Forces Libs and Conservatives typically label “authoritarian” are usually authoritarian too. What most Liberals, Conservatives, and authoritarian “Leftists” don’t grasp is that anything truly “Left” is where direct democracy begins, and exploitation + domination ends.
Absolute drivel. Do they think direct democracy is going to do shit for them in a settler-colonial society? They'd be lucky to survive "direct democracy" here. let alone get anything from it. It has to be done the way every single anti-colonial revolution has been done before, with guns, bombs, and the power of a state.
Look past surface aesthetics and rhetoric and ask yourself these questions when evaluating whether or not political orgs and/or tendencies are authoritarian: The key question is whether or not these hierarchies or authorities have been consented to and are recallable, or if they have been imposed.
You don't have to be involved in any given political organization. If you don't like the leaders leave and start a better one or work to change the leaders. Demanding arbitrary standards of consent [of who?] and instantaneous recall does nothing but open up an organization to attacks by wreckers or even simply the ignorant. If leaders are consented to, then are they still bad? Are they still "authoritarian"? What if they give out orders? It is still not explained why authoritarianism is bad or even what it is.
The paradigm we are currently suffering under is a paradigm of authoritarianism.
No it's capitalism and private property, why don't they address capitalism?
Whether you’re in the U.S. or China, you most likely have someone ordering you around and monitoring your every move each day.
Completely unprovoked the wild national chauvinist invokes China as a boogeyman. Soon they will bay for war in the name of liberation.
For many of us, our “teachers” were our first “bosses.”
Anything “Left” has to break from these authoritarian social relations.
There is definitely valid critiques about education as it exists serving the interest of capitalists, but come on, this reads like a whiny high school student. Education is liberating and teachers are educators. In their utopian "direct democracy" who will teach the whites that racism is bad and black people are not sub-human? Who taught them to read?
the reality/truth is that parents/guardians can tend to be the first “bosses” that we have
This is the worldview of a child upset with their parents. Ultraleft prefigurative politics remains a literal infantile disorder a century later. This is sad too because it represents something which I suppose has been going on for a long time, the co-option of radical ideas and language by petite bourgeois intellectuals, this just happens to be the black version of it. No revolution, and certainly no anti-colonial revolution, has ever succeeded without authoritarian measures. Even the pseudo-revolutions that have advanced conditions for black and brown people in the USA have required the guns of the state enforcing them.
I see this pervasive virus of petite bourgeois liberalism spreading in a lot of different places. They co-opt the language of anarchists, Marxists, and the isolated progressive movements of the late twentieth century into one big word salad, lack any revolutionary spirit, and practice no historical or materialist analysis. They think the problem is that we're not including more people in our movements (because we're too authoritarian), when in reality the American people are pacified little babies who can barely be bothered to exercise legal means of political expression and when beaten down, return to our masters with tails between our legs. If we can raise many Americans from their utterly depraved and disgusting state then maybe mass democracy will be viable, but until then these ideas are solely there to be shared and preached by PMCs who work at some non-profit tax haven or whatever. They can preach mass democracy all they want, but your average Joe and Jane want Marvel instead.
I don't really have any right to criticize them (but I'll do it anyways), but here's an excerpt from their website:
Building a new world in the shell of the old, and letting that world speak for itself... This is the meat and potatoes of our overall focus as an organization, and it is why we are partnered with Dual Power Projects like Cooperation Jackson, as well as Symbiosis, who are already working to develop an international and politicized network of Worker Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDE cooperatives) and communes that are federated and linked to community land trust initiatives, cooperative banking institutions, mutual aid networks, people’s assemblies, and more that can serve as social, economic, and political anchor institutions for new self-governance structures and political power (building dual power). We are determined to destroy Capitalism by making it obsolete in the building of a better system that is based upon principles of cooperation and direct democracy, and that centers our needs first.
They're basically the Richard Wolff type. I mean whatever works. Nobody has a magic bullet for every situation. Of course they probably say that all the successful revolutions in the past were bad and authoritarian. It's probably threading-the-needle posturing to try to get as many American-brained people on board or whatever, but I don't see how that really gets them anywhere.
Their website is insanely fancy though. I wonder what their funding model is? It's not a bad idea to have a good website.
We are a nonsectarian, "Scientific Socialist" organization (see here) made up of people who identify as many different things under the “Hard Left” umbrella, however we do not support egoists or insurrectionists, nor do we support highly centralized leadership (see here) or State Capitalism (see here and here).'
A lot of their website is just dumb cringe stuff.
They have a banner at the bottom of their website of a bunch of black socialists/communists who supported most of the "evil" "tankie" leaders of the world even though BSA opposes "tankies" (and they apparently use the term).
Their website and twitter is also just full of all the random socialist clique mumbo jumbo about different distributed governing structures and other pointless stuff.
Funding model: anonymous development grant from Langley Virginia.