this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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My previous comment was deleted because I was mean to Cowbee. But the man point is still valid, which is why I'll comment again:
Here are some definitions from A Modern Anarchism, by Daniel Baryon (aka "Anark").
And his definition of power:
Please explain logically, how the term "western propaganda" would apply.
Addendum:
Someone claimed that this is a good thing if the proletariat is doing it. This is not a materialist stance however, because it presumes that the function of a system can be fundamentally changed by having people with the correct ideas doing the domination.
Also, monopolization means that structural power is concentrated to benefit a minority. The proletariat is not a minority, however (which is basically the whole idea why most people should be socialists). That is why MLism creates a ruling class of bureaucrats that calls itself "proletariat", although their material function doesn't classify them as such.
Then, someone claimed that the terms are supposedly loaded. These semantic discussions are pure formal critique, though. When clear definitions are given, it's not a logical argument to claim a term sounds "too scary".
I will refrain to be mean to people I blocked. Sorry for that.
What existing collective doesn't fit this definition? Because by this definition, the anarchist controlled areas of republican spain then, were deeply authoritarian.
In what way did republican spain monopolize power? Monopoly means that only a small amount of agents get access to it.
That was precisely the case. Durruti's column especially found that any "decentralized" command structure breaks down quickly into interminable squabbles, and like any revolutionary army, had to institute a strict hierarchy and centralized control. Most but not all anarchist groups accepted this centralized control as a necessity.
I suggest reading the tyranny of structurelessness on why "anti-authoritarian" groupings always end up either destroying themselves, or in cults of personality due to their individualist rejection of rules, organization, and structures of authority.
EDIT: Ah, I found that he was indeed at least open to the idea to centralize the militias.
It looks like he still wanted to hash some things out, but as far as I can tell, that meeting with Val never occurred due to his death the next day.
End of edit.
Could you share your source which details that Durruti created specifically a top-down centralized militia? From the sources I've read, he created a bottom-up militia with the ability to recall poorly performing elected leaders. As an example, from Chapter 7 of Paz Abel's 'Durruti in The Spanish Revolution':
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
Monopolize does not mean that the group is small, but that the access is exclusive. The group that monopolizes can be large, and extremely exclusionary towards other groups. Anarchists in Spain monopolized authority, ran labor camps, and built up hierarchical structures over time to suit the realities of the Spanish Civil War.
This is a very weird way of responding to me, either unblock me and respond, or don't respond at all, IMO. Others can clearly see where I responded to you, and you're directly addressing me in the beginning of your comment. Either way, I'll address your new points.
As for it being a good thing if the proletariat is in control, your assertion that this isn't materialist because it means we are depending on people with the "right ideas" is fundamentally wrong. This is like saying violence against Nazis and violence from Nazis are equivalent. Going off of Anark's definition, the proletariat monopolizing power in their hands is unambiguously a good thing and a necessary step forward.
As for the idea that administration is a class in and of itself, this is not a materialist stance. Classes are not simply job categories, managers are proletarian too. Government officials earning wages are not a class, but instead proletarians. Their class goal remains the same as the rest of the proletariat, collectivize all production and distribution. Claiming that they are a class is not based on what actually determines class, but instead a conflation of hierarchy with class, which is an entirely different subject altogether.
As for the semantic terms being loaded, I don't really think it matters as far as we are trying to get definitions across. However, subjectivist tactics of labeling concepts you disagree with with scary sounding words does impact how people react to said terms. Pointing out the subjectivist labeling isn't really an argument against the terms, but instead against the intentions of the author. Considering Anark is a frequent abuser of Marxist theory (see my response to Anark here for an example), it makes sense for us to be skeptical of Anark's claims and intentions.
I am not going to pretend to be an expert on Anarkâs whole body of work. I have only watched a handful of his videos, on recommendation from an anarchist I know. But what I did see was enough to recognize: petty-bourgeois anarchism dressed up in the language and strappings of rigorous theory. The starting point it appears is never class struggle, production, imperialism, state power, colonial pressure, or the actual historical tasks of socialist construction. It is abstract âpower,â abstract âauthority,â abstract âdomination,â and then a moral judgment against every real revolutionary state for failing to match an idealized fantasy of immediate anti-authoritarian purity.
In theoretical terms: phrase-mongering and infantile ultra-leftism. From what I have seen, his understanding of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and existing socialist states is paper-thin. Socialist construction under siege, blockade, sabotage, civil war, peasant backwardness, imperialist encirclement, and restorationist pressure gets flattened into a morality tale about âauthoritarianism.â
His definition of power is fine, if overly individualist: âthe ability to successfully enact oneâs will.â This makes sense given individualism being a pillar of anarchism. But the definition of âauthoritarianismâ is yet another vacuous redefinition to add to the pile. It strips analysis of class content, state form, property relations, and historical function. âThe degree to which a power structure monopolizes control over the total social implementation of some powerâ sounds precise, but it tells us almost nothing. Which class controls it? Through what institutions? On the basis of what property relations? Against whom is coercion being used? In what historical situation? A workersâ state, a fascist state, a colonial state, a bourgeois liberal state, and a revolutionary army can all be made to fit vague language about monopoly, coercion, and implementation. Returning it once again to a label for designated bad countriesâą.
Your claim that defending proletarian power is ânot materialistâ because it supposedly relies on people with the correct ideas doing domination is a misunderstanding of the argument. Marxist-Leninists do not defend proletarian state power because the people wielding it have nicer opinions. We defend it because class power is materially rooted. A bourgeois state defends private property, capital accumulation, wage labour, imperialist extraction, and the dictatorship of capital not because they have bad ideas but that it is directly within their class interest to do so. A proletarian state, however imperfectly and under real contradiction, is a transitional instrument for suppressing the old exploiting classes, socializing production, defending the revolution, and reorganizing society toward communism not because they have better ideas but again because it is directly in their class interest to do so.
You also misunderstand class when you claim that administrators in socialist states simply become a ruling class of bureaucrats because they administer. Administrators, planners, party officials, and state functionaries can absolutely develop bureaucratic distortions, careerism, privilege, and contradictions. Marxist-Leninists do not need anarchists to discover bureaucracy for us. But a bureaucrat without private ownership of the means of production, without the legal right to buy, sell, bequeath, and accumulate productive property as capital, does not occupy a different class but a different stratum of the same class.
And it is obviously valid to point out that words were specifically chosen for their negative connotations. An unrelated example to show the point: there's a reason western media uses regime for talking about "designated bad countriesâą" governments despite it effectively being a synonym of government, it's the connotation. Criticising this is again obviously valid.
I can tell. I will ignore your wrong, and partially ad-hominem attacks on Anark (like him supposedly not understanding Marx). They are baseless and tangential to the discussion.
It seems as if you claim that individualism is the main pillar of anarchism, which ignores the anarchist collectivist tradition. Anarchism focuses both on the individual and the collective.
It is an abstract term with an abstract definition. All the things you mention can be subsumed under that abstract definition.
It seems you have a problem with abstraction in general. It seems that's due to motivated reasoning, rather than the wish to do scientifically/logically rigorous thinking.
That's motivated reasoning. The critique is against all states, not against "designated bad countriesâą".
You complain about abstract definitions before and now you hide against the huge abstraction of "clars interest".
You claim that the party (the controling body of the so-called "socialist" states) has "proletarian class interests". But that implies that the members of the party are actually part of the proletarian class. This supposed class membership is purely idealist. A materialist analysis suggests however, that they are not proletarian, but a class of bureaucrats.
That's not all they do. Anark's critique doesn't attack administration. But they administer via authoritarian and domination strategies.
I will ignore your critique of the form, since it's not directed at the argument made.
Edit: I still didn't see any argument made about how this definition fits the term "western propaganda", except for "word sounds scary", which doesn't critique the content of the definition. The same points would be valid if you called it "power-monopolized".
You are incorrectly defining class. This essence of class is: who controls the means of production, and who decides what to do with the surplus value created, and who it goes to benefit.
State administrators (uncharitably bureaucrats as you would call them) are not a class. They do not privately owns means of production, nor collect the surplus value of workers, deciding privately what to do with it. What to do with the surplus, and production decisions, are determined by decision making at the collective, political-level, not at the private level. This means they are not driven by profit motives, since increasing exploitation personally gains them nothing.
The party is the owner of the means of production. That's why anachists call AES "state-capitalism".
Anarchists use the term "state-capitalism" because they don't have a clue what they're talking about
Wrong again. The working class is the owner of production, and elect and delegate managers dedicated to this task.
Name me a single grouping of any kind that doesn't have managers, leaders, or organizers.
So, can anyone be delegated to be a manager, can that mandate be recalled by the workers again, or do you need to be in the party to be eligible?
Straw-man. I'm not arguing against administration (nor is any collectivist anarchist).
The party is not the de jure nor de facto owner of the means of production, the entire working class is. This is why production in socialist economies is not run for the accumulation of capital in the hands of party members, such would make accusations of "state capitalism" hold water. Production is socialized, and the social surplus is also socialized.
Saying Anark displays a poor understanding of Marxism is not an ad hominem. It is an observation about the content of his analysis. An ad hominem would be âhe is wrong because he is personally bad or stupid.â I am saying his categories are weak because they fail to grasp class content, state form, property relations, and historical development. That is directly relevant to the argument.
I also never said individualism is the only or the main pillar of anarchism. I said it is a pillar, which it plainly is, and this has been a Marxist criticism of anarchism since Marx and Lenin. The fact that there is a collectivist anarchist tradition does not erase the petty-bourgeois individualist core of much anarchist theory: the tendency to begin from abstract individual autonomy, abstract anti-authority, and abstract moral opposition to coercion rather than from class struggle and historically specific relations of production.
Your defense of the âauthoritarianismâ definition as merely âabstractâ misses the point. The problem is not abstraction as such. Marxism uses abstraction constantly. The problem is bad abstraction: abstraction that removes the decisive features of the thing being analyzed. A useful abstraction helps reveal the essence of a process. This one obscures it. It tells us there is concentrated power, coercion, and administration. That describes every state and every serious revolutionary process in class society. What it does not tell us is which class holds power, what property relations are being defended or abolished, what state form exists, what social base sustains it, what historical pressures condition it, and whether the coercion is being used to preserve exploitation or suppress exploiters.
My objection is not that the definition is âtoo abstract.â It is that it is vacuous. It explains nothing of substance while pretending to explain everything. It takes the unavoidable existence of state power under class antagonism and gives it a scary liberal gloss. Then, in practice, it becomes a ready-made tool for flattening the difference between a bourgeois imperialist state and a socialist state under siege. You can say the critique is âagainst all states,â but that is infantile. Critiquing all states in the same moral register, without class content, only benefits the existing hegemonic order. The bourgeois state already exists globally as the dominant power. Treating proletarian state power as equally evil for exercising coercion does not transcend the bourgeois state; it disarms opposition to it.
You also accuse me of hiding behind the abstraction of âclass interest,â but class interest is not an empty abstraction. It is rooted in material relations to production, ownership, surplus extraction, and the reproduction of social relations. The bourgeoisie has an interest in maintaining private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus value. The proletariat has an interest in abolishing those relations because it does not own the means of production and survives by selling labour-power. That is not idealism. That is basic historical materialism.
Your claim that party members or state administrators in socialist states are automatically not proletarian because they administer is nonsense. Class is not determined by whether someone performs administrative labour or exercises authority. Class position is determined principally by relation to the means of production, particularly ownership thereof. A school principal is not less proletarian than a teacher merely because they administer. A doctor, safety inspector, engineer, planner, or workplace coordinator may exercise authority in a technical or administrative capacity without thereby becoming a capitalist. The key question is whether they privately own productive property and appropriate surplus value as capital.
The same applies to government administrators in socialist states. Their existence creates contradictions, and bureaucracy can become a serious danger. Marxist-Leninists have written extensively on this. But a state functionary operating inside a socialized property system, without private ownership of the means of production, without the legal right to buy, sell, bequeath, and accumulate productive property as capital, is not automatically a bourgeois class simply because they administer. You are confusing function with class position.
Saying âthey administer via authoritarian and domination strategiesâ does not solve this. It just repeats the same empty categories. Every state administers through coercive mechanisms because every state is an instrument of class rule. The question is not whether coercion exists. The question is coercion by which class, against which class, defending which property relations, and moving society in which direction. Without that, âauthoritarianismâ and âdominationâ become little more than moral labels for power you dislike.
I do not think âauthoritarianâ is inherently a Western propaganda term. The problem is that it is a vacuous political label: it covers a wide range of state forms and social relations while explaining very little about their actual class content. In that sense, it functions much like âregime.â It can describe almost anything with centralized power, but it tells us nothing decisive about which class rules, what property relations are being defended, whose interests the state serves, or what historical conditions produced it. Precisely because of that vagueness which abstracts away the core of the matter, it becomes useful to Western propaganda under the current conditions of Western hegemony: it allows imperialist states and their ideological apparatuses to flatten socialist, anti-imperialist, or otherwise non-aligned states into a moral category of âbad governments,â they can then point to and shout look at these authoritarians who are just as authoritarian (read bad) as the Nazis.
Edit: Damn I appear to have joined cowbee on the prestigious "anarchist" block list. (An important note that "anarchists" and anarchists are distinct groups).
I'm going to take this as a jumping off point to explicate the nature of the administrative arm of the state further for any lurkers out there.
What exactly do state administrators do? Administration is the enforcement arm of the state - they exist to see the law carried out. People think of cops when they hear the term "law enforcement," but 'the law' is greater than just the criminal code; it also contains regulations on worker wages and hours, food safety, and energy usage, to name a few things.
In the west, discussion of this tends to begin and end with "bureaucracy bad." The libertarian framing of needful regulation as "restricting freedom" has infected a lot of the western working class with bourgeouis ideals and convinced them to act against their own class interests. It should be obvious that clean air, clean water, functioning infrastructure, and higher wages are in the working class's interest. Capital, however, will always seek to maximize profit, and regulations will invariably cut into those profits. Whether that's indirectly in the provision of vital services paid with taxes, or directly in extra costs to capital in the form of higher wages or complying with environmental regulations. And in the sense that more regulations require higher cost of compliance, these can be seen as suppressing the petite bourgeoisie by making entering an industry require higher investment which pushes out would-be 'small business owners.' The working class can be tricked into supporting deregulation by their desire to escape wage labor by joining the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie.
As capital controls the government in capitalist "democracies," it has a number of tools at its disposal to undermine its own administrative arm. These include underfunding their enforcement or setting the penalties as mere fees that companies consider the cost of doing business, but also more structural methods, such as privatizing as much of it as possible so that even these necessary functions can be subordinated to producing profit - infrastructure (both physical and digital) in the US is built not by the government itself but by contractors. Likewise, healthcare, transportation, energy production, and even weapons manufacturing are handled by private companies instead of by the government. These things become expensive because they must produce profit.
In a socialist state, these functions are performed directly by the government itself which serves both to keep costs down and protect the interests of the working class. This is necessary because even after a proletarian revolution, the capitalist class continues to exist. As long as it does, it will continue to try to maximize its profits, and it does so by cutting corners in manufacturing, abusing workers, and will always attempt to regain the power it has lost. As such, the socialist states must maintain a strong administrative arm to keep the capitalist class constrained.
Let's examine how violators are handled between the two systems to make it clear how these differ in their functioning. There are many examples of US corporations cutting corners - consider the Ford Pinto, that was knowingly designed in such a way that increased fatalities from rear-end collisions. Ford was eventually fined in a lawsuit, but no one went to prison or suffered any greater penalty. This is typical of US enforcement actions, and leads US corporations to cut corners and budget for legal penalties. If the corners cut save more money than projected legal cases will cost, the corporations will put out products knowing they will prove fatal for some number of people who use them.
By way of comparison, let's look at a Chinese case. Most of us over a certain age probably remember the melamine scandal back in 2008, when a Chinese corporation named Sanlu Group adulterated powdered milk with melamine in order to artificially boost the protein content, and 6 infants died as a result. Several public officials were stripped of office, the corporation went bankrupt, several executives went to prison, and 2 people were executed.
The differences between the two couldn't be more stark. In a capitalist country, regulation exists at best as a "gentleman's agreement" between capitalists, while as in a socialist country, it is the strong arm of the state, able to constrain capital and punish it for failure to comply.
You attacked the person instead of the argument by stating wrong things about him (aka slander). That's close enough. What Adam Smith understood about Marxism shouldn't matter in the discussion about what he observed about the economy.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't know any better. But bragging about your analysis lacking one essential perspective is less of a brag than you think.
Also, what Marx said and what Lenin are two distinct things. You shouldn't throw them together.
You also make wrong statements about anarchism. It is not petit-bourgeois and not moralist. The rejection of being dominated is rooted in biology.
The applied reasoning is inductive, not deductive. The quoted work analyses from first principles and therefore needs abstract definitions to have as a base.
If a math textbook starts with an axiom, would you complain after the introduction that the axiom doesn't include some corellary you expect twenty pages in?
So your complaint about not including class relationships and other things that happen further down the logical chain lays bare that you're practicing motivated reasoning: if you can't anticipate that the reasoning coincides with your pre-meditated beliefs, you discard it with unrelated accusations.
You're like an intelligent design christian, reading a book about evolution and exclaiming "But where is god in all this?" When the book explains the basics of mitosis.
And how does that definition fit the so-called "parties of the proletariat" in the PRC?
So, do the workers of state-owned MOP keep all the value they create, or is the surplus value taken by it's owner (the party)?
No, I did not. I gave my assessment of Anarkâs theoretical positions and then addressed the argument directly. Saying someone is a phrase-monger with a poor understanding of Marxism is not slander when it's true. If someoneâs categories erase class content, state form, property relations, imperialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, then their understanding of Marxism is directly relevant to the discussion. Calling that âslanderâ is just a way to avoid answering the critique.
Marx and Lenin are obviously different people writing in different periods. But their analysis is not sealed off into unrelated compartments. Lenin develops Marxism under the conditions of imperialism and proletarian revolution; he does not abandon Marx. On anarchism, their criticisms are fundamentally linked and lead to the same core conclusion: anarchism expresses a petty-bourgeois individualist hostility to the political struggle, proletarian state power, and the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat.
As Lenin put it:
Or:
This is pseudoscientific hand-waving at best. Humans and animals have formed hierarchies since the dawn of cooperation. Parent and child, teacher and student, doctor and patient, experienced worker and apprentice, commander and militia member: hierarchy and authority emerge for concrete reasons, and they sure as shit are not simply ârejected by biology.â The serious question is not whether authority exists. It is what kind of authority, rooted in what social relation, serving what purpose, and accountable to whom. A parent stopping a child from running into traffic is not the same thing as a landlord extracting rent, and neither is the same thing as a workersâ state suppressing counter-revolution.
I am genuinely speechless that you spent so much time braying about anarchism not being petty-bourgeois or individualist, only to end with an almost parody-level petty-bourgeois individualist misunderstanding of socialism.
Socialism does not mean every individual worker directly owns âtheirâ means of production and receives âtheirâ full individual value like a little proprietor. That is petty bourgeois nonsense. Socialism means the proletariat as a class owns the means of production through socialized forms and redirects surplus toward the needs of the proletariat as a whole, instead of having that surplus privately appropriated by capitalists.
Your formulation exposes exactly the individualist petty-bourgeois premise you just spent paragraphs denying. You treat socialism as if it should mean each worker or each workplace immediately pockets its own product. That is a fantasy of decentralized proprietorship, not proletarian social ownership. The proletariat does not abolish capitalism by turning every worker into a tiny owner guarding their own little share. It abolishes capitalism by taking hold of production as a class and subordinating surplus to collective development.
Again it is remarkable how perfectly your ending demonstrates the critique. You deny that anarchism is petty-bourgeois individualism, then immediately judge socialist ownership from the standpoint of the isolated producer asking, âWhere is my individual product?â That is the petty-bourgeois horizon in its purest form: hostile to the capitalist, but incapable of grasping the proletariat acting as a class through socialized property, central planning, and state power.
Why bring him up, then? Does your assessment of anark have anything to do with the definition? Would you have deduced that this definition must come from a person, which insert your false assumptions about Anark here?
Ok. It's not true, though.
Anark's work erases none of those things.
Correctly classyfying it as slander is a protection against Brandolini's law.
Leninism is not a correct logical development of marxism. His theory of the bourgeois state as an agent of the bourgeoisie is blatantly incorrect.
Your Lenin quotes, where he dismisses anarchist collectivism is another example of how he had some serious bullshit takes.
Name one animal where a hierarchy exists that starves other members of their species from the things they require to live. Name one animal where the hierarchies persist in a form after the individual at the top dies. Name one animal where the upper rungs of the hierarchies can punish the lower ones.
Is your doctor your boss? Can they take away your liver as punishment? Do parents regularly enact their position to starve their children? Is it a healthy parent-child relationship when the parent continuosly takes away the child's decision making power?
You don't understand the anarchist definition of hierarchy. That's a prerequisite to be able to understand any anarchist position. You're like an intelligent designer arguing against mitosis.
Explain how workers defending against counter-revolution is authoritarian, according to the above definition.
You continuously conflate the party with the workers. That's the same BS as conflating the Ukranian people with the Selensky regime (or "government", if you prefer the less loaded term).
No, in socialism, every worker should have a say in how the surplus value (or the MOP, or whatever) is employed, in addition with the consumers, ideally in decentralized soviets.
Because you cited his definitions and grounded the discussion in his work. I gave a brief assessment of the theorist whose categories you were using, then moved directly into the categories themselves. You clearly have some attachment to Anark and need him to be treated as a serious thinker. That's fine you can keep that belief. The rest of us can look at the phrase-mongering, the weak grasp of Marxism, and the anti-communism and move on.
Completely detached from reality and history.
The idea that the bourgeois state is not an agent of the bourgeoisie is absurd. What do you think the bourgeois state does? It protects private property, enforces contract law, disciplines labour, defends capital accumulation, preserves the conditions for wage labour, protects imperialist extraction, bails out capital in crisis, breaks strikes when necessary, polices the dispossessed, and maintains the legal and military framework of bourgeois rule. This is not mystical. It is the observable function of the modern capitalist state.
Lenin did not drag Marxism away from Marx. He developed Marxism under the conditions of monopoly capitalism, imperialism, world war, proletarian revolution, and colonial struggle. You can reject Leninism, but pretending it is not a logical development of Marxism in the age of imperialism is just unserious.
âCorrectly classifying this as slander is a protection against Brandoliniâs law.â /s
You were very concerned about âslanderâ when Anark was called a phrase-monger with a poor understanding of Marxism, but apparently Lenin can simply be dismissed as having âbullshit takes.â Convenient standard. In any case, Lenin was not unaware that collectivist anarchists existed. His point was that anarchism, even in collectivist dress, tends toward petty-bourgeois individualism because it rejects proletarian state power, centralism, discipline, and the political struggle necessary for the working class to rule as a class.
Humans, for all three, since the beginning of organized human society: family heads becoming clan elders to chiefs and so on.
But even outside humans, your framing is weak. Elephant seals maintain dominance hierarchies where dominant males monopolize access to mates and violently exclude rivals. Spotted hyenas have durable matriarchal hierarchies where rank affects access to food and social power. Bees and naked mole rats have reproductive hierarchies where queens monopolize reproduction and subordinate members are biologically and socially organized into specialized roles. Many primates punish lower-ranking members through aggression, exclusion, and dominance enforcement.
Does this mean capitalism is natural? No. That would be a stupid conclusion. But it shows why your biology argument is useless pseudoscience. Biology does not prove anarchism. It does not prove anti-hierarchy. It does not tell us which forms of authority are socially necessary, exploitative, transitional, oppressive, or liberatory. For that, you need historical and class analysis.
I understand it. I think it is bad.
The anarchist definition of hierarchy constantly shifts to accommodate whatever hierarchy anarchists currently want to defend as ânot really hierarchyâ or âjustified authorityâ or âexpertiseâ or âcoordination.â Parent and child, doctor and patient, teacher and student, elected militia command, workplace coordination, revolutionary defense, public health measures, collective discipline: suddenly these are not hierarchy, because even anarchists know society cannot function without structured authority.
That is exactly the problem. The category is moral and elastic, not materialist. It expands to condemn socialist states and contracts to excuse socially necessary authority. Marxists are more direct: the question is not whether authority exists, but which class exercises it, through what institutions, over what property relations, and toward what historical end.
It is authoritarian by that definition because the proletariat monopolizes control over the social implementation of power by excluding the bourgeoisie, landlords, fascists, imperial agents, and other reactionary currents from political power. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the point.
This is why the definition is useless for Marxist analysis. It cannot distinguish between the bourgeoisie monopolizing power to preserve exploitation and the proletariat monopolizing power to suppress exploiters. Which I hope you can realise are two entirely separate concepts who's conflation only serves the status quo.
No, I identify the vanguard party as the organized political arm of the working class, not as a mystical substitute for every individual workerâs immediate opinion at every moment. The proletariat is not automatically unified, politically clear, or immune to bourgeois ideology simply because it is exploited. Workers can hold reactionary, liberal, nationalist, religious, racist, patriarchal, or even fascist ideas. That is why organization, theory, discipline, and leadership is necessary.
Your alternative is idealist fantasy: decentralized soviets magically expressing the authentic will of the workers without bourgeois pressure, imperialist sabotage, uneven consciousness, localism, corruption, military threat, economic backwardness, or class enemies. In reality, proletarian power requires institutions capable of coordinating production, defending the revolution, suppressing counter-revolution, and raising the political level of the masses. That is what the party is for.
This is not the same as conflating Ukrainians with their bourgeois-nationalist and fascist-influenced government. A bourgeois state rules over the masses in the interests of capital. A proletarian party, at least in its revolutionary function, is the organized instrument through which the working class consolidates power against capital. You can claim a given party has degenerated or failed; that is a concrete historical argument. But simply saying âparty not identical to workersâ is meaningless drivel.
The petty bourgeois individualism continues...
Yes, workers should participate in the state, in planning, in mass organizations, in workplace organs, in party structures, in unions, in local governance, and in criticism and supervision of officials. But âhaving a sayâ does not mean each individual worker, workplace, or local soviet has complete control over surplus. The means of production are not owned by isolated individuals or atomized local bodies. They are owned by the proletariat as a class.
That means surplus is not distributed according to each workerâs immediate individual preference. It is socially directed toward the needs of the whole class and the development of socialist society: infrastructure, education, healthcare, housing, defense, industrialization, science, poverty alleviation, regional development, and expanded reproduction. This requires central planning, coordination, administration, and coercive protection against restorationist forces.
You deny the petty-bourgeois individualist critique of anarchism, then immediately judge socialism from the standpoint of dispersed local control and suspicion of class-wide centralized power. That is again precisely the petty-bourgeois horizon: hostile to capital, but unable to grasp the proletariat ruling as a class through socialized property, state power, central planning, and revolutionary discipline.
I don't want to waste my valuable time with you anymore.
Have fun with your easily sabotaged worker's party, waiting for true communism as introducted by China. /s
TIL ancient rome was not doing imperialism. /s
đ Just say you're running away because you don't have the theoretical capacity to continue. It's ok you don't have to pretend.
Life for us proletariat in China is improving year on year as the economy is further socialised and the birdcage tightened. China is the current furthest along the socialist transition, is this an eternal truth obviously not but currently it absolutely is true. Also this coming from an anarchist is truly comedy when have you(plural) achieved anything. In fact if you were to quantify historical anarchist achievements it would likely be negative
The fact you seemingly lack the capability to separate pre capitalist imperialism and imperialism in the modern age and think thats and own is comical.
Wanking motion
Cope harder shitlib you know it's true. Shitlibs in cosplay like you give actual anarchists a bad name.
I don't want to return to monke.
You must tho
I'd die. You are a murderer.
Yes, I personally have murdered you. Twice at least.
Seems like I put the cart before the horse. Let me elaborate:
Social darwinists can return to monke (and die from recurring famines) if they want. But I will stay in the industrial age, where there's abundant food, because I don't want to die.
Ok... Where's the social darwinist? You sure you commented at the right spot? What does that have to do with anything discussed?
Sorry, in future I'll try to couch my insults in tedious redditisms like you did, presumably that will placate the mods. Apparently writing condescending purple prose dog shit like "I will ignore your wrong, and partially ad-hominem attacks on Anark (like him supposedly not understanding Marx). They are baseless and tangential to the discussion" is fine but just being direct and calling you a dipshit is crossing the line of not being insufferable enough.