>>2830897>if tomorrow every CPUSA member died screaming in a fiery car crash you would be a very happy camper but nothing would change. your party would still be irrelevant, there would still be dozens of nominally communist parties without any power or membership or militancy and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie would still keep chugging along through the DNC and RNC.To focus on the individuals within the organizations, to speculate on their personal psychology, careerist ambitions, or individual "bad faith" is to fall into the trap of liberal idealism. It mistakes the symptom (the behavior of the individual) for the disease (the structural function of the apparatus that contains them). The material reality is that the DSA and the CPUSA, PSL, and the likes are not simply "misguided" organizations; they are integral functionaries in the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), which operates as a domestic counter-insurgency machine. To analyze this correctly is to see that the function of these "leftist" parties, irrespective of the intentions of their members, is to absorb, professionalize, and neutralize revolutionary energy before it can pose a material threat to capital.
The term "Non-Profit Industrial Complex" describes the sprawling network of foundations, charities, and service organizations that, under a legal framework, form an apparatus of social control. With over 1.5 million such organizations in the U.S. and combined assets in the trillions, this is not an auxiliary to the state; it is a central pillar of its hegemonic project.
The U.S. government and the CIA have a long history of using foundations and NGOs to destabilize hostile states, funding militant movements abroad to create chaos. At home, the same technique is used for the opposite purpose, to stabilize the state by capturing and misdirecting domestic dissent. As Robert L. Allen documented, the Ford Foundation gave millions to Black organizations in the 1960s, deliberately funding moderate leaders who would steer the movement away from revolution and toward integration into the capitalist system. This is not speculation; it is documented counter-insurgency tactic that has become more complex, and more embedded into material reality over decades.
The "Shadow of the Shadow State", Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes the
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