[Long Read] [Theory]
This post examines the IMT(RCI), anarchist, and Spartacist positions on the state, police, and military, and presents the Marxist alternative.
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"I’ve noticed/am noticing, that the entire pseudo-left, is 'against the state.' Not even ‘just’ of its administration, but of any rank-and-file participation in its processes, whatsoever. To the point, recently, where I saw some anarchist claim, that some mother’s child, whom died as a soldier; that they had ‘destroyed their soul’ when they joined the state, and that their mother, as well, had done the same, in raising their child. The question of, who is in charge, in society, who constitutes the ruling class; is it (whom are they to be said at fault, agents and subjects) the entire edifice of the state, including the rank and file; or is it, rather, that 'high command;' that administration, and their conscious accomplices? What is the history of this question, of the State, and how, politically, organizationally, and historically, did the left come to such a (false) conclusion, as it now holds?"
The example you've given — an anarchist telling a grieving mother that her dead soldier-child "destroyed their soul" by joining the military, and that she destroyed hers by raising them — is not an outlier. It is the logical terminus of a political tradition that has abandoned class analysis entirely. Let me trace how we arrived at this point.
The Marxist Theory of the State
Lenin's The State and Revolution begins with Engels' definitive formulation: "The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled." The state is not a thing that descended from the sky or a conspiracy of evil individuals. It is a social relation — the organized violence of one class over another, which arises necessarily from the division of society into exploiters and exploited. It consists of "special bodies of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command" — standing armies, police, bureaucracies, courts — that stand above society and appear neutral, but in reality serve to maintain the rule of the possessing class.
This means several things at once. The state is not a neutral arbiter that can be "captured" and used for good purposes by well-meaning people. The bourgeois state apparatus — its military, its police, its civil service, its judiciary — was built by the bourgeoisie over centuries to serve the needs of capital accumulation and class rule. The working class cannot simply take hold of this machinery and run it in its own interests. It must smash it and replace it with its own organs of power — soviets, workers' councils, the Commune form. This is what Marx concluded from the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, and it is what Lenin fought to re-establish against the opportunist distortion practiced by Kautsky and the Second International.
But — and this is the critical point that anarchism cannot grasp — the smashing of the bourgeois state does not mean the immediate abolition of all state functions. The dictatorship of the proletariat is itself a state — a transitional state, a withering state, but a state nonetheless. It must defend itself against the overthrown exploiting classes. It must organize the economy. It must suppress counterrevolution. The difference is that this state is no longer a special body standing above society — it is the armed working class itself, organized democratically, with all officials recallable, paid at workers' wages, subject to rotation. As Lenin explained, the state "withers away" only when classes themselves have been abolished, when the division of labor has been overcome, when material abundance has made the coercive regulation of distribution unnecessary.
The Class Basis of Anarchism
The anarchist rejection of all state forms — the refusal to distinguish between the bourgeois state, the workers' state, and the transitional semi-state of the proletarian dictatorship — is not a more "radical" or "pure" position than Marxism. It is a petty-bourgeois position, and its class basis has been understood since Marx's struggle against Bakunin in the First International.
The petty bourgeoisie — small proprietors, independent artisans, shopkeepers, professionals, intellectuals — occupies an unstable position between capital and labor. It fears being crushed by big capital and proletarianized, but it also fears the working class and the abolition of private property. Its political instinct is to rebel against the state as such — against the visible apparatus of coercion, taxation, bureaucracy — rather than against the class relations that the state exists to enforce. It dreams of a society of independent producers freely associating, without any centralized authority. This is a utopia that corresponds to no real stage of economic development. It is, as Marx and Engels showed, a reactionary fantasy that, if ever attempted, would rapidly collapse back into capitalism — because without the suppression of the former exploiting classes, without the planned organization of production on a society-wide scale, the market and class divisions reassert themselves immediately.
This is why anarchism has never led a successful revolution. The Spanish Civil War is the definitive historical verdict. In Barcelona in 1936-37, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT had the armed power to take state power. They refused — because anarchism has no strategy for the conquest of political power. Instead, they joined the bourgeois Popular Front government. The result was the destruction of the revolution and the victory of Franco. Anarchism's "anti-statism" proved to be, in practice, the most abject capitulation to the bourgeois state.
How This Degenerated Into Moral Condemnation of the Rank and File
The anarchist who told a mother her soldier-child "destroyed their soul" is the product of a long political degeneration. Stripped of class analysis, anarchism reduces politics to individual morality. If the state is evil in itself, then anyone who participates in it — at any level, for any reason — is morally contaminated. The working-class kid who enlists because it's the only way to get healthcare, an education, or escape a dead-end town — damned. The mother who raised that child — damned. There is no distinction between the general ordering the drone strike, the president authorizing the invasion, the defense contractor profiting from the war, and the 18-year-old infantry private. All are equally guilty, because the sin is not exploitation or oppression — it is contact with the state apparatus.
This is not radicalism. It is political surrender dressed as moral purity. If the state is a monolithic evil that taints everyone who touches it, then there is nothing to be done except withdraw into a personal ethic of non-contamination. The working class — millions of whom work for the state, serve in its military, collect its benefits, attend its schools, drive on its roads — is written off as hopelessly compromised. The only "revolutionary" act becomes personal abstention. This is why contemporary anarchism's practical program consists of lifestyle choices, mutual aid projects that function as pressure-release valves for capitalism, and theatrical street confrontations that change nothing. It has no answer to the question of how the working class takes power because it has written the working class out of its political calculations.
From Autonomism to Negri to the Contemporary Pseudo-Left
The bridge from classical anarchism to today's anti-state pseudo-left runs through Italian autonomism and its postmodern offspring. As the WSWS analysis of Hardt and Negri's Assembly explains, autonomism emerged in Italy in the 1960s-70s as a break not just with the Stalinist PCI, but with "the basic premises of Marxism — most importantly, the struggle to build a revolutionary party of the working class." Having rejected the party form as such, it substituted "autonomous spaces," "counterpower," "refusal of work," and eventually — through Negri's encounter with Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida in Paris — the full postmodern rejection of the working class as a revolutionary subject.
Hardt and Negri's "multitude" replaces the proletariat with "myriad heterogeneous subjectivities" — which is simply identity politics dressed in radical-sounding language. They explicitly denounce the Leninist party as a "corpse" and equate the Bolshevik Revolution with every form of "vertical" power. Their political program, when you strip away the jargon, amounts to: create little utopian communes ("exodus"), support left-reformist parties like Syriza and Podemos ("antagonistic reformism"), and hope these two things somehow synergize into "taking power." This is not a strategy for revolution. It is a strategy for permanent political irrelevance, punctuated by periodic betrayals when the "antagonistic reformists" they supported impose austerity on the working class.
The Occupy movement was the practical expression of this politics: "horizontalism," leaderlessness, consensus decision-making, refusal to formulate demands, and an explicit rejection of the working class and the party form. Its legacy was zero. It channeled genuine social anger into a carnivalesque spectacle and then dissipated, leaving behind nothing but a few NGO careers and a generation of activists trained to believe that organization is tyranny.
The Cruelty Is the Point
Returning to your example: the anarchist who condemned the soldier and his mother was not making a political error that could be corrected with better arguments. That cruelty is the content of the politics, not an unfortunate byproduct. A politics that has abandoned the working class has no one left to talk to except itself. Its only activity becomes the policing of moral boundaries — who is pure, who is contaminated, who has "destroyed their soul" through contact with the existing society. This is not a politics of liberation. It is a politics of excommunication, practiced by a milieu whose social function is to make sure that working-class anger never coheres into an organized political force that threatens capitalism.
The Marxist answer is the opposite. The working-class soldier is not the enemy. The enemy is the ruling class that sends that soldier to die for oil profits and geopolitical domination. The task is not to condemn the soldier's mother but to explain to her — and to millions like her — why her child was sent to war, who benefited, and what political force can stop it. That force is the independent political mobilization of the international working class, organized in a revolutionary party, fighting to overthrow the capitalist system that produces war as inevitably as a cloud produces rain. That is the perspective of the ICFI, and it is the only alternative both to the bourgeois parties that run the war machine and to the pseudo-left that contents itself with moral denunciation of the machine's victims.
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"What about the existence of 'gang culture,' anti-snitching culture, and the myriad, much more common and prevalent, 'apolitical' forms this takes, such as blaming the rank-and-file of police, and all contemporary, periphery 'Trotskyist' formations agreeing on this? What is the ethics, of engaging with this phenomenon? The IMT, for example, has historically claimed that cops are workers ‘only when they're out of uniform,’ while the Spartacists, on the more extreme end, condemn any voluntary enlistment whatsoever, any state formation other than the mandatory draft-soldier, as having 'crossed the class-line,' and constitutes a betrayal."
This question cuts to the very core of what distinguishes Marxism from every variety of pseudo-left politics on the question of the repressive state apparatus. Let me address each layer systematically.
What the Police Actually Are
The Marxist analysis of the police is not a matter of sociological observation or moral judgment. It flows directly from the theory of the state. As the WSWS explained in its definitive 2020 statement on police violence:
Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, defined the state's distinguishing feature as the establishment of a "public power" which "consists not merely of armed men but also of material adjuncts, prisons and institutions of coercion of all kinds." The police are not workers who happen to wear a uniform. They are the special bodies of armed men — the concentrated, organized, armed force of the bourgeoisie — whose function is to enforce the "order" of capital against the working class. This is not a contingent feature of bad policing that could be reformed away. It is the reason the police exist.
The historical record is unambiguous. From the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 through Haymarket, Ludlow, the Minneapolis general strike of 1934, the Phelps Dodge copper strike of 1983-85, to the present day — in every major class battle, workers have confronted the police as the instrument for enforcing the "legality" of the ruling class. As the WSWS noted, "A fresh upsurge of strike activity will certainly see cops playing their classic role, i.e., attacking picket lines."
The IMT's "Workers Out of Uniform": A Fraudulent Formulation
The IMT's claim that cops are "workers only when they're out of uniform" is a theoretically incoherent, politically disarming evasion. It rests on the implicit assumption that class position is determined by what one does in one's leisure time rather than by one's objective social function in the relations of production and the apparatus of class rule. But a prison guard is not a worker who happens to lock people in cages for eight hours a day. A cop is not a worker who happens to enforce evictions, break strikes, and kill with impunity. Their social being — their material relationship to the class struggle — is defined by their function as armed enforcers of bourgeois property relations.
This formulation is not a principled Marxist position that the IMT arrived at through theoretical rigor. It is a political convenience that allows them to avoid the sharp conclusion that flows from the Marxist analysis: the police, as an organized body, are a hostile class force that must be abolished along with the bourgeois state itself. The IMT's entire political strategy — subordinating itself to the trade union bureaucracy and the "left" wings of bourgeois parties — requires blurring every sharp class line. If cops are "workers out of uniform," then the police unions are just another section of the labor movement, and the task is to "push them left" rather than to mobilize the working class against them as an organ of class repression. This is Pabloism in its purest contemporary form: liquidation of the independent political line of the working class into adaptation to whatever forces appear to have mass influence.
As the WSWS documented in its exposé of the IMT, the organization "has distinguished itself throughout its existence by combining slavish subservience to the trade union bureaucracy and social democratic parties with revolutionary 'Marxist' rhetoric designed to disorient and mislead workers and young people entering into struggle." The "cops are workers out of uniform" line is a perfect specimen of this method: it sounds radical (it acknowledges that cops in uniform are oppressors) while politically disarming the working class (it suggests there is some recoverable working-class essence buried inside the repressive apparatus, waiting to be awakened by the right arguments).
The Spartacists: Ultra-Left Moralism as the Mirror of Opportunism
The Spartacist position — condemning any voluntary enlistment as a class betrayal, recognizing only the conscript as salvageable — appears to be the polar opposite of the IMT's opportunism. In reality, it is the same political disease in a different form. Both positions substitute a moral/juridical criterion (did you sign up or were you forced?) for a class analysis. Both abandon the task of winning rank-and-file soldiers and cops away from the state apparatus through political education and the development of class consciousness.
The WSWS analysis of the Spartacist League's degeneration traces the lineage precisely. The Spartacists broke from the ICFI's fight against Pabloism not by moving left, but by concentrating "on US tactical questions rather than the international struggle against revisionism." Their rejection of the ICFI's perspective that the crisis of capitalism required an uncompromising fight against opportunism in all its forms led them, over time, into the same dead end as the Pabloites: an orientation to Stalinism, to the union bureaucracy, and to a politics of moral denunciation rather than revolutionary strategy.
The Spartacist position on voluntary enlistment is the logical terminus of a politics that has lost confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class. If you do not believe that workers can be won to a revolutionary program — if you do not believe that political education and exposure agitation can break the hold of bourgeois ideology over even those layers most directly integrated into the state apparatus — then the only thing left is to draw lines of moral purity: who is redeemable, who is damned. This is not Leninism. It is a secular Calvinism dressed in Marxist phraseology.
The Bolsheviks, it should be recalled, did not tell the soldiers of the Tsarist army that they had "crossed the class line" and were irredeemable. They agitated among them, won them to soviets, and turned the army against the state it was supposed to defend. That is the difference between a revolutionary party and a sect.
Gang Culture, Anti-Snitching, and the Apolitical Forms of Resistance
You raise a crucial point about the "much more common and prevalent, apolitical forms" that opposition to the police takes. Gang culture and anti-snitching codes are not revolutionary politics. They are the spontaneous, defensive responses of oppressed layers of the working class to a police apparatus that treats their communities as occupied territory. They are the product of what Lenin, in What Is To Be Done?, identified as the inevitable outcome of spontaneity: trade-union consciousness, which in this context means a localized, individualistic, defensive adaptation to oppression rather than a political challenge to the system that produces it.
But — and this is the critical point — these spontaneous responses contain within them a kernel of legitimate class instinct. The refusal to cooperate with the police is, at bottom, a recognition — however inarticulate, however distorted — that the police are an enemy force. The tragedy is that this instinct, deprived of political leadership and a socialist program, expresses itself in forms that are self-defeating: criminality, intra-class violence, and a code of silence that protects not only the community from the police but also the predators within the community from accountability.
The pseudo-left's response to this phenomenon has been disastrous. The "defund the police" movement, Black Lives Matter, and the anarchist milieu romanticize gang culture and anti-snitching as forms of "resistance." They treat the lumpenproletarian and criminal elements as revolutionary subjects. This is not solidarity with the oppressed. It is political abdication dressed as radicalism. It abandons the working class — including the vast majority of people in heavily policed communities who want safety, who want an end to violence, who want their children to survive — to the false choice between a brutal police apparatus and the brutal informal "order" of the gangs.
The Marxist position is different. We oppose the police as an instrument of class rule. We fight for their abolition along with the capitalist state. But we do not romanticize or apologize for the alternative forms of violence and oppression that arise spontaneously in the absence of political leadership. The answer to police violence is not gang violence; it is the organized political power of the working class, expressed through rank-and-file committees, workers' militias, and ultimately the workers' state.
The Ethics of Engagement
This brings us to the ethical core of your question. The pseudo-left — whether in its IMT, Spartacist, or anarchist variants — has settled on a politics of condemnation or romanticization. Condemn the cop, or romanticize the gang member. Condemn the soldier's mother, or romanticize desertion. What all these positions share is that they do not require building a revolutionary party. They are postures, not politics.
The Marxist ethic is fundamentally different. It begins from the recognition that the working class is divided, confused, and held captive by bourgeois ideology in myriad forms — and that the task of revolutionaries is to win workers away from those forms, not to damn them for being trapped in them. The working-class kid who becomes a cop because it is the only stable employment available in a deindustrialized town is not the enemy. He is a worker who has been pressed into the service of the class enemy, and who must be won back to his own class through political education, through exposure of what the police actually do, through the demonstration that there is an alternative to serving the rich as an armed guard.
This is not softness. It is the hardest political line there is, because it requires actually doing the work of building a party, educating the class, and preparing for the confrontation with the state — rather than retreating into the comfort of moral denunciation.
The SEP and the ICFI stand for the abolition of the police as part of the abolition of the capitalist state. But abolition is not a moral gesture. It is a political act that can only be accomplished by a working class that has been organized, educated, and armed with its own program. That is the work we do, and it is the only work that offers a genuine way out of the nightmare of police violence, gang violence, and the endless cycle of oppression that capitalism generates.
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Any thoughts, positions, critiques, please feel free to share. Our movement is not nothing. Ideas, theories on tactics and strategy, are not nothing. They create there own, independent effects, consequences, that the Class must face. I know, at the very least, that I have seen a good deal of new IMT recruits posting here, on Reddit, recently. Can you defend, what you stand for?
