The criticism of the ACP should be strengthened. I also have “pro-authoritarian” politics, 90% of us here have (and 100% of us here ought to have them). For example I think it’s totally fine for China to execute CIA agents they uncover on their territory, but some would call that authoritarian. I think it was cool of Cuba to nationalize every industry in 1959 without compensation, but some would also call that authoritarian. Likewise I align with the “authoritarian regimes” of China, DPRK, Cuba, and many other maligned states in the world. This framing plays exactly into the ACP’s hand: “ACP supports China but ACP is bad, therefore it must mean China is bad too!” I suspect on some level this is something ACP wants to happen.

Much stronger criticism is their stance regarding basically the entirety of communist history (which they either reject or try to reframe out of left field), and how much of a break they represent with basically all of communism so far. They are the ones making enemies with other communists, by claiming they know better than us and we’re wrong and will be lined up against the wall when the american revolution comes. They talk big despite having nothing to show for it yet in practice.

The way their party works is basically a glorified tiktok house where supporters (members) send the influencers money so they can go on trips around the world and bring back instagram pictures of it. They show up for the photo op then bail without doing any work there. They are a complete break from communist internationalism there too because only the ‘executive committee’ ie the influencers (haz, helali, hinkle etc) ever go on these trips, they never bring any ACP members along with them.

They consistently lie, for example randomly putting the names of CPUSA chapters on their forming constitution and then these chapters quickly distancing themselves from apparently having signed that document. One of them that appeared on the document didn’t even exist.

They completely misunderstand theory and quote-mine every interaction, and have discord servers where they coordinate these arguments. If you’re anything on twitter it becomes blatant very quickly that most of them are 15 and think andrew tate was not edgy enough for them. They all share the same screenshot of a quote and if you press them even a little and demand they detail their thoughts they will bail but not before liking and retweeting their own tweet reply to signal to other patsocs to jump into the conversation. Their praxis is to berate and abuse marxists until they relent and agree with the ACP.

If we want to criticize their communism then we must judge them on marxist grounds not on vibes that they don’t ‘perform’ the role to our satisfaction and tick enough boxes. Their theory is wrong because they purposely misunderstand it and thus show a worrying agenda, and everything else flows from that. Their mistaken theory cannot build effective communist praxis and we see this already in the way they consider only some workers to be actual workers. But it can certainly create some nice little himmlers.

And it’s not just history, it has real consequences today. As I showed in the first paragraph, they are reframing what anti-imperialism and internationalism mean. Practically they are also known to be abusers, both physically and mentally and frankly I would not want to be around any of them.

I expect that leftAgainstACP community will eat itself soon. I’ve been invited to similar communities in the past and they end up imploding because they try to form a united front but it’s a doomed idea. You can see the posts already on that subreddit: “stalinism and the ACP have nothing to do with marxism, here’s why:” from yesterday, for example. Tbh I don’t really like the fandom aspect of this entire thing, it feels more like they’re trying to pit pros and antis, supporting people because they’re on the ‘right’ side of the fence even if they have other terrible opinions, posting memes to laugh at, etc. The moment you have people in these anti-acp communities saying china sucks it’s over, they’ve capitulated to western capital. Another post: “are pragmatic Social Democrats who are more concerned that withdrawing from NATO could precipitate a new global fascist movement and indirectly lead to a world war welcome?” (answers: yes welcome aboard.)

I didn’t intend to finish this promoting something but if you want to do something online but still material against ACP write for the prolewiki pages on them. we are among the top results if you search for their names or terms and they are some of our most visited pages, and there is still so much to add and so many more pages to create. That will be infinitely more worthwhile in teaching newcomers to marxism, which is who the ACP targets, about the danger patsocs are to them.