This sort of sentiment from the left pops up every now and then so let's talk about it:
To be fair, this particular person later moved the goalposts quite a bit:
But still, even with those qualifications, this is still a very weird way of viewing the world from a leftist perspective, for several reasons.
CIA as Agent of Class Struggle...
The specific poster above amends their statement to include this, but it's worth underlining that the CIA and other similar organizations are clearly and obviously a part of modern class struggle, to the degree that any mention of them should naturally invoke this assumption. While I don't have enough training/knowledge to argue this as well as I'd like, I'd even go so far as to say that the CIA is basically a textbook example of class formation, both in terms of their input (the original CIA was essentially a repository for Yale-bred fancylads and that hasn't changed much) and their output (their #1 or #2 job is to funnel cash to groups who will do the bidding of capital).
...And People Already Understand This
So yes, it's technically true that not every person who mentions the CIA explicitly mentions class struggle. But aside from the obvious fact that no one is going to do a full Marxian analysis every single time they tweet about the CIA, it's probably safe to assume that any left-leaning person engaging in such discussion already understands this. We all know that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" because it is literally the first sentence in the first chapter of the gosh darned Communist Manifesto. Moreover, C. Wright Mills, literally the first vaguely Marxist guy to specifically address American clandestine operations during the Cold War, covered this in the first chapter of his magnum opus:
"I should be as far from supposing that some simple and unilateral ruling class could be firmly located as the prime mover of American society, as I should be from supposing that all historical change in America today is merely impersonal drift.
[...]
The view that all of history is due to the conspiracy of an easily located set of villains, or of heroes, is also a hurried projection from the difficult effort to understand how shifts in the structure of society open opportunities to various elites and how various elites take advantage or fail to take advantage of them. To accept either view—of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift—is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful."
History as Theory and History as Praxis
Returning to the first image, perhaps the most fundamental disconnect here is the different wavelengths of the quote tweeter and the quote tweeted. The quote tweeter's references to class struggle and the "motor of history" clearly shows a theoretical outlook, while the quote tweeted is describing reality as it exists. Neither of these viewpoints is wrong per se, and as I argued above, they are actually complimentary truths. Which is why it's very strange and arguably counterproductive to Marxist aims to argue that they are not compatible. No matter your vantage point, the CIA exists today as a functional arm of capital and to that end is almost certainly still doing the same evil shit it's been doing all along. So when we talk about the CIA, we are not just talking about decades-old stuff from the Church Committee, we are talking about a power structure that exhibits dominion over us today. As such, subsuming any discussion of the CIA's machinations to a relatively abstract concept of the "motor of history" ignores how conveying knowledge of our current plight could lead to specific action to counter it.
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