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You know who isn’t in the Epstein files?
Lenin.
Or any left-winger as far as I’ve seen. Chomsky is the closest thing to it and he’s a liberal Judas goat that leftists shit on since the Yugoslav wars.
it goes further than not letting them in; leftism was described somewhere between derision and fear of it in the epstein files.
And this is why in any socialist society, state-run press is important. The working classes should control the press, not money.
The state is not working class, if they have power to manage workers and also propagandize them, they are a de-facto owner class.
Why not just have several worker-owned (and obviously worker managed, as in without a boss) press organizations?
That’s not what a class is, certainly not in the Marxist sense. Classes are social relations to production and distribution, relating to ownership. Managers are working class, as are administrators within socialism. If you want to discuss the relationship between subsections of the working classes, then this is a different discussion, but class isn’t simply any way you can identify a group. Teachers are not owners, nor are managers, nor are administrators, when their relations of ownership are the exact same. Organizing at scale creates managerial and administrative positions out of necessity.
Publicly owned and run press, as exists in China, for example, is socialist press. These are worker-run and managed. I think you may be hinting at cooperative, horizontalist management and ownership, but this isn’t really socialist in the Marxist sense at all. Scientific socialism is about the collectivization of production and distribution in one unified system, democratically run in the interests of the working classes. Horizontalist cooperatives fragment the working classes and pit them against each other, and are easy to take advantage of by foreign powers (as the west has done many times already).
Before I write a full response would it be possible for you to clarify this
The state is not working class, if they have power to manage workers
So anyone who exerts managerial authority stops being working class? Are school principles not working class? Are doctors not working class? Does relations to the means of production not factor into your analysis?
Edit: Also
and obviously worker managed, as in without a boss
This reads very baby “anarchist” to me, by boss do you mean owner or management in general (even if democratically selected within the organisation)?
I said the state is not working class as a starting retort as well as a way to signal where I’m coming from, the rest is pointing out having a class in control of the workers and the media is a bad idea.
I’ll be perfectly honest, i have only a slight idea why you gave that very simple comment such a bad reading, and it is only if you read (or listened to someone explaining) “on authority” and came out of it with a very bad and very prevalent (in leninist circles) idea of how anarchists think, and that is why you’re asking me to clarify this, and the reason i think this is because of the examples you gave as I’ve seen those same examples before, they are bad and go against your point, also it’s a waste of time going over them, so i won’t.
This reads very baby “anarchist” to me…
It was obviously simplified, and you still misread it, with the only reply asking me to explain something you don’t understand about anarchism, reads very “riddle me this, atheist!”, you can obviously read better than this.
Look, the only reason I’m being sorta hostile here is because you came off as rude, and not looking for an honest answer, despite your (perhaps genuine) attempt at being polite, I’m willing to actually talk about all this, if you’re willing to try and understand instead of giving a common strawman for me to fight, i don’t wish to waste your time, and would like you to not waste mine.
I said the state is not working class as a starting retort as well as a way to signal where I’m coming from, the rest is pointing out having a class in control of the workers and the media is a bad idea.
The problem is that in a working class state, the class in control of the workers and the media is the working class itself. This is just standard organization. Class is not a stand-in for hierarchy, because class has very clear definitional relations to ownership of the means of production, and how this reinforces class society. A manager of a firm that owns said firm just as much as anyone under them is not a different class, but a different position.
In other words, the problem with class society is not hierarchy in general, but class in particular. Hierarchy has utility, strategians and tacticians serve different necessary purposes. The fact that hierarchies form an essential part of organization does not mean that capitalists, private owners siphoning all of the surplus of society, are necessary. Workers can organize in a socialist fashion to direct and plan production so as to suit everyone’s needs, and this system would still have hierarchy.
I said the state is not working class as a starting retort as well as a way to signal where I’m coming from, the rest is pointing out having a class in control of the workers and the media is a bad idea.
Administrator is not a class category. In complex socialized production, coordination is not optional, it is materially necessary. Take chip fabrication as a concrete example in my mind. First, digital design teams at firms like Cadence or Nvidia work on specific modules. Then digital verification teams run exhaustive simulations to catch logical errors. Analog design teams then handle signal integrity and power management, with constant back and forth revisions as more realistic physical constraints are modeled. The design is then sent to a fab like TSMC where process engineers, lithography specialists, and yield analysts work to fabricate the masks and wafers. Finally, hardware verification teams extract actual specs and test against design assumptions. Thousands of specialists across multiple firms. Without administrative authority to mediate deadlines, specifications, and resource allocation, this process collapses. Or consider a nuclear power plant. Discipline and hierarchical coordination are not about exploitation, they are material necessities to keep thousands of workers and millions of citizens safe. The contradiction under capitalism is not that administration exists, it is who appoints administrators and to what end. Owners install management to extract surplus value. Under socialism, workers delegate coordination to serve social production. When the state is composed of and accountable to the working class, exerting authority to coordinate production in their collective interest does not strip it of working class character. Authority exercised by the working class in service of the working class is not domination, it is self organization at scale. Class character is determined by relation to the means of production, not by who holds functional authority. Those who do not own, control, or appropriate the surplus product of the means of production remain part of the working class, regardless of whether they coordinate, manage, or direct labor. The state, when it embodies the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the working class organized as the ruling class, not a new owning class.
they are bad and go against your point, also it’s a waste of time going over them, so i won’t.
Dismissing the examples does not resolve the theoretical question. If exercising authority over labor strips someone of working class character regardless of ownership relations, then why is a principal managing teachers or a senior doctor directing nurses fundamentally different from a state administrator coordinating economic planning? None of them own the school, the hospital, or the means of production. Their authority is functional, derived from the technical requirements of complex labor, not proprietary. Marxism determines class by relation to the means of production, not by who holds a clipboard or signs a schedule. The principal does not appropriate the surplus product of teachers. The doctor does not extract profit from nurses. Likewise, cadres in a workers state who coordinate production without owning the means of production remain part of the working class, provided they are accountable to and recallable by the masses. If you disagree with this framing, engage the premise rather than dismissing it.
It was obviously simplified, and you still misread it
I flagged my reading as provisional and asked for clarification. That is good faith engagement, not a trap. If “without a boss” means without an owner extracting surplus value, we likely agree. If it means without any management or coordination whatsoever, that is idealism ignoring the material requirements of large scale socialized production. Authority under socialism is not abolished, it is transformed. It becomes delegated, recallable, and accountable to the working class. The question is not whether administration exists, but whether it serves capital or serves social need. I am willing to talk if we start from material conditions and the concrete requirements of production rather than treating all coordination as domination. That is how we move past strawmen and towards genuine theoretical clarity.
It’s also why functioning democracy is important, so that the working class actually do control the state, and not the party elite. Otherwise you end up with a state (and its press) that exists to serve itself, and not the working class, like we have in China right now.
China does have a functioning democracy. Looking at polling, the large majority in China believe the state represents their interests, and is in fact democratic:
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Moreover, the economy in the PRC is socialist, with public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
What I see happening in Hong Kong doesn’t look very democratic to me though.
Why not? Hong Kong was returned to China after British colonialism was finally removed from China. HK is benefiting quite dramatically from being better integrated into the Chinese economy than they were before.
I was just there last month incidentally. It’s a fantastic city with lots of character. I was really impressed how walkable it is too. Can highly recommend visiting.
Oh, sounds really fun! I’d love to visit China some day in general, but it’s way too big and historied to ever get a decent picture of without spending years there.
Yeah pretty much, but even just seeing it for a bit is pretty awesome.
The majority of residents of Hong Kong wish to remain a part of China, but desire some autonomy from Beijing. Americans in Boston, New York or Chicago would say the same about their relationship to Washington, on the whole.
If you look into the ideological character of the protestors - who have been basically irrelevant for, what, half a decade now? - they were exactly the sort of people I would hope we all stand against: annoying upper-middle-class Redditor bros dressing up like pepe the frog and asking Trump to save them from the evil Communists. They’re right-wing nutjobs that Western media pretends have a point because it’s convenient for the joint foreign policy agenda of both Capitalist parties.
What you see happening in Hong Kong is what the capitalist class wants you to see, because they own the media and fund the politicians & NGOs. Previously:
The UK’s 99 year lease to subjugate the people of Hong Kong ended, a lease which had been forced upon Imperial China at gunpoint during the century of humiliation. Hong Kong reintegration after the lease expired was a foregone conclusion. The last minute, US-backed attempt at color revolution failed. It was the so-called “revolutionaries” who brought the brutality, by the way.
LOL
still grasping at that straw?
You’re out Brits, your colonial era is overYou don’t see jack shit
Lenin - THE GOAT
And then what happened?
Then new york times became hitlerite.
As usual, Lenin was vindicated.
