thats the post
Remember when bookchin said he would team up with ancaps to take down a hypothetical Marxist government in america
Michael Parenti recalls an instance in Blackshirts and Reds when Murray Bookchin made fun of Parenti's concern for "the poor kids who got fed under communism."
Idk about CIA but he's eh
Typical white American, doesn't give a fuck about poor children, is supremely concerned with his individual freedom
The weird strain of Anti-Authoritarianism present in much of the west is definitely incredibly damaging to organization and left-unity
It's not a belief that's actively conducive to making change, but instead is used to justify everyone turning against one another
The proliferation of the Holy Gospel of the political compass has seriously damaged the ability of the Left to form organizations with more influence than a branch of the DSA
Think of all the people who would otherwise be all for Socialist policy, but get spooked off by the slippery slope argument saying that any attempt at establishing an organization as leading to purges and death squads
We've be told that we're not all struggling together, that the truth is the guy next to us trying to get us cooperating is Hitler Jr.
And yeah, there are assholes that only want to grift, who only want power and will use any method to get it, but that's precisely why we have to be organized and willing to operate as a whole so that we can drive those people out with the rest of the ghouls where they belong
The memes also don't allow for any real discussion of what is authority and what is authoritarianism. I mean for all the people who throw Engels on authority (which imo is not a super useful essay) at people, the underlying point of that essay is that (by modern definitions) Bakunin is being authoritarian and needs to knock it off.
The proliferation of the Holy Gospel of the political compass has seriously damaged the ability of the Left to form organizations with more influence than a branch of the DSA
This is a really good point. In addition to the Political Compass test questions being loaded, the two-dimensional representation of politics obscures and distorts just like the one-dimensional one does, and lumps a lot of things into an axis that are neither interchangeable nor linearly dependent.
Really, even the terminology of Left and Right is something we need to abandon, in favor of something less Euclidean and more descriptive. There are liberals of many different kinds (including the ones who invented the terms of leftist and rightist), there are reactionaries of many different kinds, and there are progressives/egalitarians of many different kinds.
I disagree about "anti-authoritarianism," but "lib-unity" is definitely an op.
“Auth-left” is kinda of a useless concept when you look closer at it, like what’s the difference between the labor camps the cnt-fai put people in vs the gulag system? At the end of the day, they were both prison camps right?
Waiting for Enver to inevitably show up and start flinging shit around.
There's no such thing as authoritarianism, you dweeb. That's just horseshoe theory! Can't wait until you ambush your first forestry service cop lol
personal experience with bullying should not colour one's analysis of authority in left structures
she didn't even publish "The Russian Revolution" and supported Lenin and his revolution, and lets no forget that it was written before she undertook her own revolution, thus before she had to actually face running it
Freiheit ist immer freiheit der andersdenkenden.
If Rosa would have succeeded, how much freedom could she have given the fascists, the restaurative monarchists and the tradcaths in Germany, or the industrial magnates whose assets she was about to expropriate and who could've picked from a giant pool of reactionary WW1 vets to be hired as mercenaries? While her state would've been seen as at least as much of a threat by the US and UK as they saw in the Soviet Union? At a time where the reaction in Germany brought machine guns to protests and signs saying "if you pass here, you'll be shot"? As she said herself, die Revolution wird so gewaltsam, wie es die herrschende Klasse nötig macht. The revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary. This is the ruling class that funded and enabled Hitler. How much violence would they have made necessary in this case?
We're not talking about stable and pacified societies here. They are necessarily something else than that if they have conditions that enable a socialist revolution. In societies about to be gripped by revolution, defining freedom as the freedom of the people who'd murder you gets you fucking murdered.
Sure, once you've got a socialism going and it's reasonably safe from outside threats, things look different. It's a good discussion to have how to ensure that the structures that were necessary to bring about revolution and make it succeed don't become too entrenched, too overreaching for a society that is not at war with itself anymore and not under constant threat from hostile outside powers dominated by bourgeoise class interests who want to destroy you. But a socialist society to which that applies is as much a hypothetical as a parallel universe in which Luxemburg and Liebknecht overthrew the bourgeoise state. It is something that has never applied to any existing socialist project so far. So we'd also have to deal with the question how to get to that point, and i'm not saying that to pile more burden of proof onto you, i'm saying that because it's at least as important as the question when and how to cut back the power of the party.
If Rosa would have succeeded, how much freedom could she have given the fascists, the restaurative monarchists and the tradcaths in Germany, or the industrial magnates whose assets she was about to expropriate
Any of these is just as easy to assassinate as an anti-capitalist.
Centralized decision-making has its weaknesses and bottlenecks, no matter what ideology it's in service to. In contrast, you can't reliably take down a hive just by killing the "queen".
That's why I tried to allude to bees instead of ants.
Entomology gang can into relevant! Reality has a progressive bias, and socialist persuasions can be bolstered not just by philosophy and critical theory, but by all of the social sciences and even much of the natural sciences.
Rosa had small disagreements with Lenin on the USSR and suddenly she's an anarchist lmao, you really can track who anarchists/liberals support by if their revolution succeeded or if it failed/they died early.
Make another passive aggressive edit and people will agree with you.
Succdems in Poland: go go EU! Rule of law! Punish Poland harder, senpaiiiii!
Me: you do realize that when/if the left gets to power the "rule of law" will be used against it too?Even the Razem succdems got some dangerous (from the perspective of capitalism) ideas
Yeah, Razem looks not too bad given the situation, what I meant was: I don't think they got any real momentum for now. And with Bo
siusak being popular among young people, and the whole "everything that's LGBT or on the left is basically Marxism", I can only imagine the situation worsening :/
The act of revolution is authoritarian. You are radically restructuring society through force and coercion. Without force and coercion, there is no revolution. Without force and coercion, you are the Bernie Sanders dick flattening meme. On your knees with hat in hand, asking the ruling class for basic amenities only to getting laughed out of the room - or tear gassed and beaten, depending on their mood.
You can get yourself some communes on a fully voluntary basis, but communes have existed throughout more or less all of history. They are not a threat to systemic oppression. They are not a threat to any of the powerful, ultraviolent hierarchies which dominate the world.
I do find it funny when anti-authoritarians whine about revolutionary societies
The initial act of revolution is about the most authoritarian thing you can do. It is quite literally one part of the population pointing guns at the other and telling them how society is to be structured
And rarely has that conversation ended in the other side readily agreeing. Theyve ususlly taken up arms and defended their exploitative positions in society until they met their end at a noose, guillotine or summary execution or killed the revolutionaries and resumed their garbage redundant position as a Kinglord/merchant/capitalist/landlord /
In fact most of the time...they have been willing to tear an entire country in two rather than relinquish their position.
The second problem is assuming those that have been overthrown are going to accept the new society and not work hand in hand with foreign agents to restore theprevious social order
I agree with all of this, but I will grant the "anti-authoritarians" the fact that such a situation is untenable. If we're going to have a class war, it should be expected to come paired with some form of martial law. It's wartime, after all, and the pre-existing civic institutions which served the roles of justice and the protection of civil liberties were toppled because they were deemed incapable of bringing about justice and protecting civil liberties. Things are going to get worse before they get better - but things need to get better.
I think one of the reasons "socialism in one state" generally turned out to be a failure was that it resulted in a stalemate. A permanent class war being fought through the proxy of the state which in turn required a perpetual wartime footing. This is a trap which needs to be avoided. We want fully automated luxury communism after all, not a drab landscape of Hoxhaist pillboxes and paranoia.
This is missing a material analysis though comrade
If people as smart, dedicated and brave as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hoxha, Mugabe, Ortega, Sankara and Qadaffi and the hundreds of millions of brave people that followed them all ended up in roughly the same spot something bigger is at work than "this leader is authoritarian"
What's more unless we're great man theorists then we understand that the masses sought leaders of men of steel with the caliber of the people mentioned above.
If US imperialism collapses we can indeed walk into fully automated luxury communism (and thats presupposing another power doesn't simply fill the power vacuum). But looking at Cuba, DPRK or China now who are all still on a perpetual wartime footing I think this is utopian.
Don't cede the term "authoritarian" to capitalists as an easy way to denigrate you. I wouldn't call the act of liberation 'authoritarian' even if it involves killing people or taking things from them against their will, as the nature of their existence was already a limitation and imposition on other people.
"If you have power over someone, don't cause harm to them. If someone has power over you, well, sometimes harming them is an okay way to fix that."
The act of revolution is authoritarian. You are radically restructuring society through force and coercion.
Imagine believing this.
What does anti authoritarianism even mean?
Unless youre an anarchist you still believe in a state to fend off your revolution and build the productive forces... This necessitates some level of violence as all States are used for the oppression of one class against another
Except under socialism its the majority oppressing the minority (of capitalists, embittered white guardists, royalists titans of industry, ceos and slumlords)
The great American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about the difficulty that most Americans have in accepting revolutionary violence. In Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba, Mills wrote as if a Cuban revolutionary were speaking to an American. In response to American outrage over the pictures of the revolutionaries summarily executing five or six hundred supporters of the dictator Batista without “a fair trial,” the Cuban says:
This was war. During the Batista regime, thousands of our people were murdered….So what would you expect? Maybe in easy moral terms, no killing is excusable….But however immoral the purposes and the results of killing are quite different in different places and at different times. Because you see it does matter who is getting killed and why. But whether you think so or not, you certainly have no grounds for talking about injustice: Who gave any trial to the people of Hiroshima? Well, this, too, was a war. Remember, too, Yankee, that morals are easy to come by sitting in your quiet suburbs away from it all protected from it all. Morals are easy to say out [sic] when you’re rich and strong and all the unpleasantnesses of the world are hidden from youÂby distance, by amusements, by your own indifference, by your own private way of life.[46]
I think Mark Twain put this the most convincingly.
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Also I don't think it's possible or makes any sense for the marginalized and deprived to "oppress" the advantaged. I wouldn't say that's what oppression means. Combat them? Sure. But oppression has a downward dynamic to it.
Anti-authoritarians should have disappeared when Allende got shot through the brain, yet here they are. I just don't get it.
Sankara was authoritarian and he got shot through the brain. Authoritarianism isn't a magic wand for fuck sake
Funny, I was actually gonna put Sankara as the example instead of Allende at first, because it also fits the point I was trying to make. He didn’t purge the military and government enough and got killed for it. He was riddled with bullets by soldiers under his “friend” who had plotted a coup against him. This is the kind of scenario that Stalin had prevented by purging the military so hard it almost lost him WW2.
You’re not wrong that it isn’t magic. Authoritarian communist movements fail. “Libertarian” movements fail even more.
You’re not wrong that it isn’t magic. Authoritarian communist movements fail. “Libertarian” movements fail even more.
This is so stupid and bad faithed that i don't even know how to react lol
This is the kind of scenario that Stalin had prevented by purging the military so hard it almost lost him WW2.
almost lost him WW2.
uh
but
isn't the central and basic point of a military to defend from external enemies? I'm kinda surprised you're saying the quiet part loud there.
Also it's not particularly "authoritarian" to restructure the military, stock it with your partisans, and include ideological training alongside combat training.
Yeah like 99% of people I recognize Stalin went too far in his purges to the point where it ended up doing more damage than necessary.
That last paragraph reads like a parody of MLs. It’s not authoritarian to fire and dismiss people from their positions without a trial? Enforce state-mandated ideological training? I think those are great ideas but it doesn’t stop being authoritarian just because we do it lmao.
A hierarchical military is already authoritarian. This can be reduced by decreasing the scope and term of command, and instilling egalitarian values. Having certain social requirements for being in the military wouldn't really be anything to blink at. They have physical and mental fitness tests already, just require people not to be sociopaths and include capitalistic mindsets in the category of "sociopathic".
People get fired from their jobs unfairly across the private sector all the time. So I'd say this kind of restructure would be "not fair, but just and righteous".
Changing to something that is less repressive, more equitable, and less centered around one person or small group of people is kind of the opposite of authoritarian.
Clearly, not authoritarian enough if he got shot by Blaise Compoare!
okay, run and tell mommy or something
you always deflect and make everything personal lol
you're not offended, you're just wrong lmfao
Accurate. All governments by definition are authoritarian.
Libs hate it when I point this out. The only people who should be using "Authoritarian" as a critique are anarchists.
I don't believe in the concept of authoritarianism because if one actually studied history, one would understand that most of the time, authoritarian is a label peddled to people who are not cowtowing to capital. Any kind of regulation and/or control of capital gets people the label of "authoritarian."
Honestly, nothing is as authoritarian as capitalism.
- Compare Authoritarian Chinese Police vs Democratic US Police
- American Gulags
- List of Corporate Crimes
- Democracy vs Dictatorship of the Bourgeoise
- Water Wars in Bolivia
- Colonialism -The US/UK government literally burn puppies to death
- US forcibly removes everyone from Faukland islands in the 1800s for asking ships to pay a duty
- Ronald reagan's Crusade in Bolivia -The Contras -Government by Organized Mob -626 villages were exterminated by us-funded militias
If you are worried about Stalin sending some random Nazis to a place that is objectively better than US prisons... I really have to wonder about your commitment against capitalism!
I would say that many American institutions are far more authoritarian than their Chinese (or erstwhile Soviet) counterparts. Authoritarianism is not the opposite of democracy; you can have an elected despot just as much as you can have a usurper despot.
This is why it's important that words have consistent meanings; any inconsistencies will be used by the interests of capital to create inversions.
"If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."
I'll linger... and if there is a dumb q about the usual stuff that I can't resist answering, I answer :).
That's great! You're threads and articles are the best, do you have any good ones on the DPRK?
In the old account I did. I am writing an article about it.. for about 6 months. I am basically missing everything between 1930-1950.
Exactly. That's what Ibn Al Khaldoun said first, although I don't think they had guns back then.
im an authoritarian anarchist but you can just call me anarcho-collectivist
The vapid “you’re an anarchist or a Stalinist” perspective of this community is deeply harmful and intellectually untenable.
I think it is a lot better here than in many other places, but you're right. It still is something which should be combated. Most of the time it is a false dichotomy. Leftist tendencies are much closer to a venn diagram with a big overlap than they are to a binary choice. For the most part, they are doing all the same shit - organizing people, political education, meeting people's material needs - just with a particular focus on different aspects of the struggle. Additionally, the situation is far too dynamic and multifaceted to determine what the "correct" course of struggle should be. Furthermore, these tendency labels we choose are mostly aesthetic. What you do matters a lot more than what you enjoy reading. If we judged leftists based on what they do to contribute to the struggle rather than unfounded paranoia about our comrades going out of their way to resurrect the worst missteps of past struggles, many of these categories would become fully redundant.
This isn't the Bolshevik Revolution. This isn't the Spanish Civil War. We are on a new frontier. We are all trying to carry forward the best lessons from past struggles while learning from their mistakes.
