Authoritarian communism is predicated on the contradictory idea that their government–which, being a state, is legitimized by its monopoly on violence–is able to accurately reflect the mechanics of dialectical materialism in its decision-making and attempts to serve the working class. I don’t believe those two things can work together. You are inherently restricting the revolution by deciding that certain groups are allowed to use force while others are not.
As an anti-authoritarian, this is way too oversimplified of a reason to be against authoritarianism. ‘Extremism’ is a practically meaningless word that tends to translate to “this person’s methods for enacting political change scare me, therefore they are Bad” and is usually used to incarcerate black and brown people who don’t perform acceptability for white people. If you genuinely consider yourself for collective liberation, I implore you to think with more nuance here. There are plenty of reasons to dislike tankies that aren’t just vague liberal sentiments
None of this relates to my point though. Everything you mention here is possible (and as an anarchist, necessary) to carry out while treating the children as equals and not infringing on their autonomy.
For when, why, ani how you exercise those liberations is how those children will praxis and react in the future.
I don’t know what this means. Someone not knowing how to liberate themselves and learning it from someone who does is not a state of them being under the power of the teacher. Teaching does not inherently entail restriction in autonomy and is only an assertion of power to the extent that we allow it to be.
Also, children’s liberation is absolutely a thing and you can/should read about it.
Yep, are still trying find a solution for this quandary
Ok but at that point, why still use “vanguard”? I’d understand wanting to reclaim it to mean something other than its historical meaning. But as it stands, when most people hear “vanguard”, they understand it to mean Lenin/Stalin. And I think anyone building a revolution based on a “vanguard” broadly speaking would need to be super fucking careful to not fall into that trap themselves.
Welcome to the mammalia Class. As a minor, did you consent to your caregivers’ care methods? Were you allowed to adult? Get educated?
This is why child liberation theory is a thing. You’re right that we give parents power over their children, and an anarchist analysis would say that’s a bad thing.
The problem with vanguardism isn’t that there are people who protect/stand up for others, it’s that it inevitably institutionalizes those people into positions of power over those others. Nurses, caregivers, etc. aren’t “supposed” to have power over their patients, but they very often do. Humans are already good at protecting and supporting each other–no need to risk creating a power differential by forming a designated vanguard to rigidify it.
I feel like maybe I’m missing something because I tried Bazzite for a bit (before switching to vanilla Fedora) and found it kind of overwhelming? Like there was so much stuff installed by default and it wasn’t super clear to me how it all was supposed to work together to do basic things like package management (esp. since dnf doesn’t work)
May I propose: China is probably better for many of its citizens compared to the U.S. and is objectively run by more competent people. The western world is built on mountains of anti-communist and anti-Chinese propaganda that makes discerning the truth about the reality of living there hard for the average westerner who hasn’t actually spent time there. At the same time, absolute power corrupts, and any system that concentrates power into centralized structures is at very high risk of that power being co-opted and abused by counter-revolutionary, power-hungry assholes. Regardless of whether that has happened in China (or any other socialist state), the risk is there, and the way to mitigate it is to dismantle the structures that allow it to happen.
Thank you! I will read these.
Side note, I think knowing that you put both the Zapatistas and the CPP in the same category of “authoritarian socialism” is helping me understand your perspective better. I think you’re wrong, but I can at least understand where you’re coming from, so thank you for that.
Challenging and limiting institutional power is not relevant to conversations about avoiding authoritarianism?
Please educate me about how authoritarian socialist countries ensure and maintain accountability to the people (or point me to where I can research myself)! I’d love to be wrong about this
Clearly we’re not getting anywhere. Read some anarchist theory if you want to understand this “word salad” 💕
I think you’re on the right train of thought but missing a key aspect. I’m with MLs that without some sort of organized counter-authority, existing power structures will overrun the revolutionary forces. But that authority needs to be fully accountable to the people it serves, otherwise it will become disembodied and “institutionalized” in the more specific sense, leading to a power structure that justifies its own existence instead of deriving the justification through the people. MLs, to me, are missing this power analysis. They seem to try to argue that an authoritarian communist-party-run government has this accountability to the people by the fact that…they serve the people? That’s not enough. You need to organize your revolution around accountability, around the idea that institutional power must always be justified by the will of the people and not the other way around. The Zapatistas understood this, which is why they built their governance around consensus-building and have since actively removed institutional power as it no longer served the people.
See my other reply
They enforce the authority of the people against institutional power, using a method (consensus-making) that ensures that it’s truly reflective of the will of the people (and not what a group of faux intellectuals think is the will of the people) and that it cannot be divorced from that will.
The Zapatista territories in Chiapas come to mind.
The comment I’m responding to is saying authoritarianism isn’t a thing. Whether or not the dictatorship of the proletariat the “right kind” of authoritarianism isn’t relevant to that conversation.
Authoritarianism is a system of institutionalized domination, and yes this includes pretty much every government on earth currently.
Weird because I was describing the USA
Ironically, calling anarchism “disorganization” is almost always a result of capitalist/authoritarian propaganda about what anarchism is. Sorry you can’t conceive of a world where people organize themselves without the use of oppressive violence.