Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 21:14:14 -0800 (PST)
Subject: AUT: COMMUNISM IS ACTION NOT A BELIEF


COMMUNISM IS ACTION NOT A BELIEF

February 1, 2002 by Floyce White

Many working-class people are drawn into struggle
through an initial contact with one or another
petty-bourgeois movement.  Most are disgusted and
repelled; those who remain are slowly won to
liberalism.  They come to see the totality of
bourgeois causes as "the movement."  Activists get
jerked from one urgent campaign to another.  The
ever-present need for an immediate show of numbers
causes the "struggle within the struggle" to be nicely
and conveniently suppressed.  Slogans, writings, and
actions are adopted that do not threaten property
relations.  Anger is channeled into sham
confrontations of "civil disobedience" rather than
takeovers.  As activists get involved in more issues,
their struggles become increasingly distant from the
material distress that set them into political action.

Lacking any process of long-term development of
struggle, the "proletarian milieu" gets defined by
opinions on issues instead of as the condition of
being working-class people in struggle to end class
society.  The presence of capitalists within each
organization ensures that any position on any issue
must be pro-property.  The presence of many small
capitalists is what keeps a petty-bourgeois movement
petty bourgeois.  Capitalists are class conscious
because of their business activity; any idea that
challenges their domination is viciously expunged. 
Each multi-class faction develops a basketful of
positions as its manifesto, platform, or program to
guide action.  The long-term process of ongoing
discussion, debate, criticism, and self-criticism is
replaced by quoting authority figures or reciting the
"party line."  Particularly odious is the wholly-false
concept of "group opinion" that pressures each member
to participate in actions and distribute statements
already decided by some majority vote, consensus,
committee, or "leader."  Disagreement is labeled
"petty bourgeois" even though agreement is always for
a pro-capitalist solution.  Disagreement means
quitting, splitting, or acting against one's beliefs. 
Spontaneity, flexibility of tactics, multiple
approaches, individual initiative--all are stifled by
conformity.  Bossed over as if employees, the circle
is complete when working-class activists announce the
work orders to the masses.

Many working-class activists try to wash their hands
of bourgeois politics by concentrating on workplace or
community issues.  This strategy is not effective. 
The property system always generates sellouts among
the dispossessed.  To save their privileged positions,
traitors always silence any talk of overthrowing the
system.  These labor lieutenants of capital create
conservative company unions or liberal "us only"
unions, but never build long-term relations with
meaningful acts of support.  Token solidarity is
limited to "our" industry, country, or local. 
Traitors turn community-action groups into
voter-turnout machines, parapolice, or "poverty pimps"
for government grants.  Anti-worker politics limits
the choices to various liberal reforms.  "Throw the
bums out" instead of explaining why all reformers are
sellouts.  "The workers aren't ready" instead of
raising the anti-property demands that make workers
ready.  Lifelong reformers become the slickest
practitioners of bourgeois politics and the slimiest
apologists for the capitalist system.  Working-class
activists face the same underhanded methods and the
same ulterior motives in every political arena.  The
absence of capitalists merely opens the possibility
for working-class solidarity.  Fearless and persistent
struggle with communist ideas is necessary to win
workers away from anti-worker politics.

In the course of writing these articles, people ask me
if I am a "left communist" or an anarchist.  No. 
These flyers are a criticism of the petty-bourgeois
socialist movement and a self-criticism of my
participation in it.  The struggle of the poor against
the rich is named for its goal:  communism.  If it
were called something else, the rich would have
dirtied that name.  As working-class activists raise
their demands in petty-bourgeois movements, the names
of those movements get soiled too.  The search for a
"New Left," a third way, or a special appellation
reveals the shallowness of petty-bourgeois
"anti-capitalism."

Communism is not a specialization to be vaunted or a
program to be waved.  Communism is not accidentally
created during endless repetition of the mistakes of
the past.  Communism is the definitive state of being,
expressed in the words and deeds of the dispossessed. 
There is no such thing as a "capitalist communist." 
We must not pussyfoot around the bourgeoisification of
struggle by calling rich comrades "intellectuals"--or
worse, "workers" due to belief.  Comrades from
capitalist family origins are, at best, sloppy
reporters and wannabes who consciously and
unconsciously use every trick, humiliation, and
malfunction as their actual anti-communist being.  To
emulate them or to accept their limited goals is to
play the fool and traitor.  In opposing the routines
of daily life--going to work, going to bed, going to
the store--we find the threads of communism.  Our
slogans must be:

SHARE NOT TRADE
ABOLISH EMPLOYMENT--END WAGE SLAVERY
NO RENT--NO MORTGAGE--NO HOMELESSNESS
COMMUNISM IN OUR LIFETIME

Please post comments for discussion at 
http://pub84.ezboard.com/bantiproperty
or mail letters to this address:  PO Box 191341, San
Diego, CA  92159-1341

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