this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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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 “he is wrong because he is personally bad or stupid.” 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 “authoritarianism” definition as merely “abstract” 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 “too abstract.” 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 “against all states,” 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 “class interest,” 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 “they administer via authoritarian and domination strategies” 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, “authoritarianism” and “domination” become little more than moral labels for power you dislike.
I do not think “authoritarian” 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 “regime.” 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 “bad governments,” 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 Anark’s 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 someone’s 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 “slander” 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 “rejected by biology.” 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 workers’ 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 “their” means of production and receives “their” 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, “Where is my individual product?” 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.
“Correctly classifying this as slander is a protection against Brandolini’s law.” /s
You were very concerned about “slander” when Anark was called a phrase-monger with a poor understanding of Marxism, but apparently Lenin can simply be dismissed as having “bullshit takes.” 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 “not really hierarchy” or “justified authority” or “expertise” or “coordination.” 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 worker’s 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 “party not identical to workers” 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 “having a say” 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 worker’s 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
😂 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?