I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
I can’t really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by “both” sides of the spectrum. It’s just something I find interesting.
Because they’re very vocal online, are annoying, and also give actual leftists bad rep. If you’re promoting egalitarianism and distributing social power among everyone, you wouldn’t like people who support authoritarism to share a label with you.
every state in the world is authortarian
Are you saying this as a retort to me indirectly calling tankies authoritarians? If so, that’s pretty rich.
The Soviet Union suppressed people who used Marxist analysis to argue that the higher echelons of the party aparatus had constituted itself as a separate, dominant class that held the ultimate political power, which resulted in a tendency to exert that power undisputed and continued accumulation of privileges. Once enough time had passed, some of the people leading that aparatus decided they wanted an even larger share of the cake, so they decided to drop the pretense, drop the nominal communism and embrace privatisation. When working people tried to oppose that process, the authoritarian state used its repressive forces to protect the ruling class. What is most interesting about this is that you can see similar processes in almost every single country that followed the leninist vanguardist model, ultimately losing any political equality that was initially sought in its revolution, and any self-respecting Marxist should have taken the hint that this makes Leninism and its godchildren a failed avenue for socialism.
To connect this with your not too hidden assertion that “since every state is authoritarian, me supporting authoritarian states is ok”: any state and society is going to decide the margins outside of which behavior and politics are not acceptable, but that is absolutely no excuse to give free reign to any government to become as authoritarian as they aim to no matter the cost. When we do that, we come across disgusting situations such as the difficulties for working class Chinese people being unable to self-organize and protect their rights if the local party strongman arbitrarily decides they’re too much trouble. Any kind of emancipatory project soon turns crippled under those circumstances, which you could have easily noticed if you weren’t drown in liturgy.
https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/
ML states are the only successful socialist states in history to hold out for a significant amount of time against the United States empire. I’m not super attached to the vanguard model myself, but can you show me a single other successful model? I think this quote is quite relevant here:
Authoritarianism under the banner of socialism isn’t success. It’s just a different kind of failure.
Can you define what you mean by “authoritarian” in a way that doesn’t include actions the US does ? What is authority in your mind?
Why would I do that when I think the US is authoritarian, too?
Alright but like, which states aren’t then?
Like, if none of them aren’t which I assume is your take (I was an anarchist myself until the climate crisis started hitting hard so I have some sympathy for anti statism myself) and you can see that socialist states provide a better quality of life than capitalist states when compared at an equal level of development, surely you can admit that one is a lesser evil than the other? But that’s not what the people shouting about “authoritarian states” functionally do with their rhetoric, functionally they defend capitalist states and uphold the status quo by forming part of the opposition to the end of capitalist states and the formation of socialist ones.
None, afaik. We need to do better. I don’t oppose ending capitalist states and forming socialist ones. I oppose violations of human rights by both corporations and governments. If we can’t set the bar above “marginally better for most people than late stage capitalism, but we’ll disappear you if you speak out against us,” we’ve already lost.
Is it better to be too “authoritarian” and protect your revolution, or just let reactionary states destroy your newly formed socialist state, carve up the remains and enjoy the spoils while people suffer?
If you’re authoritarian, who are you protecting? It’s not for the people or the workers, so it’s not a revolttion worth protecting.
How do you personally determine whether a revolution is for the people?
Are we talking about a revolution or a government, here? If you believe the revolution is ever-ongoing, fine, substitute your own words for the taking-power part and the governing part. If the taking-power part, I’m not sure we can know. Look at the Iranian Revolution. There were leftists involved with the taking-power part, but not so much with the governing part. As far as a government for the people, there are probably many different ways it can turn out, but the essence is fulfilling people’s basic needs while also respecting their human rights. No one’s gotten it right yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t.
The latter.
Good to know you hate working class people
Even in the United States after the revolution they implemented authoritarian measures to ensure the security of their revolution. They sized the land of Loyalists and effectively drove them out if the country. They killed Loyalists, who were their fellow colonists, for their opposition to the revolution. They attempted tirelessly for peaceful transition to independence but the Monarchy refused them and ignored them until they were left with no choice but to begin violent armed revolution. All revolutions are authoritarian in their nature. The American revolutionaries were seizing their power by force and imposing their self actualized authority over the colonies in pursuit of their own economic and social freedoms.
The United States is authoritarian and many of the same ways that socialist states are authoritarian. If you don’t believe me, look at the history of the socialist movement in America. Look at what the state was and still is willing to do to its own citizens for criticizing and organizing against the capitalist and imperialist system that the state runs on.
Are you here to tell me that McCarthyism and the red scare were democratic in their execution? That they were in line with the Free Speech and Free Expression ethos the United States projects? They were not times of political democratic freedom. Even in recent times you have leaders of movements critical of the state being killed for their political positions. Students killed during the anti-war movement in the 60s and 70s. Anti-War activists driven out of their employment and careers over their opposition to the state and it’s actions in Vietnam.
So what do you call authoritarianism under capitalism then? Democracy??
When did I say the US wasn’t authoritarian? It’s possible for every side to be dickheads.
The compulsion that you feel to distance yourself from past proletarian movements so that your attackers won’t associate you with the supposed atrocities of those movements only functions to move you further and further right. It doesn’t work because the attackers will do it regardless of how much you moderate yourself. This instinct leads you to not only distance yourself from their own goals, and to condemn your own movement, but to uphold reactionary lies about our movements, sometimes even outdoing those lies by exaggerating them, in order to further emphasize the attempt to distance. It doesn’t matter how much we try to twist and turn and distance ourselves from atrocity propaganda, rubbish will be heaped upon the graves of working class leaders.
Functionally all this compulsion does is move you rightwards. You are attempting to make yourself more appealing to the right because you think that doing so will magically make people on the right suddenly like socialist politics. In the meantime they will attack you with every single piece of propaganda regardless, and you will moderate yourself even more. This deradicalises the movement and blunts the radical edge it requires to get things done.
It’s exactly the same compulsion that liberals have that has caused them to move further and further right over the decades. Every time they get called a communist by the republicans they desperately try to move rightwards in order to get it to stop happening, it will never stop happening though because it is not said in good faith, and the tactic of accusing them of it works well in moving them right.