The paranoid structure of thought on the left that sees the CIA behind every antagonism is also a mind steeling itself against critical reflection. This kind of paranoid reasoning will be used to undermine every attempt on the left to become self-critical. All the paranoia is in service of propping up identity. That is, a sectarian communist identity, grounded in a historical power, that stabilizes sectarian life in the present, but is now detached from real social conditions and isolated into cults.

This is a force that will constantly inject itself in and work to forestall every left attempt to adapt to conditions. It will have the signifiers of past revolution on its side, but will act in defense of prevailing forms of ideological power. This blindly-formed split in its subjectivity means it will not be able to interact honestly. It will continually attack the left and do so through paranoid reasoning, while attempting to claim the mantle of the left leadership, but only enough to browbeat its opponents into submission. It will gain no ground in the world beyond left sectarianism through its victory against critical theory. It doesn’t realize this intervention by critical theory is the path it has to cross to regain a footing in the outside world.

The sectarians will never address theoretical concerns in any of this, as it is just as much protecting itself from the interrogation of theory as it is trying to assert its own dominance. It can not actually bring itself to analyze or question its political history. It will only use character assassination against its critics in order to dodge the arguments they have brought forth. You could call this “character assassination”, too, that I would making such claims about sectarians, if not for the fact that the critical theory, in the first place, substantively addresses the politics of the sectarians. These sectarians are refusing to address the critique, and can only insist that the CIA or some other nefarious force produced it, and is solely responsible for any seeming contradiction among leftists. This defense itself is so curious and transparently maladaptive that we have no choice but to ask ourselves why it resists interrogation so fiercely.

Then, it is the case that the total Marxist and communist critique must find a way to assess “superstructural” matters that cut beyond reified appearance. There are relations that can not so totally be summed up through analysis of economic data. We have to interrogate how “material” reality shows itself in our behavior and in our thinking. A critical analysis of our thinking can be a path back to what materially grounds us. We can trace what our left formations do, through their professed ideology and thinking, back to the “base”, if only when such a maladaptive pattern erupts and clearly acts as a roadblock to advancing within and against society. This is not a totalized account of how capitalism absolutely conditions all thought in society in an entirely predicable way, but is selectively directed to where things have gone awry, and in that case is only theory creating a bridge towards new practice.

How I respond here is how I believe theory demands we respond generally. More so, I think it highlights what we need to consider in our social relations, which is the way the dominant society’s modes of power and ideology infect attempts at liberation. This necessarily happens unconsciously. We are reproducing this society and have to reflect to understand why we would alter practice. We are not doing this to advance theory in the university, but figuring out how to make theory stick in practice. That we will always adopt new disadvantageous behavior is nothing to fear, as the aim of communism itself is to make this kind of interrogation a permanent feature of life.

It is not the CIA doing causing us to misapprehend, but is rather an inevitable aspect of organizing within a capitalist system. The sectarians are not in error because they’re intrinsically evil, but because they reflexively seek to entrench this society’s modes of relations into spaces that are attempting to break from them. They assert these modes of relations on dishonest terms, always as they rely on the “realist” assertions of prevailing power in appealing to inevitability. They insist that we stop critically interrogating the modes of organizing they bring forth and just let the leadership handle our business. That this very relation is how dominant power sneaks in the backdoor, through our lack of self-reflection creating a blind spot, is a point that is impossible to get across to the sectarian.

A hardened fetish-form of organization, conducive to capitalist, class, and patriarchal relations, that does not accurately reproduce in consciousness its real internal social dynamics, has cemented itself as the most visible symbol of attack against the system. It is now more so our greatest stumbling block. The outside world has already been inoculated against it, so this now is only an internal struggle among leftists. The point of critical intervention is to figure out how to return to the world and bypass the system’s immunization. That Marxism can’t perfectly analyze these conditions is irrelevant, but that pervasive certainty is also a part of the kind of thinking that we must attack. There are no perfect solutions. Marxism must be on the side of contemplating its own errors, and not ceding to the idea that master experts can protect us from social dissonance. This acceptance is likewise the path to growth. Better to have a society of people struggling for answers together, than to have one assured and quieted to the need for struggle by father figures, who only demonstrate mastery through fetishistic illusions that necessarily disguises social reality.