140
SocDem liberals just waitin to rip off the mask
(thelemmy.club)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
140 points (74.0% liked)
Memes
56191 readers
1039 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
Don't be pretty sure about things you haven't studied, then.
You don't enjoy people talking on your social media, do you?
Talking yes. Talking out of their ass no.
Both of you could've simply named the political system that you think is magically immune to being overthrown, while somehow not being authoritarianism itself.
2 things quickly:
Authoritarian is a meaningless pejorative. All states/countries/political groups etc. must be authoritarian by necessity in class society.
This meme isn't about states being overthrow this meme is about how socialdemocrats entire ideology is built upon "reforming" capitalism by implementing a welfare state to more evenly spread the profits of the super exploitation of the periphery. When those profits dry up so too does the welfare state which inevitably pushes them right or left to deal with the heightened contradictions. The meme is pointing out the unfortunate pattern of it almost always ending in a rightward shift (due to many factors).
Historicially, classes have been created or destroyed in order to create more or less centralized authority-driven decision making, and societies with less centralized authority have called ones with more centralized authority "authoritarian".
Feudalism, dictatorship and even economic subjugation are called authoritarian by less authoritarian states.
In practice, the criterion for "authoritarianism" is however far back on that scale makes your current political center have anxiety about their ability to keep their current privileges from the authority.
But in theory you can see that the social organisation with the least authority possible would be an anarchist one, designed to dissolve class hierarchy when possible (e.g. abolition of private property) and apply anti-authoritarian safeguards if not (e.g. teach children how to take class action against adults, and make it easy for them to do so).
While such a society will still accumulate authority, it is designed to process it like any other waste product.
This means "authoritarian" is as meaningful as "filthy". We can never be fully clean, but someone who chooses not to bathe to the standards of their time can be called filthy, and those standards can improve over time.
Your framework sounds nice in the abstract, but it doesn't hold up against the concrete reality of how the term functions today. "Authoritarian" isn't applied based on some neutral scale of centralization. It's very clearly deployed selectively as a moral weapon by the Euro-Amerikan ideological apparatus to delegitimize any state or movement that resists imperial integration or challenges capitalist property relations.
If the criterion were truly about concentration of coercive power, the United States (with the world's largest incarcerated population, extrajudicial drone programs, domestic surveillance architectures like COINTELPRO and it's successors, and an executive branch that operates beyond legislative or judicial restraint on the whims of the president) would be the paradigmatic case. Yet it rarely (never) receives the label in mainstream discourse. Why? Because the term isn't neutral.
On the historical point: classes aren't created or dissolved to adjust the "level" of authority. They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle. The bourgeois revolutions didn't aim to "spread" or "centralize" authority. They smashed feudal state forms to erect new ones that secured the dictatorship of capital (parliamentary democracy, rule of law, private property enforcement) all presented as "freedom" while materially consolidating a new class rule. The question was never how much authority, but authority for whom and against whom.
Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power. In a world still structured by antagonistic classes, the relevant distinction isn't between "more" or "less" authority, but between authority that reproduces exploitation and authority that dismantles it. The proletarian state, like any state, exercises coercion, but its historical task is to render itself obsolete by abolishing the class relations that make coercion necessary.
In it's modern usage the term obscures more than it reveals. As it's not meant to be a useful tool for analysing states, power or history, but a bat to beat those who don't get in line.
Great post comrade. We need a /c/bestoflemmy community to highlight comments like this.
Thank you always happy to hear when people find my contributions informative/useful.
That's what I said; the center defines the standard. The US is authoritarian by social-democratic standards.
"Class struggle" is not a one-dimensional variable, and the mode of production is to a significant extent a choice made by those within the system. A revolution has degrees of freedom for who is in its circle of solidarity.
State communists mistake the state/vanguard as a neutral outsider rather than a material entity. Authority left to fester will shape the material conditions to enshrine the authority at the cost of those without authority.
Social democrats tend not to call the US authoritarian (I have yet to see it). They're too busy negotiating their cut of imperial plunder, welfare states built on extracted surplus and "human rights" rhetoric that conveniently ignores sanctions and coups. If "the center defines the standard," then the standard isn't about coercion; it's about loyalty to capital (as I already pointed out). The label only sticks to those who break ranks (refuse to bend the knee to the EuroAmerikan hegemony).
On mode of production as "choice": this is idealism, pure and simple. Putting the cart before the horse. Ideas don't shape the material base; the material base shapes ideas. Capitalism didn't arrive because someone imagined it. Feudal relations broke because they could no longer contain the productive forces, guilds choked industry, serfdom blocked labor, divine right couldn't manage global accumulation. Socialism isn't a fairy tale we opt into. It becomes necessary when capital's own contradictions (overproduction, immiseration, ecological rupture) can no longer be managed within private ownership. And solidarity isn't moral selection or simply who we like or don't like. It's determined by objective interests. The Chinese revolution for example united workers, peasants, and the national bourgeoisie not because of abstract ideals, but because all three had material stakes in smashing imperialist and feudal domination.
On the vanguard: have you read Lenin? Mao? The entire point is that it is NOT neutral. The vanguard is explicitly the organized, conscious detachment of the proletariat, an instrument of class rule, just like the bourgeois state, but inverted. The difference isn't the existence of authority; it's which class wields it, for what end, and whether its practice is tied to mass line feedback. To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.
Authority isn't a substance that "festers." It's a relation, grounded in who controls production, who allocates surplus, who defends or transforms property forms. You can't analyze it like a moral contaminant. You have to trace it to its material base. When authority serves to socialize wealth, decommodify life, and break imperial chains, it isn't reproducing domination, it's creating the conditions where coercion itself becomes obsolete.
I love your writing comrade, and excellent points
Thank you 🫡
If material conditions are all that shapes ideas, why are you speaking ideas at me? Either you are incorrect or you are wasting your time, and I don't think you're wasting your time.
In a world where ideas don't matter, either of us working against our class interests through ignorance is incoherent. If we can be deceived to act against our class interests to change material conditions to serve the rich, then ideas can change material conditions.
People can interpret their interests different ways. People can ally themselves with specific groups but not others. People can have different levels of risk aversion. People can be affected by propaganda and charisma. Ideas skew praxis skews the development of material conditions.
Neglect this at your own peril. Use it to make fairy tales come true.
What class attributes do the authorities in the vanguard have in common with the proletariat?
Ok, I'm going to try lay this out as clearly as I can, because I think you're mixing up what materialism and idealism actually mean (even if we haven't used their names to this point it is the core of the argument).
The main tool of my analysis is materialism. Put simply: the way people organise production, how they meet their needs, who owns what, who has to sell their labour, this is the foundation. Ideas, culture, politics, they arise from and reflect that material base. They aren't illusions, but they don't float free. People think and act, but they do so within conditions they didn't choose.
Ideas matter. People can be persuaded, misled, organised, educated. But those ideas only take hold because they connect to real conditions. You can't sustain a set of ideas that are completely out of step with how people actually live. And you can't just will a new society into existence because it sounds good. Ideas move things along, but they don't set the underlying terrain.
What you're arguing with is idealism. In short, idealism puts ideas first. It treats consciousness, values, or narratives as the engine of history, as if reality bends to what people believe rather than belief being shaped by reality. When you say the mode of production is a "choice," or that solidarity is basically a matter of interpretation, you're putting ideas in the driver's seat. That treats history like a competition between narratives, where whichever idea wins out determines reality.
But that's not how it works. People don't get to pick a mode of production the way they pick a belief. Capitalism didn't arise because it was persuasive. It arose because older systems stopped functioning under pressure and new relations became necessary to keep production going. The same logic applies to any transition out of it. There's a reason certain ideas appear at certain times and not others, and it's not just because someone made a good argument.
None of this means people are robots or that they can't act against their interests. Obviously they can. Propaganda exists, divisions exist, fear exists. But even that happens within limits. If ideas were truly primary, you wouldn't need to look at anything outside discourse to explain social change, and that clearly doesn't hold up.
On your last point, you're also treating "authority" as if it automatically creates a class, and that's just not how class works. Class isn't about who gives orders day to day. It's about relationship to the means of production. Who owns them as property, who controls them in a way that lets them extract surplus, who can pass that control on.
Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn't privately owned as capital, people in those roles don't become a separate class just because they have authority. They don't own the factories, land, or infrastructure as something they can sell or accumulate. Their position depends on the broader structure, not the other way around.
If that changes, if people in those positions start turning control into private, inheritable ownership, then you're dealing with a class shift. But that has to be shown in actual material terms. You don't get there just by pointing at hierarchy and calling it a class.
So you made a straw man of what I was saying. There are degrees of freedom in how material relations are shaped which can be chosen between by a revolutionary movement.
Feudalism did not primarily maintain its classes through ownership either. Like a feudal lord, an administrator primarily maintains their position by social maneuvers towards their near-peers. Justifying bad metrics as unavoidable while claiming responsibility for windfalls, shaping their domain to play better within these social dynamics, and sabotaging rivals who don't fit in their narrative.
Unlike feudal lords, administrators don't own a personal demesne, but for the most powerful feudal lords that demesne was miniscule compared to their power base that came from vassalage. A feudal lord conquering a rival kingdom would distribute it to loyal vassals like an administrator cannibalizing a rival ministry would distribute it to loyal managers.
In this game, administrators want to increase authority over their domain of responsibility to better weaponize it. Modes of production are turned towards political usefulness for the administrator rather than towards the benefit of workers, alienating workers in the process.
Simply put, authority becomes a form of control over the means of production which shapes an administrator's class incentives differently from workers. It isn't ownership but it doesn't need to be.
And yes, administrator roles do tend to be leveraged into nepotistic inheritance of authority, with family being appointed to higher roles in exchange for favors.
No straw man. You said mode of production is a “choice” and solidarity comes down to “interpretation.” That’s putting ideas in the driver’s seat. If you want to soften that now, fine. But don’t rewrite what you said and call it misreading. Degrees of freedom exist, but they exist inside hard limits. Movements don’t invent new material conditions by thinking hard enough, they work through contradictions they actually inherit.
On feudalism, you’re stripping out the core of what made it feudal. Lords didn’t just maneuver socially. Their power rested on land, and on peasants being tied to that land. That’s how surplus was extracted. Vassalage was a political expression of that underlying relation, not a substitute for it. If you take away control over land and surplus, you’re not describing feudalism anymore, you’re just using the aesthetic of it.
With administrators you’re doing the same thing, collapsing authority into ownership. They’re not the same. Authority that can’t be turned into private property, sold off, or passed down as a right is conditional. A feudal lord could hand land to his heir. An administrator can’t hand a factory to their kid. If they start acting like they can, that’s not proof that authority magically equals a class. It’s a sign something in the system is breaking down, and the question becomes why, materially.
You’re right that bureaucrats can game systems, build networks, sideline rivals. None of that is controversial. But describing behaviour isn’t the same as identifying a class. You keep jumping from “they consolidate influence” to “therefore they are a class,” without showing the property relation that would actually make that true.
Even the well documented idea of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging isn’t a blank cheque for your argument. It’s a warning about a process, not a claim that any layer with authority already is one. There’s a difference between a contradiction that has to be managed and a fully formed class that reproduces itself through ownership. If every exercise of coordination produced a new ruling class, then no collective project would ever be possible and we should all just give up and kill ourselves now.
On nepotism, same issue. Favouritism exists in almost every system ever. That alone doesn’t define a class. For it to do that, those positions have to become something like property, stable, transferable, independently reproducible. If that happens, then yes, you’re looking at a real shift. If not, you’re still dealing with a deviation inside a different structure.
You’re not wrong to be wary of authority. Nobody serious ignores that problem. But right now you’re treating suspicion as if it’s analysis, and it isn’t. Analysis asks what the underlying relations are, who actually controls production, how surplus is allocated, whether positions can turn into property. Without that, you’re just pointing at hierarchy and filling in the rest by analogy and vibes.
Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your intepretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable when looking at societies where ownership plays less of a role. Feudal society didn't just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don't fit the "feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it" schema. Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.
Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because that's how capitalism works (especially in the 19th century before social liberalism muddied the waters through pension funds, unemployment benefits, small business loans, etc.), but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do. For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class, which was so succesful not just because of racism but because of genuinely different economic incentives between those with citizenship privileges and those who are floundering in a hostile legal system but for who what little they get is more than they could have gotten back in the imperial periphery. In essence, citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.
And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation. Right-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with capitalists by invoking their shared citizenship while left-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with the migrants by invoking their shared worker status. These are different strategies that are both within range of what the material conditions make plausible. One hopes to reinforce imperial oppression, creating the material conditions that can be leveraged into greater citizenship privileges as traitors to the international working class; the other hopes to leverage the power of a united labor front grants either to demand more privileges at the negotiating table (socialist reformers) or to have a revolution whose reorganisation leaves them better off than before.
I wish I could say for certain that being traitors to the international working class is a foolishly bad bet. But it worked okay for western workers in the past century. I truly can't say if a median income middle aged white male American would expect less prosperity under Trump than in the conflicting mess that would be an American leftist revolution.
Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies, reshaping material conditions in different uncertain ways. In 2015-2024, the USAmerican capital class was divided between going full hog dictatorial fascism and trying to reform through the slow decline of their empire. Neither is objectively better for the US capital class; they both have different risk profiles, and fascism is a big enough swing that it can't be hedged against very well. If the US collapses, billionaires may well end up being hunted down and killed, which is worse for them than becoming multi-millionaires in a world where China is the dominant nation.
Waving away ownership because it’s a “social construct” is a dodge. Money is a social construct. Borders are a social construct. Wage labour is a social construct. That doesn’t make them less real. It means they are historically produced relations with force behind them, backed by law, coercion, and everyday practice. Saying “it’s just a construct” doesn’t dissolve its material power. It just sounds radical while avoiding the actual analysis.
This is just wrong. Land was the dominant means of production in feudal society. Control over land structured the relation between kings, nobles, and peasants. Surplus was extracted through that control and the labour bound to it. The church owned land. Free cities operated within and around that land-based order. Their existence doesn’t negate the core relation. Complexity at the edges doesn’t erase the structure.
You’re mixing levels of analysis. Patriarchy, white supremacy, caste, these are real, oppressive social relations. They shape labour, reproduction, access to resources, and state power. But they are not classes in themselves. They intersect with class. They are used to divide, organise, and reproduce class relations. Analysing them alongside class is necessary. Collapsing them into class blurs what each actually does. A concept that covers everything ends up explaining nothing.
No. If any conflict of interests counts as class, then the term loses all precision. Tenants and landlords, yes. But also senior and junior staff, rival departments, urban and rural voters. Once every patterned antagonism becomes “class,” you can’t distinguish primary contradictions from secondary ones. You can’t explain why some conflicts reproduce across generations while others shift or disappear. Class has explanatory force because it’s tied to production and surplus, not just any difference in incentives. Are green energy execs and fossil fuel execs different classes? Obviously not.
Migrant and citizen workers can have different immediate incentives. Legal status, deportability, access to welfare, all of that matters. But both still sell their labour power. Both are still exploited by capital. The asymmetry exists but it’s a division within a single class, actively produced because it weakens collective power. That’s why it works. Not because it creates two classes, but because it fractures one.
There is no solidarity between worker and owner. That’s not a matter of interpretation, it’s a material relation. One sells labour power. The other extracts surplus. Appeals to shared citizenship, nation, or race are ideological tools to obscure that antagonism, not resolve it.
Right-wing workers aligning with capital aren’t exercising some free interpretive choice in a vacuum. They’re being pulled into a politics that reflects their uneven position within imperialism, short-term advantage in exchange for long-term subordination. That isn’t solidarity. It’s a cross-class "alliance", and those always break when it matters.
When profits fall, when crisis hits, the “shared citizenship” story disappears overnight. Layoffs, wage cuts, austerity, the owner’s loyalty to the nation ends exactly where accumulation begins. That’s the reality underneath the rhetoric.
This isn’t about blaming workers. It’s about explaining why this politics has traction. Imperialism redistributes enough surplus to sections of the core workforce to distort consciousness. That’s real, but it’s unstable and conditional. The moment that flow tightens, the underlying antagonism reasserts itself.
So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s grounded in position. People can misread their interests, sure. They can be won to chauvinism or reformism. But those interpretations only stick because of material conditions, and they only last as long as those conditions hold. Real solidarity has to be built on shared relation to production and shared interest in ending exploitation. Anything else is temporary alignment at best.
Factions within capital do choose strategies. But they don’t choose freely. They respond to crisis tendencies, falling profitability, geopolitical pressure, labour unrest. Finance, tech, energy, they have overlapping but not identical interests. That doesn’t mean there’s no structure. It means class rule is contested internally.
Those strategies aren’t proof that ideas escape material limits. They’re proof that ruling classes adapt under pressure.
The deeper issue here is analytical. You want a framework flexible enough to absorb every pattern you see. That feels sophisticated because it acknowledges complexity. But it quietly drops the hard part, distinguishing structure from expression, primary from secondary contradictions, class from layer.
Once “class” means any durable conflict of interest, everything becomes class. Every hierarchy, every incentive split. At that point you’re not explaining anything, you’re just renaming it.
You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s what gives the concept teeth.
And the political implication of your position is pretty dark, whether you mean it or not. If every exercise of authority or unevenness in incentives is already the seed of a new ruling class, then organised transformation becomes impossible by definition. Any revolution complex enough to survive would already contain the embryo of its own betrayal and again we should just give up and kill ourselves now.
I am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism. Concerns that may become primary when capital is undone, as in state communism.
And all of these can continue to be monopolized by a specific societal subgroup without the use of "ownership". Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class.
The relation to production of different groups change over time. Serfdom, slavery, automation. Worldwide alignment of workers' interests is temporary and shifting like intranational alignment, which is why it historically hasn't happened yet.
If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery in their natural solidarity with other workers rather than continuing exploitation because their interests did not in fact align with slaves in the colonies.
No, we should become anarchist. Unevenness is a vulnerability that we build social structures to prevent from turning into authority, and complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells.
As with your narrative of state communism, these systems are imperfect and will develop places of authority and abuse, and we will learn from that and alter the systems to be less authoritative.
But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class' detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people so the changes are made in the people's favor.
We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism; the countless seeds of authority we carry with us into the postrevolutionary society will be far easier to wrangle than the full-grown monstrosities of capitalism.
You can't just decide ownership matters less after capitalism by fiat. That's idealism. Ownership isn't a preference. It's the material anchor of class power. The point of proletarian state power isn't to wish authority away. It's to use authority to socialize production, break imperial chains, and create the conditions where class distinctions become obsolete. You don't get there by lowering the status of property relations. You get there by transforming them.
This conflates function with class. Yes, bureaucrats can degenerate. That's a real contradiction. Mao wrote extensively about the risk of a "new bourgeoisie" emerging from within the party. But the solution isn't to abandon proletarian authority. It's to deepen mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms. The AES experiences show that proletarian authority can break imperial dependency, socialize surplus, and expand human development. That isn't authority becoming a class. That's authority being wielded to transform the conditions that make class possible.
The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. Of course bourgeois revolutionaries didn't abolish colonial slavery out of "solidarity." That proves the class character of that revolution, not the impossibility of proletarian internationalism. The Paris Commune, the Bolsheviks, the Chinese revolution, the Vietnamese revolution, the Cuban revolution, these show proletarian internationalism in practice. It's uneven, contradictory, contested. But it exists. And it exists because imperialism creates a shared enemy, not because workers spontaneously feel nice to each other.
"Anarchism"(I've read anarchist theory and debated principled anarchists; in practice, when faced with real revolutionary tasks (smashing the bourgeois state, defending against counter-revolution, coordinating production at scale) they end up adopting positions functionally close to MLs, because material conditions demand it. The "authority is inherently tyrannical" line is tyranny of bedtime idealism that collapses on contact with actual struggle.) treats authority as the problem. But authority isn't the problem. Class power is. You can't dismantle the bourgeois state with decentralized cells. You can't break imperial chains with sociocracy. The material task of revolution is to seize state power, socialize production, and defend the revolution against counter-revolution. That requires coordination, discipline, and yes, authority. "Anarchism's" refusal to confront this is why it has repeatedly failed when faced with real revolutionary situations.
This sounds good but is abstract. Who are "the people"? How do they coordinate at scale? How do they defend against counter-revolution, imperial invasion, economic sabotage? The mass line is a method for tying leadership to the masses through concrete practice. But it requires a vanguard, a party, a state form capable of wielding power. "Anarchism's" distrust of all authority leaves it unable to answer these questions.
You can build prefigurative spaces under capitalism. That's great, but prefiguration isn't revolution. The bourgeois state won't be voted away or out-organized by parallel structures. It has to be smashed. And what replaces it has to be capable of holding power, not just avoiding it.
You see authority as inherently dangerous, so you want to minimize it. I see authority as a social relation, so I ask: which class wields it, for what end, and with what mechanisms to prevent ossification? One approach leads to moralism. The other leads to strategy.
Why do you think only ownership can be a "material anchor"? When someone can "own" something they've never been within a thousand miles of, why couldn't another form of institutionally enforced authority over that object fulfill that same role?
You reformist! ;)
Why would regulation offer any more resistance against the pressure of material relations between authority and worker within state communism than in liberal capitalism?
It's natural that functions converge when pursuing the same goals, especially when the pressure is on. Pulling someone out of the way of a moving bus is going to look the same in all ideologies.
It's also natural that when you ask someone raised in a statist society what they would do, they're going to be primed to answer in a more centralized way. One of the nice things of anarchy is that other people can exercise their better ideas, so even if I give a bad answer they are free to give a good answer and people can go with that instead. That's how you prevent beginner mistakes like the four pests campaign or the holodomor from killing millions of people.
You can if you want primitivism, but yeah dying of smallpox sucks. That's why anarchists prefigure structures, as you note.
Why couldn't you?
As I mentioned before, the below are just my personal guesses of what would be good options. Anarchist society is larger than me and will do better than me.
Everyone, with those who can't communicate effectively being assisted to have a say.
Sociocracy, federations, and whatever else they come up with and consent to.
Shaping the material conditions towards decentralization and voluntary association, so there is nothing for the counterrevolution to seize.
Shaping the material conditions to make places as hard as possible to hold with force, and the prevent the existence of strategic positions for the empire to hold. Decentralization, guerilla defense infrastructure, weapons caches. Mass solidarity. Propagandize among the invader's population and encourage revolution and resistance there.
Decentralized local production. Long-lasting repairable goods. Living within your ecological means.
Perhaps to help make these ideas more concrete we could have drills/competitions where different communes or federations showcase the strategies they think work best so groups can share and learn empirically.
Ownership isn't about physical proximity. It's about the right to exclude, to appropriate surplus, to transfer control. That's what makes it a material anchor. Institutional authority without that right is conditional. A manager can direct labour, but if they can't sell the factory, bequeath it, or pocket the profit, they aren't a capitalist. That distinction, as has been pointed out already, is the difference between a function and a class.
Mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms aren't liberal reforms. They're tools to keep proletarian authority tied to the class it serves. The AES have used them, imperfectly but materially, to prevent bureaucratic ossification. That's not reformism. It's simply recognizing that contradiction doesn't disappear after revolution. It has to be managed through practice, not wished away. And let's be clear: these tools work because the dictatorship of the proletariat has an objective interest in aligning leadership with the masses. The dictatorship of capital has the opposite aim. Its core function is to reproduce exploitation. No amount of "recall mechanisms" will make a bourgeois state serve workers, because its class character is defined by serving capital. You can't reform a class enemy into an ally.
Exactly. Material conditions demand certain forms. That's proof that strategy must be grounded in reality, not moral preference. If anarchists end up adopting ML positions when faced with real tasks (smashing the state, defending the revolution, coordinating production) that says something about those ML positions. They are proven correct by practice.
This is historical illiteracy. First, the "beginner mistakes" line erases the material conditions those revolutions faced: invasion, embargo, sabotage, famine imposed from outside. Second, it ignores that anarchist experiments have their own body counts when they fail to coordinate defense or production. Third, it pretends the AES didn't learn, adapt, and save hundreds of millions from imperial predation. The PRC lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty, built world-class infrastructure, and broke imperial dependency. That's a historical achievement under nearly impossible conditions not to mind the USSR going from illiterate peasants to space faring in under 50 years.
And the "let others try their better ideas" approach sounds open but is functionally irresponsible. Revolution isn't a laboratory. People die when strategy fails. The mass line isn't about letting everyone do their own thing. It's about synthesizing mass experience into coherent strategy through disciplined practice.
Show me where it has shown even the slightest potential to. Imperialism doesn't care about your decision-making model. It bombs, sanctions, coups. Breaking imperial chains requires coordinated political power, economic planning, and military defense. That requires authority. Decentralization without central coordination isn't a strength. If anything it's a massive weakness begging to be exploited.
This is magical thinking. Counter-revolution doesn't need a central office to seize. It needs discontent, scarcity, external backing. Imperial invasion doesn't require a capital city to target. It requires weakness to exploit. Defense requires logistics, intelligence, strategy. That means coordination, discipline, authority.
Abstract universalism ignores concrete contradictions. Who decides what "effective communication" means? How are conflicting interests adjudicated? How is surplus allocated when not everyone's needs can be met equally?
All good things in theory. But imperialism doesn't respect local autarky. It enforces dependency through debt, trade, force. Breaking that requires collective power at scale. And let's be concrete: decentralized, uncoordinated production cannot manufacture modern technology. Computer chips, phones, advanced medicine, modern weapons, none of it happens in isolated communes. Kneecapping yourself technologically in the face of a hegemonic aggressor is suicidal at best. And we're back to fuck the ill and disabled if your model can't produce the medicine and equipment they need to survive.
Prefigurative practice has value. But revolution isn't a showcase. It's a life-and-death struggle against a ruthless enemy.
The core disagreement remains simple. You see authority as inherently dangerous, so you want to minimize it. I see authority as a social relation, so I ask: which class wields it, for what end, and with what mechanisms to prevent ossification? One approach leads to moralism. The other leads to strategy. But to be blunt: your "anarchist" vision is idealist fantasy in the face of hegemonic violence. Imperialism doesn't negotiate with your decision-making model. It crushes what it can't co-opt. Material conditions don't care about your preferences. They only respond to power which you fear rather than understand.
Materialism does not posit that ideas do not have any influence, but that ideas come from material conditions, they aren't formed independently of the person's lived experience but are shaped by it. Conversation and exchange of ideas still exists and still shapes how people think, but these ideas did not come from nothing.
The world shapes us, we shape the world, the new world then reshapes us and we then reshape the world in endless spirals. It's a cycle, but one where a return to the origin point is at a higher level, like a car tire completing one revolution and advancing one tire length.
As for the vanguard, the vanguard is a subsection of the proletariat, not its own class. As such, the vanguard has class interests aligned with the rest of the proletariat, that being the collectivization of all production and distribution so as to end the proletariat as a class in general.
What would you characterize as authoritarian/authoritarianism?
Wikipedia seems to do a decent enough job defining it:
But basically, my point is:
Basically, my opinion is that politics is a constant work in progress, no matter the political system.
The trick is to have a system where if people choose to engage in authoritarianism they lose power. A liberal democracy can arrest a head of state who engages in illegal actions more easily than a feudal monarchy does.
This is because of their respective structures, with indictment being a legal structure with physical preparation done to facilitate it on the one hand, and being treason in the other.
So naturally the more a system facilitates the overthrow of authorities, the less authoritarian it gets. You're right that politics is a constant work in progress, so a good political system incorporates that progress as smoothly as possible.
No system can withstand a sufficiently powerful foreign intervention, but a system where the overthrowing of authority is as mundane as throwing out the trash, where people's best method of accumulating wealth and power is by betting on something other than authority, can split your false dichotomy.
Systems that attempt this are called anarchy.
That said, you are missing one key element from the meme. People aren't voting for authoritarianism because they are unhappy but because they have reaped the fruits of authoritarianism/imperialism on a global scale and they want the system to find new people to exploit.
If a region in the western world became anarchic with no economic changes, it would rightfully be overthrown by people from the global south who their economic system oppresses. Liberal democracy prevents this through citizenship and the authority of those with voting rights over those without.
So anarchy would qualify in spirit if not in letter, but it would require a reckoning with everyone whose oppression we benefit from.
Do you have any points or do you prefer the tried and true call people names and stick your fingers in your ears?