Make me authoritarian

Watch Finbol videos and order some sovietboo gear to larp in.

anarchists can't into space

There are some relevant threads on /Marx/ you could read through

Go lurk r/anarchism for a few months.

No.

Revolutions are inherently authoritarian. An anarchist revolution is, for the individual, just as authoritarian than a Marxist-Leninist one. You are subscribing to an abstract dichotomy between libertarian and authoritarian structures, they make no difference for the individual experience. Let's say I am a kulak, what difference does it make for me if I'm force to collectivze at gunpoint by an anarchist milita or an agent of the NKVD? Recommended reading:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm

Also, I refuse to accept that Marxist-Leninists states are more authoritarian than others. Don't confuse the terms autocratic and authoritarian! You need to get the eternal anglo out of your head and start accepting that there aren't just negative freedoms, there are also positive freedoms. If a bunch of people have to die so people aren't homeless, have free education and free healthcare, who cares? Being healthy, not over-worked and secure enables other freedoms in the process. Lastly, I want to stretch that Marxist-Leninists are not undemocratic or autocratic ideologically, but we are realists enough that we understand genuine democracy depends on the material conditions the revolutions leaves us with - there was simply not an option for most Marxist-Leninist states to release a firm grip on society when they were constantly under attack (and are!). That doesn't mean we are opposed to democracy, every Marxist-Leninist will gladly fight for democracy with you, as long as we can. Sometimes unity has to be prioritized over democracy.

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then answer me this: why have they become oppressive? why do they surpress freedom of speech, of association and so on. If the state is so very advanced and wonderful then surely they would invite questions rather than ruthlessly stamp them out
if you say this, you earn a "I don't know what i'm talking about" stamp

I don't anybody would deny that the USSR became increasingly more lax on civil liberties after Stalin. Pics related. What's about freedom of association? You couldn't associate you in a capitalist way, obviously, but the USSR had significantly more people being active in associations like the West ever had.
What makes you think you couldn't ask questions, or report complaints?

Not tryna take a position in this argument, but didn't Mao himself set up a campaign for people to criticism him openly and then shot all the participants? Seems like pretty damning evidence if that's true.

Read Althusser.

Only if you equate any use of force at all with authoritarian. In which case all societies (not just states) are authoritarian, but what this description fails to appreciate is that differences in the direction and scale of coercion lead to genuine differences in lived experiences and freedom. If you use force to kill all the porkies and bring proletarian democracy, you are using force to enhance the general freedom. If you use force to make the proles keep in line you are using it to reduce the general freedom. Clearly these are fundamentally different in how they shape the world and the individuals experiences. What matters is the result of your actions, does it create the greatest freedom for the greatest number? If so then I wouldn’t call it authoritarian, especially if your use of force is designed to prevent some from violating the freedoms of others (like when preventing porkies from exploiting proles).

For the Kulak it doesn’t, but if the NKVD then turns around and arrests proles for saying Stalin’s shit stinks then it makes a difference to them, the people that socialism is supposed to serve. Besides, the Kulak is in this case the aggressor upon the freedoms of the rest of the population, so sending them to the gulag is the reactive defense of basic freedoms of the peasants/workers, not an aggressive assault on the freedoms of the Kulak.

For people who throw the term “liberal” around so loosely they seem to have a pretty poor understanding of liberal theory. Read Mill ffs.

I agree on the importance of positive freedoms, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore negative freedoms. If you can go to school and have a house and go on vacation then great, but you are assuming that all has to come at the expense of being able to criticize the government, organize outside stage approved channels, campaign against the party line, etc. As far as I’m concerned sacrificing one for the other doesn’t make you free, it just makes you free and unfree in different ways. The point of socialism is to have both.

I dont buy this for a second. Not only do I not think that democracy would have led to the deaths of ML states, but democracy is at the core of what socialism is. Socialism is not socialism without working class self governance, and the working class can’t govern itself without democracy. Essentially what you are saying is that ML’s have to abandon socialism to protect socialism.

because people who stepped out of line had a repeat tendency to disappear

This.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

Are you talking about the Cultural Revolution?

You wouldn't be sent to the gulag for as much as uttering criticism. That's just factually untrue. There is enough evidence of people stepping out of line during peak Stalinism. I'm not saying there weren't any repressions of any sort but this is just an exaggaration and anti-communist propaganda.

I'm by no means an expert on Maoist China, but I think mostly right-wingers were targeted, not just people who disagreed with Mao.

I would argue that all revolutions historically have been a bit more excessive in their use of violence than the status quo that preceeded it.
This implies that all proletations are inherently communist. What makes you think that? Because someone is a proletarian he can't do wrong things? I do agree with you that the masses have to be the ones in power though. I fail to see how the collectivization movement under Stalin was not supported by the masses.
What you did is you took my argument about positive freedoms and totally exaggarated it. With this line of argument I could excuse a totally alienating autocratic technocracy.
The Kulak doesn't see it that way. He thinks he is naturally entitled to his property and that the state in infringing on his freedoms. Since freedom is such a subjective word, what makes this different than infringing on proletarians who think they are perfectly entitled to rebel but hurt the common cause in the long term? How would I not - following this logic - be totally entitled to violently crush the Revolutionary Catalonia and re-integrate it into the Spanish state in order to crush fascists?
You are invited to participate in party meeting and make state your case. That's democratic centralism, you can debate everything but you have to show unity in practice, especially in a siege situation.
Fine, but you need to provide evidence for that argument. Look at Cuba and the DPRK. Are those not under siege?
That would imply that your talking points are inherent to the definition of socialism, but they aren't.

Google Bookchin.

I used to be like you, then i don't know what happened that made me a bloodlusting maniac

Every fucking time.

this
FUCK HEALTHCARE IM OUT FOR PORKIE BLOOD

You're a faggot because you don't even elaborate on your doubts.

You mean the revolution that failed precisely because of Stalinist counterrevolution that the Anarchist leaders were too pussy to stop?

Revolutions are the most anti-authoritarian thing possible, since it is violently defending against authority.
Collectivization isn't forcing the kulaks to do anything, it is simply taking away their authority. In both cases it isn't authoritarian, it becomes authoritarian when the NKVD forces the peasants to adopt a certain organization that the party wants.
This isn't about the inevitable deaths that comes with revolution. This is about the means to bring about it.
Nice crypto-Blanquism. The people don't need bureaucrats and ideologues to force them how to live and how to defend their revolution.
You mean obedience to closed committees and autocrats.

And he's wrong. He has no right to oppress and exploit others, merely privilege. Rights cannot be zero-sum, only privilege can.

This is just a semantic argument that ignores the difference between Anarchist and ML versions of DotP in terms of hierarchy and structure. You sound like a leftcom here fam.

By imposing another authority upon the old order.
Dude…
Where the fuck do you think membership in some organizations in Marxist-Leninist states was mandatory?
Not everybody is a Clausewitz. When the revolution is threatened, justified hierachies are needed. Making everything about hierachy won't get you anywhere.

Sorry mate, you wrote a bit but I think your rebuttal is quite poor.

Leftcoms are Marxists, just like us. I don't see how this is an argument. We disagree on some other stuff, but that doesn't mean we eventually advocate the same things.

The argument is that you're harping on semantics of authoritarian rather than addressing the differences between Anarchist and ML DotPs, similar to leftcoms harp on the semantics of socialism when claiming the USSR is capitalist.

globalresearch.ca/operation-condor-never-ended-assassinations-and-coup-plots-continue-across-latin-america/5516491

worldnewsdailyreport.com/retired-cia-agent-we-run-the-afghan-opium-trade/

I no longer have any stomach anti-war destalinizing revisionists or anti-Soviet """leftists""" that whine about how bad USSR was while it was the sole reason they were ever relevant.

This. OP read Bookchin's critique of anarchism and its historical inability to address the question of power.
new-compass.net/articles/anarchism-power-and-government

Certainly during the period of the revolution itself, but I think that has more to do with political upheaval in general.

I didn’t say that, I’m saying that insufficient limits on state power will lead to abuse of that power. In particular there is the threat that it will be directed against genuine proletarian movements legitimately dissatisfied with a decaying socialist state. Take the USSR and revisionism for example. The Soviets built strong mechanisms of state coercion and control, but when revisionism took control of the state, they took control of those mechanisms, which made them impossible to remove from power.

No, I’m just saying that the aim of the socialist project should be to maximize both positive and negative freedoms, not sacrifice one for the other.

It’s not, I have no problem with using state power against workers or anybody else if their actions are undermining or infringing on people’s freedoms. What is needed is a utilitarian approach to freedom, since freedom for one often means unfreedom for others. We have to provide maximum freedom for the greatest number. My main objections to the Soviet Union aren’t that it used state power, it’s that the power was alienated from the population, and it was directed in a way that curtailed rather than enhanced people’s freedoms.

While I don’t disagree in principle, I would suggest a more localized federal system, which would allow a plurality of approaches to socialist politics and economics. It would also allow greater freedom imo, since communities could govern themselves without having others impose anything on them. This is especially important in large and diverse countries like the Soviet Union or US. As for the siege situation, over a dozen US military bases in Syria is proof that a confederacy is perfectly capable of mounting effective defense against external threats. What’s needed then is strict unity and cooperation in military matters, but that doesn’t require a highly centralized political or even economic system (aside from a centralized plan for wartime production).

They are, but I don’t see how allowing greater political freedoms would lead to their downfall.

But surely you would agree that socialism requires that the working class be the ultimate governing force? How can that be done without a democratic political system? If you suspend democracy, even temporarily, then you are suspending working class rule and therefore suspending socialism.

source? Honestly curious.

OP I think you also have to understand that the USSR was shaped by the conditions that surrounded it. I honestly feel like this "libertarian" trend in describing Marxism is largely just born of an easy way to get out of owning up to the USSR's failures in a meaningful way, since you can throw up your hands and say "oh well it was cuz of authoritarianism".

I feel like marxists should turn to the most effective praxis for the situation, and not fuss over things like "anti-authoritarianism"

The thing about authoritarianism though is that it often either leads to other problems or makes those problems much harder to address. After all, if there is no free exchange of ideas, no free criticism of the state, no mechanism for compelling the state to do what the people want it to, then any degeneration, any corruption, any systemic problems that the ruling elite refuse to address will simply fester and grow until they destroy the state. To some extent even MLs recognize this, even if they don’t admit it or express it in that way. They blame revisionism for the failure of the revolution, but they refuse to acknowledge the structural factors that allowed it to completely derail the revolution with impunity. The tools of state power which were supposed to defend the revolution, became tools for defending revisionism once they had control of them.

I agree, the whole idea of "unity of action" became too "unity of thought", and yeah, that general bureaucratic rot definitely spelled the end of the USSR.

(me)

I still think, though, that overly concerning oneself with praxis becoming "authoritarian" in a revolutionary context is a self-defeating notion. ML might not be THE way but dismissing it because it's "authoritarian" is dumb.

Even unity of action seems more like something that is only relevant in building the party and in a crisis situation like the revolution itself. The US certainly doesn’t have unity of action, it’s one of the most szchizophrenic, disjointed, and chaotic political systems on the planet, and yet it is the epicentre of global capitalism and imperialism. If workers in a socialist state go on strike for whatever reason, it should be met with a moderate approach that considers their right to dissent and the consideration of their grievances. Don’t just send in the KGB to fuck them up because they violated democratic centralism.

Idk about that, I think the Dems and the Reps govern roughly the same barring some changes in social policy and tax rates. They generally approach foreign policy in the same way, just with varying tenors.

Agreed on the second part though.

Yes but what you don’t see by looking at that is the total chaos behind the scenes. American policy is the product of a general equilibrium that emerges out of countless different forced exerting themselves on the government. Each individual NGO, advocacy group, corporation, disgruntled senior citizen who won’t stop calling their congressman, all of them compete with each other to influence the direction of the state. It’s far from a calm reasoned discussion about how to address an issue and a decision being agreed upon and carried out, it’s a tenuous balance of power and interests of which actual policy is a rough approximation.

If you impose a state. Simply removing the state is removing authority.
Kulaks aren't suddenly forced to become a slave for the collective, they are just striped of their privilege.
Collectivization was mandatory. I don't mean a group, I mean a way of doing things.
I never implied there won't be leaders, but if you need force to get people to accept obviously skilled leaders, then you're saying the proletariat masses are too stupid to function without a party that is somehow better than the masses they rule.
There can be no justified hierarchy because all hierarchy is based upon the spook of authority. Organization is not hierarchy, and officers don't need to be saluted and paid more than privates for a war to be won.

Dont…I think the state is necessary to prevent an authoritarian state. It doesnt mean you have to go one extreme to the opposite.

People keep posting this as if it's the absolute worst thing to come out of liberals, but she's right about most of what she says.

Accept that you were always "authoritarian". There's no way to transition to communism without going against the will of a great deal of people.

In one sentence you've managed to brilliantly satire and critique the entire history of Western imperialism, and all without even being aware of it! It almost deserves applause.

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Anarchists were pretty much irrelevant from the beginning. They certainly weren't in any position to stop "muh Stalinist counterrevolution".
I've never seen a single anarchist actually stop and think critically about the movement in Russia and why they failed. Instead we get this shitty revisionism and a metric ton of salt against the Bolsheviks for beating them.
If you can't even get people behind you, then you don't get any say when the people you disagree with overtake you and do things their way.