Cowbee

Pretty much!

All states are authoritarian, as all are instruments by which one class asserts its authority. That doesn't decouple it from democracy either, it's important to understand that working class states by necessity employ broad participation.

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Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 11h ago

The Zapatistas are an example of "authoritarian" socialism, as you already explained. Democracy in socialism comes in many different forms, usually involving a combination of local voting and consensus gathering.

For China, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the CPC, a working class party, dominates the state. At a democratic level, local elections are direct, while higher levels are elected by lower rungs. At the top, constant opinion gathering and polling occurs, gathering public opinion, driving gradual change. This system is better elaborated on in Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance.

For the USSR, it was quite similar. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about.

These are just 2 examples, but it extends to other socialist countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, the DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, etc, which all have their own unique conditions and systems in place. All use their systems of democracy to keep the working classes on top, while exerting authority to suppress capitalists, sabateurs, fascists, etc.

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Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 11h ago

How much have you studied Marxist-Leninist democracy? Accountability is core to socialist countries, both in theory and practice.

Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 11h ago

This is both the use of authority, and not dissimilar to what socialist countries often deemed "authoritarian" practice.

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Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 12h ago

Then that definition doesn't apply to the socialist states that "tankies" support, so the original comment doesn't make sense.

Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 13h ago

Their point is essentially that it just means "has a government," but is treated like it's a strict condemnation of some governments over others.

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Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 13h ago

Is it not better for the working classes to institutionally dominate capitalists?

Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 14h ago

You should be proud! And yea, I figured you wouldn't be dissuaded, just wanted to point out my personal experience with that text in particular, to give you something to consider while reading it. In practice, Marxists and anarchists work alongside each other frequently! Also, side note, I've been reading Maurice Cornforth's Materialism and the Dialectical Method recently, and it has been fantastic, and will probably replace Politzer's work in my reading list once I finish it. If you feel like you aren't fully solid in dialectical materialism, consider giving it a read after you finish Socialism: Utopian and Scientific!

And thanks again, comrade!

Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 14h ago

Yep!

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Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 14h ago

The orgs that do exist do have study platforms. PSL, for example, requires a year of training and study before becoming a full member, and has Liberation School for anyone to make use of. However, this cannot truly be compared to the resources and study a university can provide, which is what I am more jealous of. Study at the level of a budding revolutionary party in the heart of a deeply reactionary empire is always going to be a struggle, needing to overturn decades of anti-communist propagandizing, and the kind of higher-level Marxist debate that happens among contemporary Marxists is mostly out of reach for us in the west.

Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 15h ago

I never said that I was a liberal. If anything, I consider myself a market socialist since anything needed to survive shouldn’t be comdified for capital.

If I were to be cheeky, I'd say that market socialism is still liberalism. There's a difference between a Socialist Market Economy, like the PRC, and market socialism. In a socialist market economy, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, while diverse forms of ownership account for small and medium firms, including cooperatives and private ownership. In market socialism, cooperatives form the principle aspect, and as such it is largely weak to the same mechanisms as capitalism.

I’m simply saying that giving one man absolute power whether it be political or through wealth will inevitably lead to corruption. After all, the meme states that tankies are “always right”, and I’m assuming that by tankie they mean the authoritarian left like Stalinism, Maoism, etc.

Neither Stalin nor Mao had absolute power, though. Both the USSR and China under Mao were democratic. For China, public ownership is the principle aspect of the economy, and the CPC, a working class party, dominates the state. At a democratic level, local elections are direct, while higher levels are elected by lower rungs. At the top, constant opinion gathering and polling occurs, gathering public opinion, driving gradual change. This system is better elaborated on in Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance.

For the USSR, it was quite similar. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about.

By "tankie," OP essentially means anyone that recognizes existing socialist states as valid. This includes the majority of Marxists.

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Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 15h ago

It's better for the working classes to control the state, even if corruption exists and must be actively suppressed.

Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 15h ago

Having a strong central government under the control of the working classes is possible, though, as exists in socialist countries. It indeed uses this absolute power against enemies of the state, but in this case the enemies are capitalists, fascists, sabateurs, etc, and the state truly democratic in the sense that it represents the majority. The state can only be under the control of a definite class, it does not exist outside of class struggle but within it.

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Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 15h ago

Great comment, of course, but this part in particular:

Now for the part where you really make yourself look ridiculous: you pretend you’re some “hard science” guy while dismissing historical and dialectical materialism. I have a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in STEM, alongside a master’s in Marxist theory. Socialist theory is not vibes or moral preference, it’s a systematic framework for analyzing class relations, production, surplus, and material conditions. You clearly don’t understand that method, yet you keep lecturing people who do. Liberal capitalism, by contrast, rests on idealist fairy tales about “human nature,” “markets,” and “incentives.”

I am incredibly jealous that this is an option for people. In the west, any Marxism taught in schooling is heavily distorted, either to outright condemn it as evil, or to create "western leftists" that turn doomer enough to tacitly support imperialism. There are some decent orgs that do good training, but not at an institutional level. As a consequence, we all basically have to be self-taught, ideally combining theory with real practice so as to avoid the "western left" phenomenon.

Still, really cool that you have a master's in Marxism! Huge respect for that (along with the PhD, of course), and it makes any compliments you've paid me seem far too flattering, haha.

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Cowbee [he/they] @lemmy.ml 15h ago

You're really hitting the nail on the head with respect to why our study is never finished. Dialectics requires us to look at everything in its context, not just metaphysically (ie, isolated, static, unchanging). The USSR, for example, was both tremendously progressive with respect to Tsarist Russia and its contemporaries, while having real struggles and flaws.

Socialism became scientific with the creation of dialectical materialism, ie seeking materialist explanations for real phenomena, and using dialectics as the methodology. When applied to history, we see socialism not as an idea to be implemented, ie "utopian" in thinking, but as it develops historically. In capitalism, markets centralize over time, while raising the number of proletarians and decreasing the number of bourgeois, creating the conditions for collectivized ownership and distribution.

The proletariat as a ruling class is unique in that, rather than seeking perpetuation of its status, seeks to end itself as such. This is why dialectical materialism is a proletarian ideology, seeing everything as it comes into and out of existence, as a process and in constant motion, because all previous ruling classes sought to explain their rule as permanent.

The part where this breaks with anarchism for me is the fact that anarchists, ultimately, seek to implement society in a way that goes against how capitalism progresses. This is why it's so difficult to start a cohesive anarchist movement that lasts, it isn't because it's impossible, but because anarchists are "working against the wheel of history," so to speak, in trying to decentralize all production and distribution. It certainly isn't impossible, but it's orders of magnitude more difficult at scale. Locally is where anarchism has its advantages.

This was a bit of a ramble, but this will all make much more sense after reading Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, I hope. I'm not telling you to abandon your anarchism or anything, just that this is the work that personally marked the end of identifying as an anarchist, so it will probably give you a good deal to think about at a minimum.