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 u
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.