What makes you Identify with the Party you do?

[TNF]

I left the Democratic Party when I came to understand that liberals and I have fundamentally different outlooks on the structure of society and the meaning of politics. I used to think that liberals were on the same page with those of us on the left, and that we just had tactical disagreements. Lived experience (working as a Democratic Party functionary in college) and the historical record proved that assumption incorrect, and ever since, I have stopped identifying with liberalism and picked up the banner of communism.

Liberalism is more or less the ideology of the bohemian bourgeois' contempt for workers. Its chief representatives look the other way as the American industrial base is gutted and sent abroad, as the right of workers to free association is eroded day after day, as young workers are sent to jail in rhetoric numbers in its phony 'War on Drugs', and actively asserts the 'right' of the United States to bomb other countries into the stone age if they do not except the dictates of its capitalist overlords. It is the raising of rule by bureaucrat to its logical conclusion, where freedom ends where the feelings of the bourgeois bohemians begin. It says that guns should only be in the hands of racist cops, that the state should be able to read your emails and monitor your phone calls, and that it should keep you safe from things like violent video games. It substitutes fake anti-racism and fake anti-sexism (like arguing that promoting more women and minorities to leadership positions in the capitalist system will somehow act as a panacea for the lived experiences of women workers and workers of color) for the genuine article, and in doing so weakens both and emboldens the identitarian right.

Liberalism as an ideology can never be truly liberatory in the capitalist epoch, because it has sacrificed every bit of what made it a revolutionary, liberatory creed in the 18th and 19th centuries on the alter of profit.

Conservatism, like liberalism, is an ideology full of contempt for workers, but on a different level. Whereas liberalism represents the trendy, bohemian version of hating the working class and apologizing for the parasitical upper crust, conservatism is its knuckle-dragging cousin. Conservatism doesn't have any of the pretensions of liberalism and knows it, openly using sexism, racism, and other bigoted ideas to divide workers into separate, hostile identities so as to better exploit them. In spite of saying that they're against 'identity politics', the conservative is the most able user of them, embracing the dog-whistle politics of white supremacy, exalting the patriarchal family unit, and defending 'traditional' gender roles and sexual norms. It promotes the idea of a white, christian male society constantly under siege by the 'other', when it obviously knows better. Like liberalism, conservatism is very concerned with what you're posting on the Internet, who you're talking to and why, and wants to keep bad ideas out of your head, although in their case the ideas are ones that challenge their retrograde view of society as a divinely ordained system where the good and virtuous are rewarded while the evil are always punished or whatever.

I can't identify with either of those ideologies because, at their root, they are the ideologies of the class that exploits my labor, robs me of my free time, and dictates the course of my every day existence by way of its ownership of the means of production. As a member of the exploited class, the working class, I can only view myself as a communist because I want to end that exploitation once and for all and build a society that truly values all of humankind, i.e. a stateless, classless, race-less, gender-less, sexual orientation-less¹, etc. society.


¹Obviously in saying this I don't mean that we'd all be some kind of gray blob with no sexual desire whatsoever (although this seems to be the end goal of some of our liberal friends, if we take their rhetoric seriously). I mean this in the sense that socially constructed identities, like straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc would be dissolved and society constructed in such a way that we reject the idea of biologically determined sexual preferences and the like