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.
Waiting for Enver to inevitably show up and start flinging shit around.
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
what was the last successful "anti authoritarian" revolution then? How will counter revolutionaries within and without be dealt with in a non"authoritarian" way? Authoritarianism may be an evil buts its a necessary one
If AMLO decided that the Zapatistas existing was a threat to Mexican Capital he could crush them in one day. They are allowed to exist, they're not "liberated".
You could say that about a lot of communists in the West too.
Each of us are "allowed to exist", our organizations are "allowed to exist".
I mean yeah. We are powerless. They could kill every single one of us tonight and it wouldn't even make the news. I would never say we were successful at liberating literally anyone.
I suppose part of my point is that we exist in a sort of equilibrium, where the state and its capitalist analogs do not simply smother us- out of a combination of a) not recognizing us as a threat, and b) not being willing to casually slaughter its own citizens. And there are both ideological and material components of both a and b.
This might sound liberal, but we have an ability to build things up from the individual and small-collective level, and our personal choices can point in a revolutionary direction. We are stuck in hegemonic liberalism (which is not going to change any time soon), and as such our survival is largely connected to staying in the good graces of liberals, of maintaining a position such that in a cost-benefit analysis, it wouldn't make sense to kill us off.
We can make noise about what foreign countries are "advancing socialism" all we like, and it's not going to do anything more than make the target on us less blurry. We can form unions and party structures (which are good, although capitalist institutions in this country have 80+ years of success in getting the better of them), and potentially accrue big victories but also become a choicier target to crack down on. We can go full insurrectionary and get totally merked. Or, we can build anti-capitalist ways of living in ways that are not ostentatious, but directly secure most of the means of production of decent lives organically, and in a way that will allow us to resist climate change, attract people, and maybe even start a PPW from.
I am sympathetic to all of these but I favor the latter.
Mexico has planes with bombs, they could obliterate the Zapatistas
Vietnam isn't inside US territory, it's across an ocean lol, not quite the same thing as a region inside Mexico.
Vietnam was the underdog but they still had at least some form of weaponry and an actual army (as well as aid from USSR and China), Zapatistas have a population of 360K people and no real military equipment.
This is true but it has nothing to do with the Zapatistas. Cartels are the only force that breaks that monopoly on violence. Honestly a cartel could probably eradicate the EZLN
Lol vietnam was a country of dozens of millions of people being armed and funded by a global superpower.
Al Qaeda literally had weapons and money from the CIA laying around when they became "enemies" of the US, and continued to receive funding from Saudi billionaires with seemingly limitless wealth. Also, they are willing to kill 100 innocents to kill one infidel. Zapatistas have ancient bolt-action rifles and make their money selling $60 bags of coffee to white liberals. They are allowed to exist by the Mexican state.
The zapatistas are to be admired yes, but have they actually expanded out of Chiapas? Not denying that they are doing very important things, but they can't even get out of a single province. Now imagine running the biggest country in the world
Are these huge capitalist countries under attack by sanctions and sabatoeurs?
Iran literally executes people in public daily. When western backed protestors were rioting, they used live rounds on them. How in the fuck is Iran not "authoritarian" lol
Lol. There is no valid argument for our against aUtHoRiTaRiAnIsM because it's not a thing
ahh yes because communist/socialist countries were famously hindered, whats a venezuela?
let's get this back on topic, a Venezuela is when the government does things
& the more things it does, the more Venez, well, a governmental entity is
you started talking about Iran for some reason while the discussion was on socialist countries
idk if they could be considered "civil" considering that the Supreme leader and the Parliament have considerable power compared to other countries plus they are a right wing theocracy who should only be supported due to their anti imperialism
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.
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
dont buy it. that experience is so unfathomably narrow in comparison to the questions we try to resolve
one could call this childish idealism that is diametrically opposed to the material dialectical analyses that marxists like.. well, liebknecht, used to apply.
likewise
people use "authoritarianism" as a scare tactic & ham-fisted way to shut down debate... not as a worthy criticism.
if former capitalists & their toadies have to serve jail time & do hard labor for exploiting & oppressing workers, then this isn't "authoritarianism", no more than the reality of wage compulsion is "authoritarian"
in fact, it's much less authoritarian and is actually ethically justified because of the nature of wage relations in the old system
workers will have to continue class struggle, it's a struggle afterall and not a PMC board meeting or personal grievance airing
the state & legitimizing authority is simply the state... it's like the firmament fixed & eternal
labor is rehabilitating for capitalists who never did labor before, that's the point. it's not about punishment, it's about serving the community & removing class distinctions... i didn't say they would toil endlessly without reprieve
it's not illegal to criticize the government, it's illegal to incite violence against the larger community
the state protects workers from the market in the ideal social democratic model.
the state oppresses the exploiters in the ideal socialist model
no one was killed for criticizing the government in USSR lol, I don't know what you're talking about
Usually, it was for protesting the government's policy of redistribution by exterminating all the jews in the village with a shovel!
Here is all the contemporary working class POV on Trotsky . William Hearst and other fascists loved him as a cudgel against USSR.
The working class thought he was an enemy!
Heck, Trostky was the ultimate cuck. This woman literally slept with him yet she chose Stalin over him! Check out her Stalin portrait! Image
Heck, Trostky was the ultimate cuck.
No, raising a daughter is.
I cannot think or comprehend of anything more cucked than having a daughter. Honestly, think about it rationally. You are feeding, clothing, raising and rearing a girl for at least 18 years solely so she can go and get ravaged by another man. All the hard work you put into your beautiful little girl - reading her stories at bedtime, making her go to sports practice, making sure she had a healthy diet, educating her, playing with her. All of it has one simple result: her body is more enjoyable for other men.
Raised the perfect girl? Great. Who benefits? If you're lucky, a random man who had nothing to do with the way she grew up, who marries her. He gets to ravage her every night. He gets the benefits of her kind and sweet personality that came from the way you raised her.
As a man who has a daughter, you are LITERALLY dedicating at least 20 years of your life simply to raise a girl for another man to enjoy. It is the ULTIMATE AND FINAL cuck. Think about it logically.
oh you mean Trotsky who literally sought help from fascist Japan & NS Germany was rooted out by actual Mexican communists who knew how dastardly and underhanded he was being?
Trotsky is an anti-communist figure lol
Zinoviev and Bukharin admitted guilt lol
Tukhachevsky was plotting against the state, what's wrong with you?
The Moscow trials are public record. Feel free to examine the evidence and the court transcripts yourself. They have been translated into every imaginable language.
Defined by Capitalists? I would highly recommend that you read some gramsci on hegemony!
Read the transcripts. I promise you they were neither tortured nor was the confession forced. After the prosecutor proved each point, some of them confessed in hopes of manipulating the soviets. Also, I bet you never learned about the derailed trains or the miners who suffocated to death. THe difference is that in capitalist America, the supervisor at the mine gets to be free and run for the Senate. In the USSR, the workers themselves headed the investigation committee and did such a thorough investigation that they found the plot. Then, mostly it was people snitching on others in hopes of leniency, but because the USSR was a worker state, the people were like "F this shit" and they got no leniency.
It's true
Kamenev and Zinoviev and Bukharin were convicted criminals, believe all the sob stories you want to
Mensheviks were not comrades, they were bourgeois fancy lads
Trotsky sought help from NS Germany and fascist Japan
they're actual trials with actual evidence and actual witnesses
only anti-USSR propaganda calls them "show trials", because it's literal Western anti-USSR propaganda
but sure, the Western imperialist's propaganda is completely without issue
no, you're just not actually providing any evidence to your case, and only mentioned a source that literally exaggerates beyond recognition
you know that Western Sovietology is built around exaggeration and caricature and demonization, and yet you still accept all of its premises?
and you have nothing here
you're just bleating out anti-communist nonsense every chance you get
and I personally think it's pathetic and abusive to be on a radical left forum and only spew anti-communist canards
okay, that's why you keep responding i guess?
why don't you actually come up with evidence or sources, or a counter-argument, or at least some sort of analytical framing rather than just remain set in your propagandized anti-communist ways?
okay, cope more
not sure what you think you're doing here whining about "USSR bad" as though that's a legitimate take at all
you're the reactionary & counterrevolutionary idiot who regurgitates anti-communist lies & exaggerations
so that's abusive in and of itself, but I'm not going to pretend to be personally affronted by your ignorance
cry more about it I guess? or clutch pearls?
makes no real difference to me
you're the one who acts in bad faith and never actually supports any of your positions
not sure why you're even here if you're just so offended and disrespected on a fundamental level lol
“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?
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.
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.
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
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
okay, then stop responding if it's just all too distressing for you to not take vehemently anti-communist positions on a communist/far left forum
you're not offended, you're just wrong
i get it. you don't like being wrong, it's understandable
so stop responding, or take another route and support your positions with actual accompanying information
otherwise, you're just spewing lies
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.
