Marx Engels Lenin Institute

"To be a Leninist is not to dogmatically worship every action of past socialist states, but to recognize that Leninism represents the practical application of Marxist theory to the age of imperialism. It is the science of revolution, providing the strategic and organizational framework for how a dispersed working class can coalesce into a force capable of seizing state power. To abandon Leninism is to abandon the only methodology that has ever successfully dismantled a capitalist state and replaced it with a workers' state. It is to choose perpetual protest over the concrete project of winning power.

This requires us to defiantly reclaim the wins of 20th-century socialism. Was it a history without tragedy and error? Of course not. But it was also the single greatest epoch of human liberation in history. It was the Soviet Union that bore the brunt of the fight against Na**sm, breaking the back of the Wehrmacht at a cost of 27 million lives. It was socialist movements that lifted hundreds of millions from feudal and colonial backwardness, guaranteeing housing, healthcare, education, and full employment as human rights for the first time. It defeated fascism in the 1940s, and it offers the only coherent blueprint to defeat its 21st-century descendant today. To allow bourgeois historians to reduce this colossal struggle to a narrative of pure failure is an act of political and intellectual surrender.

We must name our enemy clearly: liberalism is the left wing of fascism, and it is a dying ideology. It is the political expression of a capitalism in its senile phase, a system that can no longer offer reforms and can only administer decay. The liberal clings to the fantasy of a neutral state and a humane capitalism even as that same state unleashes its police and its bombers to protect the interests of capital. Their ideology is disintegrating because it has no answer to the existential crises its own system has created. They can only manage the descent into barbarism; they cannot prevent it."

"A specter is haunting the left: the specter of apology. It manifests as a cringing embarrassment before the victories of 20th-century socialism, a frantic desire to distance ourselves from the label of 'authoritarian,' and a desperate attempt to prove our respectability to a liberal establishment that will always, ultimately, side with the fascist over the people. This era of apology must end. The crises of our time—the rise of fascism, the unfolding ecocide, the brutalizing inequality—demand not a moderated, sanitized politics, but a clear, unflinching, and unapologetically communist response."

Unapologetically Communist A specter is haunting the left—the specter of apology.