The role of the state in relation to the worker, from the beginning, was to subdue them. The premise of liberal-democratic capitalist society is that the individual worker is free. The system must keep labor subdued in that false experience of freedom for the entire system to function. This tendency to ameliorate harsh conditions for some, or to even give them space to live an economic life, is not the system bringing labor into a ruling class. This is instead the system figuring out how to keep the worker from rebelling, while permanently locking them out of rule. Be a ruler in this system is not a matter of having lots of material goodies, although it may involve that, or not. The capitalist and laborer, even in the imperial core, do not share all of their status, and in fact there is an antagonistic relation, still, between them. The amelioration is only to create a thick enough insulation in the worker’s consciousness from the bare fact of their servitude.

When we talk about workers receiving spoils, it is spoils as an insulation from facing the bare fact of subordination. It is not that the worker is without this knowledge of subordination, but there is just always enough in the way of them having to face it. It is out of sight, out of mind. Consumer goods are not a prize, that once exclusively belonged to the bourgeoisie, but now extends to imperial core workers, as capitalist and worker banded together to form a class of equals. The capitalist does not care about consumption in the way a worker would. The consumption is insulation from bearing constant conscious awareness of the relation of servitude.

This can also mean the laborer becomes more violent the closer they get to the fact of confronting their servitude, in which they seek scapegoats. Everyone else has to live with awareness of their oppression, but those with social power closer to the marginalized, who abuse, are simultaneously protected from the knowledge of their servitude through that abuse. They do not get to move society’s pieces around, and they do not get to command economy. They are deeply alienated and unfree, and they are stripped of all non-antagonistic, non-competitive forms of sociality. They can only function like protective gloves on the hands of the bourgeoisie, when the ruling class finds that it’s time to strangle surplus labor to death, or re-subordinate society to its hierarchies.

The sense of social meaning for the middle-class or socially elevated reactionary is constrained by power. They are driven by a resentment towards the oppressed, who often become free of the mental subordination to these regimes of power, even in being assaulted by them. Reactionary abuse of others is itself servitude to a class of rulers who get to set the terms of the whole order. That exercise of local power conceals servitude, even as an act of servitude. Those dominated refuse to serve, or they are considered insufficient for the task. Yet deprived of social meaning, they become free in ways the reactionary can never manage, and this creates a ressentiment towards the oppressed. The oppressed even work like canvases for a projection on the part of reactionaries, who see the oppressed as their oppressors. The reactionaries are in fact oppressed, too, but by their own ideologies and actions. The bourgeoisie, at a far remove from local, commonplace society, exercise their power like phantoms through the reactionary. They take over the bodies of these reactionaries and devour their souls.

The reactionary becomes pure authoritative social function the closer society moves towards war or collapse. A general precarious position, however, in between relations of power means most on the servitude side of the capital-labor relation have contradictory enough experiences to allow them to be allies to the most marginalized. The actual cops, patriarchs, and violent fascists should be ruled out as allies, but we have to take a more open approach to others, even while understanding structural incentives. People are forced to adhere to capitalist function, but they are not identical to those functions. Something always remains beyond function, maybe many things, even if we can’t always see that right away.

You will still find enemies again on the other side of keeping an open approach. When you do, you have to re-commit to the open approach, and still take people as they come. When seeking out something shared in a group, you should speak to the highest qualities, and let whoever can be moved towards you do so. Do not convince yourself that you have to speak in a way that precludes all but a narrow kind of identity. Allow all in the audience you speak towards adapt to the highest qualities you emphasize. If they adapt, they are clearly not fascists. Speak in a way that permits every conceivable kind of person who could be moved towards you to do so.

I am disabled and trans and I know not every white, cis, able-bodied worker is going to want to be in coalition with me, or even spare me from the camps. I know those reactionaries exist, and yet I can’t say for sure that any single white worker in front of me is going to be a reactionary. Where any of us are radical, we also have aspects that we need to change, so we are really no different, apart from structural location. It takes fighting to figure out who our allies are. Some people grow into allies, others move in the opposite direction, but you must allow yourself to be uncertain when addressing people, and not jump the gun on deciding who they are. You can’t project your enemy onto every individual body put in front of you.

You also can’t know that they aren’t your enemy! But power comes in learning how to navigate exactly that space. We have to find in people what even they don’t realize is there. Sometimes people are showing you they are allies, when they don’t know they’re doing that. We all have a more intimate experience with the upper strata of workers. Maybe we have been abused by them. We see them in our daily lives, so we know in a more concrete way how their power can be really active in the world.

Yet they are proxies for a power greater than them, too. Bill Gates isn’t going to be seen in your community. Jeff Bezos would never interact with your neighbors. Those closest to us abuse us in service of a system that cannot extend itself nakedly in front of us, for fear of giving itself away. And these antagonisms are made ever more severe because of survival. The deadliest petite bourgeois, or deadliest white worker, are the ones very close to losing their power. But they are likewise hollowed out husks of human beings. They are instruments of a power far beyond them. They are possessed in service of capital.

The power the reactionary exerts is for the stabilization of an order, and their benefits are found in relative wealth, but also in an intense libidinal cathexis, that is simultaneously always undermined in conflict with an Other. It exists in potential through comparison with another, and is always undermined by that same Other. These middle-class reactionaries can be instrumentalized at all because to do so means shutting themselves off from conscious emotions and self-understanding, but these feelings return, always trailing the path of this Other. What they repress returns in the social world, and they endure emotion only when forced to from the outside. They are driven to destroy their Other in service of achieving a perfect, emotion-free emptiness, that is simultaneously perfect fulfillment and overcoming of deprivation.

Their desire, in destruction of the Other, is towards a static state of harmony, but one that would be revealed as illusion when their state of servitude was left bare in the aftermath of the Other’s disintegration. To shut themselves off from self-interrogation means preventing an understanding of their own subordination to not only a ruling class, but to a regime of painful, life-restraining ideologies. Becoming power exercising itself is a helpful way to distract yourself from that reality. The petite bourgeois or elevated worker is stripped of life when they become power, and life where it remains at its most vital becomes unbearable, as it is then filled with a residue of the misanthropy they carry when exercising power. When they are forced to live, or forced to confront the reality of basic human social relations, the devil they maintain themselves to be in relation to power gets its revenge in their psyche.

Even if we have to fight some these reactionaries, we cannot envy their condition, nor can we render every single person in our environment at one with that reactionary worldview. We are not organizing fascists into becoming communists, but there are other people in our world who can be shown the tragedy of the fascist condition. Not even so they refuse to become fascists themselves, which they likely wouldn’t; but so they see a futility in this current world, which should help embolden them to think beyond it in cooperation with others. We all have one foot in upholding power in our various ways, and one foot grounded in an antagonistic relation to power. The task of communism is to create the stable foundation where we all can take that one foot out of power’s reproduction. We need to create the platform for everyone to stand on.