Allow me to explain my previous post (on my Instagram, @ruthless.kritik) in which I said, “Leftists are more dangerous to the working class than the capitalist class.” I’ve been called “a radical centrist”, a proponent of horseshoe theory, and a “post leftist” for this controversial claim. Have these ‘Marxists’ not read Marx and Engels?

In 1882, Engels wrote in a letter to August Bebel:

Unity is quite a good thing so long as it is possible, but there are things which stand higher than unity. And when, like Marx and myself, one has fought harder all one’s life long against the alleged Socialists than against anyone else (for we only regarded the bourgeoisie as a class and hardly ever involved ourselves in conflicts with individual bourgeois), one cannot greatly grieve that the inevitable struggle has broken out.

1. Engels, Engels to August Bebel In Leipzig, 1882

This ‘thing which stands higher than unity’ is a clear program for the proletariat that doesn’t deceive it into cooperation with bourgeois and middle-class movements. Marx and Engels nearly broke support from the German Social Democratic Party in September 1879 due to the growing influence of bourgeois activists and theories, namely Eduard Bernstein’s reformism. In a circular letter first drafted by Engels, Marx and Engels wrote:

It is an unavoidable phenomenon, well established in the course of development, that people from the ruling class also join the proletariat and supply it with educated elements… [However], such people, in order to be useful to the proletarian movement, must bring with them really educated elements. This, however, is not the case with the great majority of German bourgeois converts [who have not] provided anything to advance the movement one step… Instead of first studying the new science [scientific socialism] thoroughly, everyone relies rather on the viewpoint he brought with him, makes a short cut toward it with his own private science, and immediately steps forth with pretensions of wanting to teach it. Hence, there are among those gentlemen as many viewpoints as there are heads [recall the many “anarcho-x’s”–RK]; instead of clarifying anything, they only produce arrant confusion — fortunately, almost always only among themselves. Such educated elements, whose guiding principle is to teach what they have not learned, the party can well dispense with. … If the gentlemen want to build a social-democratic petty-bourgeois party, they have a full right to do so… But in a labor party, they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitates tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with them is only a matter of time. [Recall Engels’ “inevitable struggle”–RK.] … … At the founding of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. We cannot, therefore, go along with people who openly claim that the workers are too ignorant to emancipate themselves but must first be emancipated from the top down, by the philanthropic big and petty bourgeois. Should the new party organ… become bourgeois and not proletarian, then there is nothing left for us, sorry as we should be to do so, than to speak out against it publicly and dissolve the solidarity within which we have hitherto represented the German party abroad.

1. Marx and Engels, Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle, 1879

Echoing this sentiment nearly 50 years later, Amadeo Bordiga wrote, following the revolts and seizures of factories by workers throughout Italy:

The support of the masses can be securely won only by a struggle against their opportunist leaders. This means that where non-communist parties still exert an influence among the masses, the masses must be won over by dismantling the organisational network of these parties and by absorbing their proletarian elements into the solid and well-defined organisation of the Communist Party. This is the only method which can give useful solutions and can assure practical success.

1. Bordiga, Party and Class Action, 1921

This also echoes a much more distant sentiment of Marx, who wrote in 1843, of a “new trend” that him and Arnold Ruge were a part of that demarcates itself from the ‘old’ by not following any dogmas or Utopian ideals and, instead, characterizes itself by the “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” This criticism, Marx said, must aim at what the German intelligentsia and radicals concerned themselves with at that moment, which was religion and politics. Criticizing the theory of the opportunist leaders, in turn, influences practice: “We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.” Marx concluded:

In short, therefore, we can formulate the trend of our journal as being: self-clarification (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires. … [This] reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be—as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion—to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.

1. Marx, Marx to Ruge, September 1843

Throughout the letter, Marx referred to criticizing contemporary socialists and radicals, which we may infer as necessary by Marx’s statement: “consciousness is something that [the world (the proletariat)–RK] has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”

Many leftists may think that the capitalist class and its ideologues deserve much more attention by virtue of them ‘being the enemy.’ At one time, these leftists will discuss correctly that the class struggle is the motive force of human history hitherto, but at another time, will seemingly forget this doctrine of the class struggle and believe capitalists and reactionaries can be brought to the side of the proletariat. It is not difficult to see that this can never be the case except on individual levels. If we wish to call these the ‘right’ wing of the capitalist class, the ‘left’ wing of the capitalist class — the US Democrats, UK Labour, reformists, social democrats, democratic socialists (and anarchists and Stalinists! yes, them too) — are evidently much worthier of attention, for it is these groups that dominate working class politics and divert the proletariat from their historical destiny.

Recall nearly any of Marx and Engels’ works, and they are filled with (some explicitly for) criticisms of ‘socialists’ and, what we may call today, simply leftists. The Communist Manifesto, Capital, Critique of the Gotha Programme, The Poverty of Philosophy, The Civil War in France, Anti-Duhring, The Grundrisse, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts–I personally can’t find a significant work of theirs that did not deal with absolutely exposing the incapability of their counterparts’ theories to subvert capitalism. It’s a shock, then, to find self-declared Marxists surprised at the declaration that “leftists are more dangerous to the working class than the capitalist class.” After all, it is leftists who “like Marx and myself,” said Engels, “one has fought harder all one’s life long against… than against anyone else.”

The root, of course, for this danger to the working class from the many leftists is, as Marx and Engels said, in the fact that “they are a falsifying element.” Whether it be in the social democrats and democratic socialists’ blatant appeal to bourgeois democracy, whether it be in the Stalinists’ “socialism in one country” and their ‘socialist’ commodity production and wage-labor, whether it be in the anarchists’ fetishization of democracy and ‘independent producers,’ whether it be in the syndicalists’ trade-unionism, whether it be in the cooperativists’ ‘worker-owned’ capitalism, etc., etc., all these divert the proletariat from state power, their dictatorship against the other classes, and the abolition of class society and human-human exploitation. Some of these are weaker than when they were stronger, e.g. the syndicalists, while some remain stubbornly in the spotlight of leftist discourse, e.g. Stalinism and cooperativism. Regardless, they remain “a falsifying element” that can only spell danger, while, in contrast, the ‘right’ wing of the capitalist class is always and explicitly counterpoised to the proletariat. The proletariat do not need ‘leftist intellectuals’ to show them this.

In closing, let us recall Malcolm X’s words in 1963:

The white Liberal differs from the white Conservative only in one way; the Liberal is more deceitful, more hypocritical, than the Conservative. Both want power, but the White Liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor and by winning the friendship and support of the Negro, the White Liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or a weapon in this political football game, that is constantly raging, between the White Liberals and the White Conservatives. The American Negro is nothing, but a political football.

The ‘left’ wing of capital, the leftists, are analogous to the white liberal of the Civil Rights Movement. As such, they are much more the threat than the open reactionary. They are a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and for that, they are much more the danger.