to keep the working
class organized as a labor force but disorganized as a political force.
When workers no longer need to go to work, the necessary precondition
exists for workers' control of the workplace (instead of the other way
around).

Socialists often express shock and disbelief when liberal revolutionaries
succeed, form a government, and turn their attention to conserving the new
order.  Liberal before the revolution, conservative after--the switch is as
predictable as night follows day.  Socialists blame "Stalinists" or Contras
for the change, or say that conditions were "not ripe."  Hah!  Liberalism
and conservatism are complimentary co-processes in capitalist politics.
Liberals never prepare the conditions for anything but a conservative
regime.  In condemning the lies of liberal-oriented socialism,
the "struggle within the struggle" remains the same:  against conservatism--
for communism!


This article is the ninth in a series, available at
http://www.geocities.com/antiproperty

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