Authoritarianism is when the government does stuff.
Authoritarianism is also when companies are not allowed to do stuff.
Either way, anyone who ever played one of the early generations of Sim City games can see clearly how much the approach wins.
Gonna repost myself but authoritarianism is difficult for libs to define because any serious understanding of the concept reveals it to be a tool for propaganda rather than understanding politics
All states are “authoritarian” in that they are all tools by which the ruling class dominates the others. The working classes controlling a state still wield its authority to dominate capitalists, fascists, landlords, etc, but this use of authority liberates the majority. The authority question is therefore not a question of amount, but in whose hands, the working classes or capitalists.
China is authoritarian
So are Google, Facebook and Microsoft. But these entities can’t be held accountable because they are “private companies”
My previous comment was deleted because I was mean to Cowbee. But the man point is still valid, which is why I’ll comment again:
Here are some definitions from A Modern Anarchism, by Daniel Baryon (aka “Anark”).
Authoritarianism: The degree to which a power structure monopolizes control over the total social implementation of some power.
Domination: The degree to which some power structure utilizes coercion, violence, and/or deception to achieve its ends.And his definition of power:
When I say power I mean, quite simply, “the ability to successfully enact one’s will.”
Please explain logically, how the term “western propaganda” would apply.
Addendum:
Someone claimed that this is a good thing if the proletariat is doing it. This is not a materialist stance however, because it presumes that the function of a system can be fundamentally changed by having people with the correct ideas doing the domination.
Also, monopolization means that structural power is concentrated to benefit a minority. The proletariat is not a minority, however (which is basically the whole idea why most people should be socialists). That is why MLism creates a ruling class of bureaucrats that calls itself “proletariat”, although their material function doesn’t classify them as such.
Then, someone claimed that the terms are supposedly loaded. These semantic discussions are pure formal critique, though. When clear definitions are given, it’s not a logical argument to claim a term sounds “too scary”.
I will refrain to be mean to people I blocked. Sorry for that.
Authoritarianism: The degree to which a power structure monopolizes control over the total social implementation of some power.
Domination: The degree to which some power structure utilizes coercion, violence, and/or deception to achieve its ends.What existing collective doesn’t fit this definition? Because by this definition, the anarchist controlled areas of republican spain then, were deeply authoritarian.
In what way did republican spain monopolize power? Monopoly means that only a small amount of agents get access to it.
Monopoly means that only a small amount of agents get access to it.
That was precisely the case. Durruti’s column especially found that any “decentralized” command structure breaks down quickly into interminable squabbles, and like any revolutionary army, had to institute a strict hierarchy and centralized control. Most but not all anarchist groups accepted this centralized control as a necessity.
I suggest reading the tyranny of structurelessness on why “anti-authoritarian” groupings always end up either destroying themselves, or in cults of personality due to their individualist rejection of rules, organization, and structures of authority.
Monopolize does not mean that the group is small, but that the access is exclusive. The group that monopolizes can be large, and extremely exclusionary towards other groups. Anarchists in Spain monopolized authority, ran labor camps, and built up hierarchical structures over time to suit the realities of the Spanish Civil War.
This is a very weird way of responding to me, either unblock me and respond, or don’t respond at all, IMO. Others can clearly see where I responded to you, and you’re directly addressing me in the beginning of your comment. Either way, I’ll address your new points.
As for it being a good thing if the proletariat is in control, your assertion that this isn’t materialist because it means we are depending on people with the “right ideas” is fundamentally wrong. This is like saying violence against Nazis and violence from Nazis are equivalent. Going off of Anark’s definition, the proletariat monopolizing power in their hands is unambiguously a good thing and a necessary step forward.
As for the idea that administration is a class in and of itself, this is not a materialist stance. Classes are not simply job categories, managers are proletarian too. Government officials earning wages are not a class, but instead proletarians. Their class goal remains the same as the rest of the proletariat, collectivize all production and distribution. Claiming that they are a class is not based on what actually determines class, but instead a conflation of hierarchy with class, which is an entirely different subject altogether.
As for the semantic terms being loaded, I don’t really think it matters as far as we are trying to get definitions across. However, subjectivist tactics of labeling concepts you disagree with with scary sounding words does impact how people react to said terms. Pointing out the subjectivist labeling isn’t really an argument against the terms, but instead against the intentions of the author. Considering Anark is a frequent abuser of Marxist theory (see my response to Anark here for an example), it makes sense for us to be skeptical of Anark’s claims and intentions.
I am not going to pretend to be an expert on Anark’s whole body of work. I have only watched a handful of his videos, on recommendation from an anarchist I know. But what I did see was enough to recognize: petty-bourgeois anarchism dressed up in the language and strappings of rigorous theory. The starting point it appears is never class struggle, production, imperialism, state power, colonial pressure, or the actual historical tasks of socialist construction. It is abstract “power,” abstract “authority,” abstract “domination,” and then a moral judgment against every real revolutionary state for failing to match an idealized fantasy of immediate anti-authoritarian purity.
In theoretical terms: phrase-mongering and infantile ultra-leftism. From what I have seen, his understanding of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and existing socialist states is paper-thin. Socialist construction under siege, blockade, sabotage, civil war, peasant backwardness, imperialist encirclement, and restorationist pressure gets flattened into a morality tale about “authoritarianism.”
His definition of power is fine, if overly individualist: “the ability to successfully enact one’s will.” This makes sense given individualism being a pillar of anarchism. But the definition of “authoritarianism” is yet another vacuous redefinition to add to the pile. It strips analysis of class content, state form, property relations, and historical function. “The degree to which a power structure monopolizes control over the total social implementation of some power” sounds precise, but it tells us almost nothing. Which class controls it? Through what institutions? On the basis of what property relations? Against whom is coercion being used? In what historical situation? A workers’ state, a fascist state, a colonial state, a bourgeois liberal state, and a revolutionary army can all be made to fit vague language about monopoly, coercion, and implementation. Returning it once again to a label for designated bad countries™.
Your claim that defending proletarian power is “not materialist” because it supposedly relies on people with the correct ideas doing domination is a misunderstanding of the argument. Marxist-Leninists do not defend proletarian state power because the people wielding it have nicer opinions. We defend it because class power is materially rooted. A bourgeois state defends private property, capital accumulation, wage labour, imperialist extraction, and the dictatorship of capital not because they have bad ideas but that it is directly within their class interest to do so. A proletarian state, however imperfectly and under real contradiction, is a transitional instrument for suppressing the old exploiting classes, socializing production, defending the revolution, and reorganizing society toward communism not because they have better ideas but again because it is directly in their class interest to do so.
You also misunderstand class when you claim that administrators in socialist states simply become a ruling class of bureaucrats because they administer. Administrators, planners, party officials, and state functionaries can absolutely develop bureaucratic distortions, careerism, privilege, and contradictions. Marxist-Leninists do not need anarchists to discover bureaucracy for us. But a bureaucrat without private ownership of the means of production, without the legal right to buy, sell, bequeath, and accumulate productive property as capital, does not occupy a different class but a different stratum of the same class.
And it is obviously valid to point out that words were specifically chosen for their negative connotations. An unrelated example to show the point: there’s a reason western media uses regime for talking about “designated bad countries™” governments despite it effectively being a synonym of government, it’s the connotation. Criticising this is again obviously valid.
I am not going to pretend to be an expert on Anark’s whole body of work.
I can tell. I will ignore your wrong, and partially ad-hominem attacks on Anark (like him supposedly not understanding Marx). They are baseless and tangential to the discussion.
This makes sense given individualism being a pillar of anarchism.
It seems as if you claim that individualism is the main pillar of anarchism, which ignores the anarchist collectivist tradition. Anarchism focuses both on the individual and the collective.
But the definition of “authoritarianism” is yet another vacuous redefinition to add to the pile. […]
It is an abstract term with an abstract definition. All the things you mention can be subsumed under that abstract definition.
It seems you have a problem with abstraction in general. It seems that’s due to motivated reasoning, rather than the wish to do scientifically/logically rigorous thinking.
Returning it once again to a label for designated bad countries™.
That’s motivated reasoning. The critique is against all states, not against “designated bad countries™”.
[…] because it is directly in their class interest to do so.
You complain about abstract definitions before and now you hide against the huge abstraction of “clars interest”.
You claim that the party (the controling body of the so-called “socialist” states) has “proletarian class interests”. But that implies that the members of the party are actually part of the proletarian class. This supposed class membership is purely idealist. A materialist analysis suggests however, that they are not proletarian, but a class of bureaucrats.
You also misunderstand class when you claim that administrators in socialist states simply become a ruling class of bureaucrats because they administer.
That’s not all they do. Anark’s critique doesn’t attack administration. But they administer via authoritarian and domination strategies.
I will ignore your critique of the form, since it’s not directed at the argument made.
Edit: I still didn’t see any argument made about how this definition fits the term “western propaganda”, except for “word sounds scary”, which doesn’t critique the content of the definition. The same points would be valid if you called it “power-monopolized”.
But that implies that the members of the party are actually part of the proletarian class. This supposed class membership is purely idealist.
You are incorrectly defining class. This essence of class is: who controls the means of production, and who decides what to do with the surplus value created, and who it goes to benefit.
State administrators (uncharitably bureaucrats as you would call them) are not a class. They do not privately owns means of production, nor collect the surplus value of workers, deciding privately what to do with it. What to do with the surplus, and production decisions, are determined by decision making at the collective, political-level, not at the private level. This means they are not driven by profit motives, since increasing exploitation personally gains them nothing.
What to do with the surplus, and production decisions, are determined by decision making at the collective, political-level, not at the private level.
The party is the owner of the means of production. That’s why anachists call AES “state-capitalism”.
Wrong again. The working class is the owner of production, and elect and delegate managers dedicated to this task.
Name me a single grouping of any kind that doesn’t have managers, leaders, or organizers.
The working class is the owner of production, and elect and delegate managers dedicated to this task.
So, can anyone be delegated to be a manager, can that mandate be recalled by the workers again, or do you need to be in the party to be eligible?
Name me a single grouping of any kind that doesn’t have managers, leaders, or organizers.
Straw-man. I’m not arguing against administration (nor is any collectivist anarchist).
The party is not the de jure nor de facto owner of the means of production, the entire working class is. This is why production in socialist economies is not run for the accumulation of capital in the hands of party members, such would make accusations of “state capitalism” hold water. Production is socialized, and the social surplus is also socialized.
Saying Anark displays a poor understanding of Marxism is not an ad hominem. It is an observation about the content of his analysis. An ad hominem would be “he is wrong because he is personally bad or stupid.” I am saying his categories are weak because they fail to grasp class content, state form, property relations, and historical development. That is directly relevant to the argument.
I also never said individualism is the only or the main pillar of anarchism. I said it is a pillar, which it plainly is, and this has been a Marxist criticism of anarchism since Marx and Lenin. The fact that there is a collectivist anarchist tradition does not erase the petty-bourgeois individualist core of much anarchist theory: the tendency to begin from abstract individual autonomy, abstract anti-authority, and abstract moral opposition to coercion rather than from class struggle and historically specific relations of production.
Your defense of the “authoritarianism” definition as merely “abstract” misses the point. The problem is not abstraction as such. Marxism uses abstraction constantly. The problem is bad abstraction: abstraction that removes the decisive features of the thing being analyzed. A useful abstraction helps reveal the essence of a process. This one obscures it. It tells us there is concentrated power, coercion, and administration. That describes every state and every serious revolutionary process in class society. What it does not tell us is which class holds power, what property relations are being defended or abolished, what state form exists, what social base sustains it, what historical pressures condition it, and whether the coercion is being used to preserve exploitation or suppress exploiters.
My objection is not that the definition is “too abstract.” It is that it is vacuous. It explains nothing of substance while pretending to explain everything. It takes the unavoidable existence of state power under class antagonism and gives it a scary liberal gloss. Then, in practice, it becomes a ready-made tool for flattening the difference between a bourgeois imperialist state and a socialist state under siege. You can say the critique is “against all states,” but that is infantile. Critiquing all states in the same moral register, without class content, only benefits the existing hegemonic order. The bourgeois state already exists globally as the dominant power. Treating proletarian state power as equally evil for exercising coercion does not transcend the bourgeois state; it disarms opposition to it.
You also accuse me of hiding behind the abstraction of “class interest,” but class interest is not an empty abstraction. It is rooted in material relations to production, ownership, surplus extraction, and the reproduction of social relations. The bourgeoisie has an interest in maintaining private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus value. The proletariat has an interest in abolishing those relations because it does not own the means of production and survives by selling labour-power. That is not idealism. That is basic historical materialism.
Your claim that party members or state administrators in socialist states are automatically not proletarian because they administer is nonsense. Class is not determined by whether someone performs administrative labour or exercises authority. Class position is determined principally by relation to the means of production, particularly ownership thereof. A school principal is not less proletarian than a teacher merely because they administer. A doctor, safety inspector, engineer, planner, or workplace coordinator may exercise authority in a technical or administrative capacity without thereby becoming a capitalist. The key question is whether they privately own productive property and appropriate surplus value as capital.
The same applies to government administrators in socialist states. Their existence creates contradictions, and bureaucracy can become a serious danger. Marxist-Leninists have written extensively on this. But a state functionary operating inside a socialized property system, without private ownership of the means of production, without the legal right to buy, sell, bequeath, and accumulate productive property as capital, is not automatically a bourgeois class simply because they administer. You are confusing function with class position.
Saying “they administer via authoritarian and domination strategies” does not solve this. It just repeats the same empty categories. Every state administers through coercive mechanisms because every state is an instrument of class rule. The question is not whether coercion exists. The question is coercion by which class, against which class, defending which property relations, and moving society in which direction. Without that, “authoritarianism” and “domination” become little more than moral labels for power you dislike.
I do not think “authoritarian” is inherently a Western propaganda term. The problem is that it is a vacuous political label: it covers a wide range of state forms and social relations while explaining very little about their actual class content. In that sense, it functions much like “regime.” It can describe almost anything with centralized power, but it tells us nothing decisive about which class rules, what property relations are being defended, whose interests the state serves, or what historical conditions produced it. Precisely because of that vagueness which abstracts away the core of the matter, it becomes useful to Western propaganda under the current conditions of Western hegemony: it allows imperialist states and their ideological apparatuses to flatten socialist, anti-imperialist, or otherwise non-aligned states into a moral category of “bad governments,” they can then point to and shout look at these authoritarians who are just as authoritarian (read bad) as the Nazis.
Edit: Damn I appear to have joined cowbee on the prestigious “anarchist” block list. (An important note that “anarchists” and anarchists are distinct groups).
Your claim that party members or state administrators in socialist states are automatically not proletarian because they administer is nonsense. Class is not determined by whether someone performs administrative labour or exercises authority. Class position is determined principally by relation to the means of production, particularly ownership thereof.
I’m going to take this as a jumping off point to explicate the nature of the administrative arm of the state further for any lurkers out there.
What exactly do state administrators do? Administration is the enforcement arm of the state - they exist to see the law carried out. People think of cops when they hear the term “law enforcement,” but ‘the law’ is greater than just the criminal code; it also contains regulations on worker wages and hours, food safety, and energy usage, to name a few things.
In the west, discussion of this tends to begin and end with “bureaucracy bad.” The libertarian framing of needful regulation as “restricting freedom” has infected a lot of the western working class with bourgeouis ideals and convinced them to act against their own class interests. It should be obvious that clean air, clean water, functioning infrastructure, and higher wages are in the working class’s interest. Capital, however, will always seek to maximize profit, and regulations will invariably cut into those profits. Whether that’s indirectly in the provision of vital services paid with taxes, or directly in extra costs to capital in the form of higher wages or complying with environmental regulations. And in the sense that more regulations require higher cost of compliance, these can be seen as suppressing the petite bourgeoisie by making entering an industry require higher investment which pushes out would-be ‘small business owners.’ The working class can be tricked into supporting deregulation by their desire to escape wage labor by joining the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie.
As capital controls the government in capitalist “democracies,” it has a number of tools at its disposal to undermine its own administrative arm. These include underfunding their enforcement or setting the penalties as mere fees that companies consider the cost of doing business, but also more structural methods, such as privatizing as much of it as possible so that even these necessary functions can be subordinated to producing profit - infrastructure (both physical and digital) in the US is built not by the government itself but by contractors. Likewise, healthcare, transportation, energy production, and even weapons manufacturing are handled by private companies instead of by the government. These things become expensive because they must produce profit.
In a socialist state, these functions are performed directly by the government itself which serves both to keep costs down and protect the interests of the working class. This is necessary because even after a proletarian revolution, the capitalist class continues to exist. As long as it does, it will continue to try to maximize its profits, and it does so by cutting corners in manufacturing, abusing workers, and will always attempt to regain the power it has lost. As such, the socialist states must maintain a strong administrative arm to keep the capitalist class constrained.
Let’s examine how violators are handled between the two systems to make it clear how these differ in their functioning. There are many examples of US corporations cutting corners - consider the Ford Pinto, that was knowingly designed in such a way that increased fatalities from rear-end collisions. Ford was eventually fined in a lawsuit, but no one went to prison or suffered any greater penalty. This is typical of US enforcement actions, and leads US corporations to cut corners and budget for legal penalties. If the corners cut save more money than projected legal cases will cost, the corporations will put out products knowing they will prove fatal for some number of people who use them.
By way of comparison, let’s look at a Chinese case. Most of us over a certain age probably remember the melamine scandal back in 2008, when a Chinese corporation named Sanlu Group adulterated powdered milk with melamine in order to artificially boost the protein content, and 6 infants died as a result. Several public officials were stripped of office, the corporation went bankrupt, several executives went to prison, and 2 people were executed.
The differences between the two couldn’t be more stark. In a capitalist country, regulation exists at best as a “gentleman’s agreement” between capitalists, while as in a socialist country, it is the strong arm of the state, able to constrain capital and punish it for failure to comply.
Saying Anark displays a poor understanding of Marxism is not an ad hominem.
You attacked the person instead of the argument by stating wrong things about him (aka slander). That’s close enough. What Adam Smith understood about Marxism shouldn’t matter in the discussion about what he observed about the economy.
I said it is a pillar, which it plainly is, and this has been a Marxist criticism of anarchism since Marx and Lenin.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you didn’t know any better. But bragging about your analysis lacking one essential perspective is less of a brag than you think.
Also, what Marx said and what Lenin are two distinct things. You shouldn’t throw them together.
You also make wrong statements about anarchism. It is not petit-bourgeois and not moralist. The rejection of being dominated is rooted in biology.
The problem is bad abstraction.
The applied reasoning is inductive, not deductive. The quoted work analyses from first principles and therefore needs abstract definitions to have as a base.
If a math textbook starts with an axiom, would you complain after the introduction that the axiom doesn’t include some corellary you expect twenty pages in?
So your complaint about not including class relationships and other things that happen further down the logical chain lays bare that you’re practicing motivated reasoning: if you can’t anticipate that the reasoning coincides with your pre-meditated beliefs, you discard it with unrelated accusations.
You’re like an intelligent design christian, reading a book about evolution and exclaiming “But where is god in all this?” When the book explains the basics of mitosis.
The proletariat has an interest in abolishing those relations because it does not own the means of production and survives by selling labour-power.
And how does that definition fit the so-called “parties of the proletariat” in the PRC?
Class position is determined principally by relation to the means of production, particularly ownership thereof.
So, do the workers of state-owned MOP keep all the value they create, or is the surplus value taken by it’s owner (the party)?
You attacked the person instead of the argument by stating wrong things about him, aka slander.
No, I did not. I gave my assessment of Anark’s theoretical positions and then addressed the argument directly. Saying someone is a phrase-monger with a poor understanding of Marxism is not slander when it’s true. If someone’s categories erase class content, state form, property relations, imperialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, then their understanding of Marxism is directly relevant to the discussion. Calling that “slander” is just a way to avoid answering the critique.
Also, what Marx said and what Lenin said are two distinct things. You shouldn’t throw them together.
Marx and Lenin are obviously different people writing in different periods. But their analysis is not sealed off into unrelated compartments. Lenin develops Marxism under the conditions of imperialism and proletarian revolution; he does not abandon Marx. On anarchism, their criticisms are fundamentally linked and lead to the same core conclusion: anarchism expresses a petty-bourgeois individualist hostility to the political struggle, proletarian state power, and the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat.
As Lenin put it:
“Anarchism is bourgeois individualism in reverse. Individualism as the basis of the entire anarchist world outlook.”
Or:
“The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism.”
The rejection of being dominated is rooted in biology.
This is pseudoscientific hand-waving at best. Humans and animals have formed hierarchies since the dawn of cooperation. Parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, experienced worker and apprentice, commander and militia member: hierarchy and authority emerge for concrete reasons, and they sure as shit are not simply “rejected by biology.” The serious question is not whether authority exists. It is what kind of authority, rooted in what social relation, serving what purpose, and accountable to whom. A parent stopping a child from running into traffic is not the same thing as a landlord extracting rent, and neither is the same thing as a workers’ state suppressing counter-revolution.
So, do the workers of state-owned means of production keep all the value they create, or is the surplus value taken by its owner, the party?
I am genuinely speechless that you spent so much time braying about anarchism not being petty-bourgeois or individualist, only to end with an almost parody-level petty-bourgeois individualist misunderstanding of socialism.
Socialism does not mean every individual worker directly owns “their” means of production and receives “their” full individual value like a little proprietor. That is petty bourgeois nonsense. Socialism means the proletariat as a class owns the means of production through socialized forms and redirects surplus toward the needs of the proletariat as a whole, instead of having that surplus privately appropriated by capitalists.
Your formulation exposes exactly the individualist petty-bourgeois premise you just spent paragraphs denying. You treat socialism as if it should mean each worker or each workplace immediately pockets its own product. That is a fantasy of decentralized proprietorship, not proletarian social ownership. The proletariat does not abolish capitalism by turning every worker into a tiny owner guarding their own little share. It abolishes capitalism by taking hold of production as a class and subordinating surplus to collective development.
Again it is remarkable how perfectly your ending demonstrates the critique. You deny that anarchism is petty-bourgeois individualism, then immediately judge socialist ownership from the standpoint of the isolated producer asking, “Where is my individual product?” That is the petty-bourgeois horizon in its purest form: hostile to the capitalist, but incapable of grasping the proletariat acting as a class through socialized property, central planning, and state power.
No, I did not.
Why bring him up, then? Does your assessment of anark have anything to do with the definition? Would you have deduced that this definition must come from a person, which insert your false assumptions about Anark here?
Saying someone is a phrase-monger with a poor understanding of Marxism is not slander when it’s true.
Ok. It’s not true, though.
If someone’s categories erase class content, state form, property relations, imperialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, then their understanding of Marxism is directly relevant to the discussion.
Anark’s work erases none of those things.
Calling that “slander” is just a way to avoid answering the critique.
Correctly classyfying it as slander is a protection against Brandolini’s law.
Leninism is not a correct logical development of marxism. His theory of the bourgeois state as an agent of the bourgeoisie is blatantly incorrect.
Your Lenin quotes, where he dismisses anarchist collectivism is another example of how he had some serious bullshit takes.
Name one animal where a hierarchy exists that starves other members of their species from the things they require to live. Name one animal where the hierarchies persist in a form after the individual at the top dies. Name one animal where the upper rungs of the hierarchies can punish the lower ones.
Is your doctor your boss? Can they take away your liver as punishment? Do parents regularly enact their position to starve their children? Is it a healthy parent-child relationship when the parent continuosly takes away the child’s decision making power?
You don’t understand the anarchist definition of hierarchy. That’s a prerequisite to be able to understand any anarchist position. You’re like an intelligent designer arguing against mitosis.
neither is the same thing as a workers’ state suppressing counter-revolution.
Explain how workers defending against counter-revolution is authoritarian, according to the above definition.
You continuously conflate the party with the workers. That’s the same BS as conflating the Ukranian people with the Selensky regime (or “government”, if you prefer the less loaded term).
Your formulation exposes exactly the individualist petty-bourgeois premise you just spent paragraphs denying. You treat socialism as if it should mean each worker or each workplace immediately pockets its own product.
No, in socialism, every worker should have a say in how the surplus value (or the MOP, or whatever) is employed, in addition with the consumers, ideally in decentralized soviets.
Name one animal where a hierarchy exists that starves other members of their species from the things they require to live. Name one animal where the hierarchies persist in a form after the individual at the top dies. Name one animal where the upper rungs of the hierarchies can punish the lower ones.
I don’t want to return to monke.
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Sorry, in future I’ll try to couch my insults in tedious redditisms like you did, presumably that will placate the mods. Apparently writing condescending purple prose dog shit like “I will ignore your wrong, and partially ad-hominem attacks on Anark (like him supposedly not understanding Marx). They are baseless and tangential to the discussion” is fine but just being direct and calling you a dipshit is crossing the line of not being insufferable enough.
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Based on this, Anark makes it seem like authoritarianism is both good and necessary as long as it’s the working classes holding the authority. Same with whatever degree of domination is minimally required to prevent capitalists and fascists from overturning this. I don’t really think it’s “propaganda” so much as the words “authoritarianism” and “domination” are deliberately picked to sound scary.
Edit, responding to your edit: What’s with that response? Why brag about blocking me? That’s very silly behavior. I don’t think I’ve misunderstood anything, and it’s certainly not deliberate. The proletariat monopolizing control is a good thing.
That would be like comparing Marx’s definition of “dictatorship” to the modern definition of the same word, complete with all of its societal connotations.
Sort of. Marx had the same concept of authority and dictatorship, in that they belong to classes, and therefore should belong to the working classes. The anarchist critique of authority presented by Anark doesn’t make it seem bad at all.
The issue with using language such as “dictatorship” and “authoritarian” is those words have specific negative colloquial connotations.
For example, one of the dictionary (Merriam-Webster) definitions of “authoritarian” is:
of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people
This definition specifies a singular “leader or an elite” and would be incompatible with a definition that includes rule by the proletariat.
Similarly, here is one of Merriam-Webster’s definitions for “dictatorship”:
a form of government in which absolute power is concentrated in a dictator or a small clique
My point being not that these definitions are absolute and cannot be changed, but currently in western societies, that the definitions describe rule by a singular elite leader or small group of leaders who have absolute, or near absolute power over their populace.
I understand, it’s all a part of what we have to deal with in the battle of linguistics to make our ideas clear.
It’s nothing new for a society to change their language over time to make it more palettable to a larger group of people. For example, it is no longer considered acceptable to use the r-slur or the f-slur (not “fuck”, but the other one), whereas 10-20 years ago, it was considered normal to use those words.
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Looking up descriptions online will have people saying all sorts of shit because the actual meaning of authoritarianism is just every state.
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party, the military, or the concentration of power in a single person.
-Wikipedia
A funny thing about Wikipedias short description here means a state without democratic institutions isn’t necessarily authoritarian, since it is not moving away from them, they just don’t exist within it. Also under this definition the US isn’t authoritarian, since it is not based upon the rule of a party, but two parties.Authoritarianism, in politics and government, the blind submission to authority and the repression of individual freedom of thought and action. Authoritarian regimes are systems of government that have no established mechanism for the transfer of executive power and do not afford their citizens civil liberties or political rights. Power is concentrated in the hands of a single leader or a small elite, whose decisions are taken without regard for the will of the people. The term authoritarianism is often used to denote any form of government that is not democratic, but studies have demonstrated that there is a great deal of variation in authoritarian rule.
-Britannica
“Submission to authority” will appear in the next (and last) source as well. What does it mean? No clue, they don’t define it.Pretty based of Britannica to support the DPRK though - considering the DPRK does
- Have a system for the transfer of executive power
- Does afford it’s citizens political rights and civil liberties. (Without getting into all the propaganda about North Korea, even within the western liberals propaganda apparatus it cannot be denied that the DPRK does afford it’s citizens *some rights and liberties. How many and to what extent and which ones specifically? Doesn’t matter)
Power is concentrated in the hands of a single leader or a small elite, whose decisions are taken without regard for the will of the people.
Okay so every government with a parliamentary system and a low approval rating then?
The term authoritarianism is often used to denote any form of government that is not democratic, but studies have demonstrated that there is a great deal of variation in authoritarian rule.
I wonder why there is such a variation? Could it be because the concept is flawed? No! It must be because
Authoritarianism: The belief that people must obey completely and not be allowed freedom to act as they wish
-Cambridge dictionary
Apparently it’s just… A belief system and not actually about how a state enforces itself? Doesn’t this make every “vote blue no matter who!” lib an authoritarian? Abolish bedtimes I guess, since that is a belief children should obey the authority of their parents. Abolish homework as well.Authoritarianism: of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority [OR] of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people
-Merriam-Webster
The second definition is perhaps the best one available, though it is kind of yank-brained. The UK doesn’t have a constitution. It is authoritarian, yes, but not because of a lack of a legal document. It also decries the concentration of power, so that would be every centralised state apparatus.
And what does “constitutionally representative to the people” even mean? Does this not also require the constitution continually is changed as the will of the people changes? I agree that would be a good thing, but that would mean most governments are authoritarian, considering how many have constitutions with bits that leave them excempt from responsibility to “the people”.
Finally this definition doesn’t actually care about what the government does, just that it is not constitutionally beholden to "the will of the peopleRemoved by mod
Becoming? So it wasn’t authoritarian when black people were routinely beaten by police for drinking from the wrong fountain or looking at a white person wrong?
Or perhaps the genocidal occupation of the Philippines. Not authoritarian?
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The early days of the republic when the entire economy was based on native genocide and all the work was done by millions of enslaved people weremovedd, tortured and sold like animals?
I’m not trying to be Mr Gotcha here, I’m trying to communicate that there is literally no good past we can turn to. It’s always been like this, just lately the mask has come off
Every time liberals try to define “authoritarian” they just end up at
Flakesbonglers evergreen meme
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