Conformism is not simply an external submission to the conditions imposed by capital. It is the deeper process by which the exploited class adopts capitalist “common sense” as its own. It accepts the wage system, private property, and bourgeois legality as inevitable. This moral and ideological alignment leads to passivity, reformism, and the neutralisation of what would be more generalized class feelings in many situations, had the proletariat retained its fighting defensive organs, and if it was connected to it’s Party. The existing economy continues to generalize conformism and thus the proletariat comes to police itself, reproducing the norms that maintain its domination, a slave to capital disconnected from a full understanding of its historical self diluted by individualism.

The bourgeois State is more than a repressive machine of law, police, and army. It is a totalitarian apparatus, embedded in every social relation, that organises collective life to ensure the reproduction of capital. It operates continually, so long as the economy remains stable, producing and enforcing the norms of bourgeois society. Education, media, legal codes, and the culture industry all work to form individuals who think, desire, and act according to the needs of capital.

This totalitarianism extends beyond political power to the constitution of subjectivity. It shapes not only what people do, but what they want, what they imagine possible, and how they measure value in their own lives.

The State’s ideological apparatus instils in the proletariat aspirations that bind it to the system:
     Youth are encouraged to pursue careers and consumerist lifestyles instead of collective struggle.
     Patriarchal family forms are reinforced as natural, fitting the needs of labour reproduction.
     Political engagement is reframed as symbolic, individualistic acts within the system, not collective revolutionary action.

Even gestures of apparent resistance can be absorbed, reinterpreted, and commodified, leaving the underlying capitalist logic untouched.

For the revolutionary movement, it is essential to reject culturalism – the illusion that emancipation can be achieved through cultural expression, identity politics, or symbolic recognition. Culturalism detaches the critique of ideology from the critique of the economic structure, treating oppression as a matter of “culture” rather than as a function of class society.

This deviation ultimately harmonises with the aims of the bourgeois State. By framing struggles in purely cultural or identity terms, it allows the totalitarian apparatus to accommodate superficial changes in symbols, representation, or language, while the real foundations of exploitation remain intact. The ruling class can grant cultural concessions without touching the wage system, the exploitation of labour, or the dictatorship of capital.

The fight against conformism cannot be reduced to a contest over cultural forms. The target is the material and political power of the bourgeoisie, and the psychic and ideological conditions it reproduces in the proletariat.

The revolutionary party’s work is in part to arm the proletariat with the ability to recognise and reject the norms and desires shaped by capital and instilled within it it is to “forget” the conditioning of capitalist society, to present to the class its historic and invariant revolutionary doctrine and prepare it for the final struggle. This requires not only economic and political organisation, but also the constant exposure of how the State works to infect and neutralize proletarian subjectivity. Such a project demands theoretical clarity and organisational firmness.