They aren’t seen as a structural/systemic threat. They’re relegated from intelligence agency targeting and complex infiltration operations at the highest levels to tasking it to local cops to let them burn off some of their excess anger and desire for unanswerable violence on an acceptable target.

Adventurism is useful to the capitalists. And anarchists are quite big on that. Smashed Starbucks windows while feeling good to the smashers are also useful to retaining and enhancing police powers and not in any way a systemic threat. Your average member of the imperial core after all is put off by the inconvenience of being unable to get coffee or what have you. They see it as childish hooliganism and it annoys and sometimes frightens them and makes them think perhaps those police have a function. As a relief valve allowing some proles to occasionally smash a few things and cry “fuck the state” is a small price to pay to have a relief valve.

Anarchists are also easily manipulated. If ML’s are easily infiltrated because of our party structure and hierarchy then anarchists are easily turned to useful purposes by any account wearing the right signs and using the right language. Let’s not forget Lenin was shot and later died as a result of an anarchist assassin so they could be useful even for taking out ascendant Marxist leadership.

Anarchists flatten things out. Hierarchy = bad so it’s easy to rile them up against China, Russia, other “authoritarian” states which on the surface exercise more control over speech, activity, etc than certain parts of the west and convince them the west is the lesser evil. Heck look at their support for Rojava, Ukraine, HK riots, it goes on and on, they can be used as a tool. Color revolutions probably often start or are accelerated by anarchists so in this degree they’re potentially very useful outside the west to the west as part of the initial stages of toppling unfriendly governments before rushing in prepared folks they like.

After all it’s fundamentally an individualistic, individual-centered and idealistic ideology much like liberalism and unlike scientific Marxism. Neither Moscow/Beijing nor Washington is perfectly fine to the western capitalists as a mantra, saying where you are and its system is shitty is less than ideal but okay as long as all other existing examples are portrayed as as shitty or worse and any betters are purely hypothetical and idealistic with no path forward that actually threatens the flow of profits or the domination of capital.

Really I think the idealism and centering of the individual makes it less threatening to liberal capitalism because they can always speak their language, use appeals about freedom of the individual or this or that to appeal or direct a large amount of anarchists. Sure some small amount may be able to identify the primary contradictions and avoid all the chaff and false images created but most don’t. And they do attack Marxists and anti-imperialist organizations, and join Nazis in Ukraine, and so on. So there’s ample evidence they can be re-directed.

And really all of this is not without reason. This is an evidence-based approach for the capitalists. Name an anarchist revolution that produced a state which existed for any meaningful period of time? Name one that supported numerous other revolutions with arms, training, etc? Name one that lifted millions out of poverty and rocketed up to same level of scientific and industrial power as the west? Name one that endured decades of blockade and sanctions?