I think you make a good point with your example. Let me clarify, I don’t think its unprincipled to use the law in our favor if we can. Personally I think that it’s damn near impossible to pull off just because of the massive arsenal of bourgeois laws the powers at be have at their disposal. If they want to eliminate you, they can and will find a way to do so within the law that’s specifically structured for that purpose. So if a fellow worker can find a way, despite all the limitations I mentioned, to make the law work in their favor by all means do it. I won’t personally take your commie card for pleading the fifth lol.

The text in question: *In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat – that is, with the agrarian National Reformers. *

This statement is controversial for a few reasons, today bad actors use this line in particular to justify some messed up stuff. It’s kind of vague, but it seems like Engels is making the case that we should hitch our wagons to the party that plans on using the bourgeois constitution against the bourgeois in favor of the proletariat. I argue it cannot be done, if communists came to power in the US we’d have to start from scratch essentially, it’d have to all be re-written. It is a document that was written by and for the bourgeois, I struggle to see how that can be ‘turned against them’. Next he uses the 1844 National Reform Association as an example of how this can be done. This is controversial because that association was the beginning of the Homestead Act, which gave white settlers a free pass to move west and sped up the displacement/genocide of the indigenous people already living there. So was the homestead act a ‘win’ for the proletariat? For the settler whites it was a win. Overall it was detrimental, particularly to the indigenous population, and was a tremendous net negative (honestly it was beyond words how bad it was) from a communist perspective. Obviously Engels was limited in his perspective living overseas in 1840’s Europe where information received about these things was questionable at best. We now have the power of hindsight to see that was a very poor take, and that Engels was a product of his time. Finally, and the point of emphasis I wanted to make in my original comment, is that patsocs today still use this quote as justification for their bad beliefs. There’s a ton of resources out there from other comrades that go specifically into why they are a problem. You know very well these people and their toxic stances, based off of your PCUSA post from months ago (sorry that happened to you btw hope that situation is better now), so you know much more than I do about how much of a problem they are. Also there are non-patsocs that argue for similar things, like Gus Hall’s ‘Bill of Rights Socialism’. This again falls into the problem of using bourgeois tools against them, which I argue cannot be done on a large scale. This take also seems to imply that the law is just a neutral tool which can be used by anyone, that it’s impartial, which obviously isn’t the case. It also seems to imply that there’s some kind of pure redeemable essence in Amerikan values/law, which I would argue doesn’t exist. This is all just my takeaway from it, maybe I’m wrong, or overstating it’s meaning and importance.