You're pointing out that communists are idiots and hypocrites, but that doesn't change what they believe.
No, I'm very specifically not pointing that out because it's not true.
I've heard a lot of crappy takes on communism over the years, but claiming that that communism is hypocritical because of a failure to adhere to your own mistaken perception of what communism is just kind of sad.
Marx spoke with a clear distinction between the concepts of "a state" vs "a commune".
Marx spoke of "
the commune", specifically, the Paris commune, as a countervailing force to
state power. He describes the effect it had on police who, stripped of their political function, became "agents" of the commune. He describes the commune, very specifically, as a government, as an institution that was not utopian, that was never intended or expected to deliver any kind of utopian society. He is writing about an actual historical event, and he is doing so, in large part, to address the arguments you have made about communism. Namely, that communism is impossible and utopian.
Communism, for Marx, was the hypothetical endpoint of a vast historical process playing out over centuries. It was not something that would be ushered in by a single revolution. All a single revolution could hope to do (like the Paris commune) was to build a new kind of government, a "national government" or "a working men’s government" in which the economic and political power of the state was decentralized and distributed to the majority.
Regardless, when talking about communism in the present, there is sadly a Lenin you have to add to your Marx. A Lenin who wrote about the need for "iron discipline", who lectured on the necessity of compromise, who argued that class consciousness could only be imposed on the workers from without by means of a vanguard party. Lenin was not a hypocrite, neither was he any flavour of utopian or idealist. He was intensely, ruthlessly pragmatic. You'd have absolutely loved him. You could have bonded over your shared hatred of "communism".
You're not going to find Karl Marx saying anything positive about the police, rather: "The ‘police’, the ‘judiciary’, and the ‘administration’ are not the representatives of a civil society which administers its own universal interests in them and through them; they are the representatives of the state and their task is to administer the state against civil society.”
Okay..
You think people who believe the State and the police are oppositional structures to civil society also really like these things and want to use them more than anyone?
So, the quote you just posted
does not actually say that police are oppositional structures to civil society. It certainly doesn't suggest that the state is in any way inherently opposed to civil society.
It is describing the problems of police purely in terms of what police represent (or more specifically, who they represent) within the social order as it exists. It does not suggest anything inherently wrong with the institution of policing. Indeed, if you'd bothered to read the little lecture on the Paris Commune you quoted earlier, you'd find Marx talking very openly about the way in which institutions such as the police and judiciary can be politically rehabilitated.
The irony is that this fantasy of anarchist Marx you're trying to invent is something I'd expect to see coming from incredibly politically naïve Leftists trying to explain why "real communism" has never been tried, only you're doing it.. because you think it would somehow discredit Marx's work if it was
less vulnerable to appropriation by authoritarian governments. How exactly do you imagine that one working out?
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