Regarding the anti-authoritarian socialists

…which is almost entirely what Leninism concerns itself with.

What are you even trying to say? Hardly any person under the Czar willed their conscription into WW1. And under Stalin, many people found meaningful work, content even when food was short and work was extended.

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No, this was explained in my post. You cannot advocate for the confiscation of property and armed repression over another class while seriously claiming to be an anti-authoritarian. Perhaps if you are a pacifist you can lay claim to that title but otherwise it's just nonsense. As I said, the term "authoritarian" in the libertarian sense is just a nasty way of saying Marxist. They don't denounce the Bolsheviks disbanding the constituent assembly because the move was actually any threat to the working class, not doing so would've surrendered the entire country to capitalism. They simply despise seeing a socialist state succeed.

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loving each laugh

How the fuck does that have anything to do with the NAP? I'm not at all saying we shouldn't seize private property, in fact exactly the opposite. It seem that you are the one here who seems to think we can just convince people that "property iz a spoogg :DDD" without any sort of coercion. The point the poster you replied to was trying to make is that anarchist are authoritarian too in their belief that property should be seized. You don't sound like an anarchist though, you sound like some sort of liberal reformist.

Is revolution still even possible? Wouldn't the government just pull a Tiananmen Square massacre if pushed far enough?

Well fucking memed. Fuck off faggot. We just want our "totalitarian democracy" to be, you know, actually fucking democratic, not some vanguard led by a self-appointed fuhrer people's commissar claiming to be democratic and then purging anyone who disagrees with them or hurts their feelings.

Figures

I don't give a shit about coercion retard, that freedom is just negative "don't le initiate force" is the NAP and right-"libertarianism"

And who the fuck said he should have the power to do that?

Right, so how does that have to do with what anyone in this thread is saying? The fact that you don't care about coercing the porks into giving up the means of production makes me question you even being a leftist.

So then what's wrong with a democratic vanguard? You do realize that most socialists state have had populaces incapable of democracy right?

you've done nothing ITT but strawman fam
the anarchist position on freedom has never been "absence of coercion", in fact tankies never shut up about how propaganda of the deed alienates the workers

A.k.a. "all the workers"

Who the fuck cares? Fuck em tbh

nice my dude, it's not like you haven't been misrepresenting my views as "lolbert" in the last few posts.
Ok, so then how exactly is anarchism not "authoritarian" if you plan on forcing your views onto others? I'm not saying anarchists are wrong for trying to do this, but to dismiss others as tankies under this condition is a double standard.

glad we agree

M8, I don't care what you believe, but peasants can't participate in democracy. They can't read or write, they won't be able to read newspapers or other media in order to inform their view, how are they supposed to look at some text on a ballot and know what the fuck to do? How the fuck are people who've never worked in a factory supposed to run one? These were issues in the USSR and other socialist projects and contributed to their failure.

this is what I mean when I call you a lolbert!
though you deny its legitimacy, you essentially view freedom as non-aggression and nothing more than that, you take already existing property rights as a kind of axiom

so you're defending something that I wasn't even criticizing. gg.

Geez, it's like they should have fucking transitioned through capitalism like everyone said.

Damn, and I'm the one who's creating the strawmans apparently.
Perhaps you misread the part where I said:
i.e. I support using violent means to seize private property, I support using violent means to abolish private property, I don't disagree with anarchist in using this method.

However, you're not in an argument with me because we disagree on this are you? No, you're in an argument with me, because a poster above rightfully pointed out that anarchism IS authoritarian. You took this to be an assault on your ideology, when it was not. You retaliate by calling those you disagree with lolberts and tankies, misconstruing their views without ever attacking their arguments.

Your fine comrade, I think we misunderstood each other. When I said incapable of democracy, I did not mean to imply the peasants were unable to become proletariat, simply that they had not yet.

You don't seem to understand what people mean when they say authoritarian. It does not refer to the violent revolution, it does not refer to the force needed for one class to take down another. It refers to the violence and force within the classes that divide them, that wishes to split the proletariat between those that are fit to rule and those that are not. Very few people here have problem with violence in the sense of wresting private property and establishing communism forcibly. What people refer to as authoritarian, is the unnessisary and misguided attempt by Marx-Leninist that structure society in a way that tears up a class of people that should otherwise be united, such as the belief that peasants must be guided and are not capable of democracy. The premise here is in itself incorrect, the problem being that if the people themselves are not ready to live in a classless society or capable of it, then no attempt should be made from the outside to steer them in that direction, as doing so is not only undialectical and silly (as if communism is an option in a game of Civ where one simply needs choose communism over capitalism instead of communism being the progression of society from capitalism), but it is also illogical: once you separate the unified interests of the proletariat into two, creating a new group whose interest is instead in the upholding of their state and following muh privileges, then there is no possible chance that the undemocratic state will work to help the proletariat any more. This is what people refer to when they say "totalitarian", you're entire diatribe is based upon a complete misunderstanding.
Very few people here are demsoc, people just believe that if revolution is to be done, it must be self-organized and without cries of the "party-line" and other forms of organization based not upon communism but upon the old capitalist mindset.

my god you're such a fucking moron
IT'S NOT WHETHER YOU AGREE WITH ANARCHISM'S CONCEPTION OF VIOLENCE OR NOT THAT I TAKE ISSUE WITH, IT'S YOUR POSITION ON FREEDOM WHEREIN YOU DEFINE IT IN LOLBERTARIAN TERMS AND CONCLUDE THAT ANARCHISM IS THEREFORE AUTHORITARIAN THAT BRINGS ME TO CALLING YOU A LOLBERT

My position on "freedom" has nothing to do with non-aggression as a principle. This is the strawman I've been trying to get you to drop. In order for something like Makhno's Free Territory to come in to being, a small group of individuals must convince the popular masses that their ideology is the correct one and that it should be followed. This is all I'm saying, and by popular definition most people across the ideological spectrum will call this "authoritarian". If this definition is what you take issue with, then maybe you should address that instead of misrepresenting other people's views.

Now if I am to address >>784815's definition of authoritarian, and I assume is the definition that anarchist are working from, I'd like to understand how a democratically run vanguard fits this definition of 'authoritarian'. In this sense, he says:
In a democratically run vanguard, this will be impossible since everyone would be forced to take part in the political process. Even if an individual is not part of the vanguard itself, workplaces must be democratized and thus nobody is exempt from the political process. This cannot have worked in previous socialist projects because it is like he says:
and like my friend from before says:

but can you tell my why this is authoritarian?

inb4 persuasion is aggression

If we are to follow when we say authoritarian than it is not. But then by extension I do not see how a democratic vanguard of proletariat is either. This is the point I would like self-proclaimed anarchists to address.

self-organisation and democracy are different because democracy comes with connotations of majority rule, which anarchists are against

It depends on which vanguard you refer to. ML vanguardism should be obvious, If it is the Leninist democratic vanguard which involves re-callable delegates instead of representatives and a free militia instead of a standing professional army, it is important to recognize first that Lenin did not come up with these ideas on his own, they were based upon the libertarian areas of the Paris Commune, which were in turn lead by the ideas of Bakunin and Proudhon, indeed it was Bakunin who argued against Marx on the issue of the standing army. In this area, the vanguard party is fine (ignoring the fact that Lenin never followed through on any of his points and multiple of his other writings proposed systems of organization that were very un-democratic), however, there are multiple issues with it, which become evident when you read State and the Revolution.
First of all, the Bolsheviks were supposed to bring these democratic changes by working within the old parliamentary system itself. The problems in this approach became apparent when the Bolsheviks did nothing but install a new bureaucracy and changed the law so that even although the Soviets largely voted out the Bolsheviks, they had already installed un-electable officials that then continued to reign power and eventually abolish all democracy in the Soviets. This happened in the lifetime of Lenin, not revisionism by Stalin.
Second of all, is the centralization. The problems in tying of the Soviets to a greater state of the USSR so that the local self-organization was sacrificed, and the proposals of centralized planning should be self-evident. Lenin himself did not believe in autonomy and said himself in the diatribe "bureaucracy versus democracy is in fact centralism versus autonomism, it is the organisational principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy as opposed to the organisational principle of opportunist Social-Democracy. The latter strives to proceed from the bottom upward and upholds autonomism and ‘democracy,’ carried by the overzealous to the point of anarchism. The former strives to proceed from the top downward."
To summarize, the vanguard falls short in that still is attached partially to the system and organization of the capitalist society, and as such can only fall back to bureaucracy and degeneration; it does not place emphasis upon autonomy, self-organization, and radical dissolution of old hierarchical organization. And of course, if I were a lesser person, I would also point out how these vanguard attempts have almost always degenerated into undemocratic regimes, while anarchist and libertarian organized movements, while often short lived due to the current limitations in the dialectical progression, never did, I am willing to accept the argument that the Bolsheviks deteriorated because of wartime pressure, although the other writings of Lenin and the way the Bolsheviks were going before the war even happened is a pretty telling story as to what would have happened anyways.

Good fucking lord, please go away. Literally every time there have been a Marxist group plus other groups fighting side by side in a revolution, the Marxists ALWAYS TURN AROUND AND KILL THEM. It's not that it just happens a lot, it's happened EVERY time.

I'm still salty about you killing so many anarchists in the streets of Barcelona after you fought next to them to save the city only weeks before.

how much resistance was there to the Stalinist takeover by the FAI?
we know the CNT was forced to go along, and an alliance between two parties is always in favour of the more reactionary, but I read that Quico Sabate and others fought the PCE authorities with the approval of the FAI, which if it is true is pretty awesome

Nothing to do with the communists purging all other leftists during the Spanish civil war then?

hey dont you kno that saying that makes you just as authoritarian as a marx-leninist? :^)

Nice manipulative language
That's factually incorrect
That's it, alienate the people more
And please stop confusing the term Marxism with statist/authoritarian communism.

I couldn't care less where it came from, a good idea is a good idea. If Lenin said pepperoni was the best pizza topping, I'd have 20 anarchists calling me a tankie if I said I too like pepperoni.
and how did that work out for him? Paris was decently capitalist at the time, it could've lasted longer.
And how is Lenin wrong here? If you have something like say, nuclear powerplant, how are those supposed to be autonomously organized? I for one, don't want people unsupervised just building plants wherever they want and mining whatever uranium from anywhere. In this case, some sort of structure needs to be in place to ensure everything runs correctly. In this case, I do not see how a bureaucracy is bad, especially if it is appointed by recallable leaders. If you don't like the bureaucrats, than elect a leader who will get rid of them.
You skipped over any sort of explanation for how this is capitalism. How does the bureaucracy automatically "take-over"? How does it not dissolute the "old hierarchical organization"? In fact, how the hell does it resemble it at all?

It actually started with Proudhon though, who inspired Marx.

I actually kind of think it's silly how superficial this observation is. Authoritarian socialism and even authoritarian communism didn't start with Karl Marx – Proudhon was writing about authoritarian communists before Karl Marx even wrote the communist manifesto. And anarchism didn't start with Bakunin. And for as anti-Semitic he may have been, anarchism' anti-authoritarianism was not a response to Karl Marx being a Jew. How do we even take that claim seriously?

Self organization can take many forms. You can organize into a hierarchical structure or a horizontal one. Unless you define how you'll be organized the term is basically meaningless.

thanks, im saving that quote
although in this metaphor it'd be the 20 anarchists who first said they liked pepperoni, before Lenin came along and changed the name "pepperoni" to "sausage" and then insisted that anarchists were wrong

You do know why the Paris commune fell right?
You have no idea what autonomous organization means. In this case, a nuclear plant would affect people in a wide area, and so agreement would have to come from many people to build and manage one. Furthermore, organization does not need to operate in the horizontal manner, the specialists run the place themselves with collective and democratic agreement on behalf of the greater community which incorporates the nucleaur plant.
And who will manage that leader? More leaders, of course!
It follows the old capitalist ideology of horizontal interest-based hierarchy, the idea that a greater "property-owner" must be distinguished from the lesser "property-user". Its organized with the idea that leaders are necessary, the "superstructure", as you Marxists call it, then comes back to reshape the base. Unless the structural relations of representative democracy are completely obliterated, the superstructure will stop the base from changing completely. The bereaucracy takes over because you have chosen to let a few state representatives, whose interests have been distorted from the rest of the working class, to change the representative bureaucratic system. It cannot dissolute it as such.

IF YOU DONT LIKE CAPITALISM ELECT A LEADER TO GET RID OF IT
HOLY SHIT

Haha nice, I like that one too.

The National Guard invaded if I remember correctly

How would such a project even begin though? This is where I think a central governing body would be useful. Once again, I think this body needs to be accountable to the proletariat.
Kek, my choice of wording was poor here.
I don't want a political elite to rule over people, I want people to BECOME political. Everyone a bureaucrat in a sense, nobody a bureaucrat in another.

Trying my best comrade.

How would very large communities come to a consensus on nuclear power? Direct democracy?

except before that the Jacobinist-inspired government took control and installed a greater committee (the Committee of Public Safety) when then grounded the autonomous growth of clubs, militias, and other local groups to a halt.
With the collapse of capitalism due to its contradictions (fall of profit and whatnot) and the degeneration of the state as is inevitable. Upon this the people will self-organize, overthrow, and rebuilt from spontaneous autonomous effort. Think how the Soviets and the Spanish anarchists organized their efforts.
Sure, except thinking still along the lines of a leader, a few gois to carry out the leaders plan, and the leader is just a universally elected dude is unnecessary. There are other ways of organizing. In this case Leninism and the Left-Coms come very close, its mainly the issue of central planning that I have problems with.

Pretty much. That being said, I'd doubt if people in that scenario would even need nuclear energy anymore, wind, solar, or some other resource will probably be well developed and available enough at that point.

See but here's what I mean, you seem to think that I want some figurehead like Stalin or Lenin or someone to be permanent glorious leader. I want what you want, but I think that a central body is necessary to provide things that need to be accessible to the entire nation. Things for example like a standing army. I don't think this is unreasonable to ask of anarchists, as I don't see why such a central body can't be organized from the ground up.
My roommate is a renewable energies engineer, I've talked with him about this. It's possible for people's homes, business (or cooperatives in this case), and other public spaces to be completely powered by renewables. However, nuclear is still relevant for both areas where renewables are hard/impossible to get (or transporting nearby renewables is unfeasible) and heavily so in manufacturing industries, and scientific applications where large amounts of energy are required. There's also much reason to continue nuclear research if for nothing else but to learn how to best make use of toxic waste.

When you remove a group from the rest and form a central body, its inevitable that they become beaucratic and corrupt because their interests are no longer aligned, especially a standing army. A group of people don't have guns, a group does: what do you think happens?

They aren't removed though, they're held accountable by the workers who elected them. Also, everyone has guns in this scenario and I doubt the military could be swayed into murdering the populace.

If they are chosen to take over the management of resources, they are then held unaccountable essentially. Again, you mentioned a standing army so one group would indeed have guns and the other wouldn't, or at least one would have firepower that far outmatches the non-army.

I don't know why you're hating on leftcoms OP, you sound like a typical bordigist pushing "organic centralism".

Aren't bordigists considered as leftcoms?

If this is your view than it's impossible for any sort of revolution to occur, because we're currently outnumbered by the military. It's my view that the military will not be able to be turned against the proles, because the military will be made up of proles. As for elected officials being unaccountable, if this is true than anarcho-syndicalism is impossible too because it relies on electing representatives, though they a recallable. If this is the case then I have no idea what it is you're arguing for. I do not want a situation like Occupy where we have a bunch of different people trying to send a message, but that message becoming incoherent due to members of that movement themselves not knowing what it's about.

Leftcom defines a number of ideologies now. I think most Bordigists reject the label though.

Actually, the bordigists I've had the occasion to read reject the label… "bordigists". They call themselves "the italian left communists".

Sounds about right, the ones I've met were insufferable. Not to say they all are, I like some of their ideas, but I get the impression that it's somewhat of a snowflake ideology.

Glorious posts, comrade. Absolutely nailed it.

What does that mean?

Like, they identify as such for the purpose of identifying as such, with very little rational outside of that.

Sorry I get it even less.

forget it, I bear no ill-will towards italian leftcoms

A revolution being authoritarian in the context of a working class imposing its goals onto a capitalist class, is an entirey different thing to the authoritarian nature of a Stalinist bureaucracy imposing its goals on a working class.

"Anti authoritarians" are generally in favour of the former and against the latter. Lumping them as one and the same and pretending that Marx would have done the same is entirely disingenuous.

My personal anti sectarianism is aimed at anybody but stalinists, which is convenient, since the stalinists hate everybody.

Those are called representatives, and it's very difficult to recall representatives due to their specialized knowledge; the only alternative is to replace them with other representatives. So it seems that representatives will be necessary in anarchism, just perhaps not in the political sense.

someone who identifies themselves as some hopelessly obscure nitpicking ideology that's more about virtue signaling like anarcho(social cause)ism

I can't speak for other leftcoms, but my interest in that particular group of tendencies arose out of disappointment with the larger marxist tendencies. I would much rather be part of large well known organisation, but I disagree with their politics to such a degree I don't really see any other options.

It's hard to virtue signal when nobody know you exist.

Wat

I see nothing wrong with property except for property hoarded for profit. I see no reason you have to use violence because it is the very thing that gave communism and socialism a bad name to begin with so it is counter intuitive and invites other countries to start a war with you if you do win which we see time and time again in history.

That's literally all that (private) property refers to.

But the property your house and yard is on is private property too, is it not?

Land should not be property

Then someone could literally build a wall around your house just to be a dick or they could cut down your favourite tree because they didnt like it or just build a landfill right near your house.

seriously, read a book about what property is before you post in a thread about ML….

When you tell someone to read something for a reply that would take a sentence it give an argument against gives me the impression you don't have an argument for that. I know what property is and I don't see how I am wrong.

The problem with that is that this board isn't for arguing. This isn't the place where we spoonfeed you the tenants of communism. This is where we discuss the tenants of communism. Go learn them, and maybe then we'll talk

If you don't form a critique its just a circle jerk. Usually land ownership is considered private property and if its public property it doesnt give you the same rights of control of the land you live on as when it is private..It's not like I never looked into this before so you can't accuse me of not trying. Maybe I'm missing something like public property works entirely different in communism or something.

Can I has some practical explanation of this?

Because, apparently everyone knows about it, but nobody can enunciate specifics.

No.

I.e. there are several interpretations of this, but "private property" in orthodox Marxist discourse specifically refers to private property on the MoP (means of production). And MoP is multiple-worker, economies of scale, kind of thing. Not a toolbox or computer.

There is "private property" and "personal property" distinction for this. What person can own is his personal property (this house of yours, for example). But what requires other people (factory, huge land tract, bank and so on) - that would be private property.

Hello Holla Forums

Okay thank you. That is why I was so confused because usually personally property refers to objects that can be moved. Then I do not really object to that. I just wish it didnt have it's own meaning and instead use it's own words to avoid this sort of confusion.

Trying to steer it back more to topic from where I veered off some.. although I don't think violence has to be used to take the mean of production I do think it is okay to use some force to protect natural resources from being hoarded or used up too much but I wouldnt condone it to be violent even then.

I'm not sure why so many think violence vs democracy are the only options. There is the possibility at of voting someone in who has a secret communist agenda that either hides communist laws in small print among something that everyone would be sure to vote on, or just straight up change things illegally through abuse of power. This all can be done without violence.

Comparatively speaking this is a minor thing. Most words get twisted by the media. Either unintentionally (ignorance is rampant, after all) or intentionally (especially when we are talking "stalinism" or "middle class").

Means. And you way of thinking is naive. It's not like use of violence could be prevented without violence.

You can't just assume someone will for sure use violence first especially when it would be illegal for them to do so anyway. You can use force but you dont have to kill someone over a iron mine or something. You just have preventative measures and stop them if they do something and charge them for a crime if they did so. For all course of action violence should be the last option and even though it should not always be an option because you have to ask whether or not it is justified.

The ultimate goal of socialism in its Marxist state is, its eventual dissolution as a state into Communism once the zóon politikon become in such a way they are ready and are able.

In its essence, Marxism is anti-authoritarian to some degree, and any interpretation can take its thesis even further against structure.

Any kind of permanent state socialism for the purpose of Marxism is not Marxism.

Choose one