Memes

Why bring him up, then?

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.

Leninism is not a correct logical development of Marxism. His theory of the bourgeois state as an agent of the bourgeoisie is blatantly incorrect.

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.

Your Lenin quotes, where he dismisses anarchist collectivism, are another example of how he had some serious bullshit takes.

“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.

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.

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.

You don’t understand the anarchist definition of hierarchy.

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.

Explain how workers defending against counter-revolution is authoritarian, according to the above definition.

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.

You continuously conflate the party with the workers.

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.

No, in socialism, every worker should have a say in how the surplus value is employed, in addition with the consumers, ideally in decentralized soviets.

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.