With the uprisings of these last couple of weeks, the country's poor and colonized people have shown how much power they're capable of commanding. But until this mass anger and willingness to mobilize is turned towards advancing a coherent plan for overthrowing the capitalist state, it won't bring about an end to the systemic violence that this revolt has emerged in response to. When all the available options are honestly debated, it becomes clear that Marxism-Leninism is the plan we need.
As the social upheaval continues, the anarchists and the social democrats will be the main ones to compete with the Marxist-Leninists in propagating their agenda. So I'll refute the arguments of these two strains, then clarify what it means to fight for Marxism-Leninism in the context of modern America.
Anarchism doesn't provide a viable path for the exploited and colonized peoples to overcome imperialism
As Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution, anarchists "want to abolish the state completely overnight, not understanding the conditions under which the state can be abolished." Marxists also want to abolish the state, but we recognize that the state can't be broken up until the capitalist class is sufficiently defeated. This is because Marxists know that the state must be utilized by the proletariat to suppress the bourgeoisie, who will try to retake whatever territory that comes under the control of a newly formed proletarian state. Only after the threat of capitalist reaction is neutralized can the proletarian state then wither away.
The counterarguments that anarchists have to this usually depend on a variation of one simple sentiment: the state will lead to oppression regardless of whether it's run by the bourgeoisie or by the proletariat. The idea this sentiment rests on is that after being formed, a proletarian-run state will never wither away but will instead stay firmly in place forever.
Over a hundred years after the first socialist state was created in Russia, history has vindicated Marx and Lenin's expectation that the state will begin to grow weaker as proletarian revolution progresses. While anti-communist propaganda would have us believe that China, Cuba, the DPRK, and the other existing socialist states are despotic or "authoritarian" regimes, their internal affairs haven't disproven the "withering away" theory.
In the DPRK, the government has become less centralized over the decades, with the position of the presidency having been abolished within the country in 1998. Now leadership positions are being increasingly filled by the masses instead of by a small party elite, reflecting Lenin's predictions about how the decentralization of politics would begin after a proletarian revolution happens. In the other socialist countries, a democratic political system prevails-one which opens the possibility for similar developments to happen within them. As journalist Charles McKelvey wrote last year:
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