start their business¶

The only power being built when people "start their business" is their own power, to the exclusion of the power of the working class. This is a direct appeal to the petty bourgeois aspirations that drive reaction and uphold the capitalist system. https://t.co/pAwxYeU9mX The role of communists is not to "integrate with society," it is to directly oppose the status quo, to defeat and destroy the existing state. ACP does the opposite of this by appealing to and entrenching those who have the most to gain by the maintenance of the status quo. The mention of "even a construction company?" leads me to believe your mistake is in equating "doing stuff" with "running a business."

Communists should be building, farming, etc. These are projects orgs must run, to build a productive engine that isn't bound up in capital. Running a business -- extracting surplus value from workers, governing production by the logic of capital valorization -- does the exact opposite. It is no different from any other capitalist enterprise, just because the capitalist happens to say "By the way, I'm a communist." The philosophy of the ACP revolves around the same axis as the broader society. It's entirely aesthetic, a "communist"-themed branding with no oppositional politics. "Start your business" is just one iteration of giving members "permission" to act exactly as they would otherwise. Their audience is people who want to enrich themselves, to ascend the social hierarchy, rather than destroying it. Positioning literal capitalism as somehow "anticapitalist" is the same rhetorical strategy they use to launder chauvinist views as "real communism." The group views queerness as "unnatural," opposes immigration as "destabilizing," holds bioessentialist views of the roles of women and men, panders to white supremacist fears of a racialized "criminal element," and so on. Because they want to tail a very specific cohort. There's so much more that could be said about the ACP, but the short answer is that it is not a revolutionary org -- or even an organization at all. It's a loose affinity group dedicated to obscuring the meaning of the word "communism."

It's the transphobic version of CPUSA.