Industrial Workers of the World

Most workers have bought the conservative line about socialism i.e. that socialism will make them poorer and even more alienated from power than they are. For example, the conservative line in the USA, more or less mirrored in the rest of the industrialised world, says that the American people are taxpayers and that because they pay for government, they deserve as little government as possible. In practtice, this boils down to cutting government provided social services and leaving the lean, mean part of the State intact e.g. police, fire, military, prisons and help for commerce like roads. The Americans should not have to put up with higher taxes to fund the parasitic poorer workers who can't pay their own way in the free marketplace because they're too lazy to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Such is the conservative line and so the conservatives would have their listeners believe, the government should let the free market rip without bothersome interference by bureaucrats.

There is no class perspective in conservative analysis. There is no extraction of wealth and by extension, power, from workers who sell their time and skils for wages to the employing class.  There is no alienation from power because we're all equal under the law and have the same number of votes as every other individual.  We have democracy, which is only possible where free enterprise reigns.  Complete ignorance is maintained about where wealth comes from and where it ends up. Instead of power and wealth, workers get nationalism, an ideology which assumes that the employing class and the working class have interests in common. It's kind of like the old African joke about  colonists: "When they came, they had the Bibles and we had the land. After they established themselves, we had the Bibles and they had the land."

So, American conservatives, indeed, conservative workers world wide, see their world in upside down terms, a world in which corporations create wealth; poorer workers rob them by demanding social services like healthcare which raises their taxes AND, that workers just want to try to keep as much of their individual wealth as they can (wages and what they can save) and not to be taxed by Big Government Bureaucrats anymore. By the way, the identification with their bosses' businesses goes right into the language and thought of everyday life e.g. "my company is doing better than most" and so on...

Truth be told, most lefties who identify as socialists/communists, have either forgotten or abandoned or never knew  class analysis and now favour moralistically flavoured 'militant actions' for what boil down to legislative reforms of the inherently exploitative wages system.  There's nothing wrong with getting some of the wealth and power we sell everyday to our bosses when we go to work, directed back to us.  If we get legislative reforms which work in our class interests, great; but, the system itself, the capitalist system, is not the target of Labor or most of the left, except maybe to talk about "seizing State power"; but this sort of rhetoric is usually reserved for the most Rrrrevolutionary sects, sects whose programs, if implimented would lead them to become administrative bureaucrats within wage systems with, perhaps another name and design for the national flag.

In the coming months, conservative dogmas, such as the ones pointed to above, will be used by our rulers's political spokespeople (Labor, Liberal, Green and National) to get us to toe the line in both domestic and foreign policies.  We the people will be told to accept the capitalist system, for with all its faults, it's the best one we can possibly obtain....ah hell.