We hear a lot these days about reforming this or that. For over 200 years American workers have tried to reform capitalism into a more worker-friendly economic system. The majority of these reforms have been utter failures. The reason why is obvious enough: If you take a piece of dog shit and squeeze it into another shape, you have re-formed it, but it's still a stinking piece of shit. That's exactly what happens every time liberals try to reform capitalism. You can squish and squeeze it any way you can, but it's still the same stinking system. Reforms come and go, depending on which way the political winds are blowing. What gains are achieved today can be swiftly snatched away tomorrow.

It's understandable that we must fight for better conditions right here and now. After all, American workers are really hurting and need some immediate relief. Even those among us who are of the revolutionary mindset realize the necessity of taking what we can get now in the way of temporary fixes, while continuing to struggle for a comprehensive economic and social revolution. In this light, reforms can be viewed as stepping stones paving the way to ultimate revolutionary victory. However, they are actually clever diversions used by the powers that be (whether liberal or conservative) to keep workers forever chasing their own tails in an endless circle.

Reforms tend to act as safety valves that relieve the pressure for revolutionary change. They calm tensions just enough so that the rotten system continues merrily on, without ever providing truly substantive change. Using the system to effect immediate relief may be a necessary evil, but it shouldn't distract us from struggling for a comprehensive revolutionary vision of the future.

How far should we go in supporting reforms that tend to give added life to the very system we are struggling to dismantle? Regardless of how we label it, when we struggle within the present authoritarian capitalist sytem to end opression of the working class, we are operating as "reformists." Yes, we must struggle today for better working conditions. Yes, we must fight against police brutality and defend our civil liberties from police-state encroachments, and battle against sexism, racism, homophobia, homelessness, poverty and injustice, just to name a few of the many repressions imposed on us by this authoritarian capitalist society.

Activists need to move away from the 1960s protest model that operates under the assumption that we have many separate struggles to fight. In its place we need to construct a comprehensive revolutionary strategy that recognizes the interrelationship between the various movements actually constitutes one struggle against the hierarchal powers of the present economic and social structure. It is a mistake for activists to lead the masses into believing that the means of obtaining social and economic justice are available within the framework of this capitalist controlled system--a system that thrives on inequality and exploitation.

If you truly believe in change and improving the human condition, then your goal cannot be to "fix" the system. Instead you must be about the business of ripping off the scab and exposing this bleeding and festering sore on humanity that is capitalism. We need only look at today's neoliberal capitalist model of substandard wages, speed-ups, increased work hours, and the rapid erosion of most of the social gains achieved during the 20th century through mostly bloody struggles by the working class to see that reforms are vaporous mirages. American workers have played the reform game only to have everything they struggled for snatched away on account of the overriding capitalist pursuit for larger profits. Once again the working class finds itself flat on its back with a capitalist boot pressing down ever harder against our collective necks. We shouldn't now be replaying the same insanity of stumping for a friendlier police state and once again begging the boss class to give a bigger slice of the wealth that they robbed from workers in the first place.

It's time for the working class to get up off their backs and fight for revolutionary change, not reform. That requires a change in people's concepts of how the world should operate. The police state and capitalism are not abstract entities separate from the people, as we often make them out to be. The people themselves are responsible for this sad state of affairs by continuing to support these institutions of oppression, and that's why they remain as a potently destructive force in our lives. While working today to ease the pain of exploitation, we should also be focused on hastening the demise of this rotten system.

When it's all said and done, capitalist liberals are no more friends of the working class than capitalist conservatives.