A curious pathology has taken root among the self‑styled Marxist‑Leninists of the American academy and the few remaining party formations they cling to; an unspoken, almost devotional posture of non‑critique toward the police. They will dissect the labor movements of ancient history, compose vague treatises on fighting imperialism, and issue proclamations on the dictatorship of the proletariat, but when the question of the cop on the corner, the officer who beats strikers, the carceral apparatus that swallows entire Black and brown communities arises, the real centers of class struggle in the modern era, their mouths go dry. They offer, at most, a limp gesture toward “defunding” diluted into a proposal for better training, no better than liberals. Abolition? That's Anarchist! No, communists want to attack and dismantle the bourgeois state, not capture it. You are RED LIBERALS. You do not mobilize against police unions. They do not celebrate prison breaks, or work with rioting prisoners on work stoppages. They do not treat the badge as the enemy it is.
Why this silence? Because, they will confess in private, the American working class is “pro‑police.” To critique the police openly, they whisper, is to alienate the very constituency they claim to represent. So they hold their tongues. They perform a politics of comfort, moderating revolutionary impulse into managerial reform, ensuring that no blue line is crossed too harshly lest they upset the fragile sensibilities of a working class they have never actually organized. This is not Marxism at all, so their constant accusative speculation of Anarchism directed upon real Marxists is hilarious. It is the posture of a class fraction so distant from struggle that it mistakes its own cowardice for strategic patience.
The material reality is stark, there is no socialist state to defend, no proletarian dictatorship to uphold. There is only the bourgeois state, its courts, its jails, its concepts of police and justice, its armies of occupation in every city of the globe. To be a “statist” under such conditions is to align oneself with the repressive apparatus of capital. Yet these self‑proclaimed Leninists drape themselves in the language of state power while refusing to name the enemy that wears the uniform. They have made their peace with the cop because the cop is the ultimate guarantor of the social order they dare not disrupt. They call anarchists naive for recognizing the state as enemy, for understanding that the first duty of any revolutionary is to break the machine that beats us. But it is they who are naive, or worse, complicit, and federal operatives.
When confronted with a Marxist analysis of the state, they retreat to the tired accusation, “This is anarchism, not Marxism.” They claim that Engels, that Lenin, that Mao all upheld the necessity of state power. They are correct, under conditions of workers’ power, not under capitalism. To invoke the state as a revolutionary instrument while the state remains bourgeois is to fetishize an abstraction and abandon the concrete task of destroying the apparatus that oppresses us. It is abandoning the need for communist insurrection, because, in reality the thought of that gives them a sinking guilt in their stomach, what a horror it would be to attack the society that truly underneath all the rhetoric, serves their labor aristocracy. This is not Leninism, even. This is the disease of revisionism.. It is the bastardization of Marxism into a doctrine of quietism, where revolutionary critique is empty.
The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) offers a textbook case of this pathology and how it functions in times of rupture. During the height of the debt crisis, when the working class was being eviscerated, what did the KKE do? They formed a cordon around the parliament building, not to storm it, but to protect it from angry youth and workers. They attacked fellow leftists who tried to approach, physically blocking the very militants who shared their supposed enemy, even the anarchists who hated the KKE were confused when they saw them start attacking people approaching parliament. They stood between the people and the bourgeois state, performing the function of security for the very institution that drowns us; the police sat back and got some time off. They feared the unhinged movement of the masses more than they feared austerity, which makes them counter-insurgents. They chose to police the rebellion rather than offer it bodies, and strategy.
Let them reap what they sowed. The KKE’s irrelevance today is not a tragedy; it is a judgment. They got what they had coming -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-U7_PyxwkcI will leave China out of this. Whatever one may critique about its trajectory, it is not a Western revisionist party cowering before its own bourgeois police. It is a state born of revolution, and it conducts itself as such. I am not about to bite the hand that feeds, China has long since abandoned funding these western revisionist parties. Not out of sentiment for maoism, but out of material reality. The struggle here is against the bourgeois state that surrounds us. That is where our energy belongs. The KKE, the CPUSA, and their ilk are distractions at best, enemies at worst. They are to be shunned, swept aside, and if they stand in the way, crushed.
Felix is right. The CPUSA and its ideological kin are not allies to be courted or fronts to be united with. They are enemies. Not because they disagree on the pace of transition, but because their entire political existence is structured around not challenging the bourgeois state. They hinder. They confuse. They absorb radical energy and convert it into harmless procedure. They must be swept under the rug of irrelevance, their influence quarantined, and if they continue to obstruct or pacify genuine organizing, they must be attacked, not simply physically, but politically, and relentlessly, until the spaces they occupy are reclaimed by those willing to name the bourgeois state as what it is; the covert servant of capital, and other class enemies.
>>The American left will not move forward until it abandons this pathetic, comfortable pose of bourgeois piety. We do not need a “workers’ party” that asks permission from the police to march. We need organized revolutionaries who understand that the bourgeois state cannot be reformed, cannot be captured, cannot be negotiated with, only dismantled and abolished. We need to sharpen ACTION BASED theory, and realize the successful formula for praxis differs by nation, locality, and periods in time. It is built by trial and error, not inactivity.