Memes

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But even assuming that state power of some degree is required, there is a lot of room for debate about how much.

Not when you treat "authoritarianism" as a hard binary there isn't.

The reason I bring up communalism, the more anarchist-adjacent forms of organization, is because they aren't really the same as what people talking about Marxist communism are. Tribal formations and communes are localized, based on self-sufficient and small-scale production and distribution.

Communism, in the Marxist sense, can be seen more as the stitching together of all humanity into one unified system, with mass production and distribution scientifically organized and planned to meet everyone's needs. This isn't really a moral judgement about either, but the understanding that when someone says "communism is authoritarian," they are referring to the Marxist conception, which is qualitatively different from the anarchist.

But even assuming that state power of some degree is required, there is a lot of room for debate about how much. Original commenter seemed concerned about authoritarianism, I assume that their understanding of communism is Stalin’s USSR. There are certainly ways to be auth/com without going that far, and that commenter may find those appealing.

This is a much more interesting argument, in my opinion, because it requires answering what it means to wield authority.

In Marxist analysis, the state is within the class struggle, and exists precisely to represent a definite class. Thus, authority lies within the hands of a definite class in any given state, that class being the one with political and economic control.

What determines the extent to which authority is wielded?

It can seem pretty obvious that it's the decision of the government to act in this or that matter when dealing with different problems faced by society. However, this is looking at the effect, not the cause. The cause of wielding authority is the class struggle, which has necessary material struggles. In other words, the extent to which authority is employed is not simply a choice by the state, but a reaction to the conditions one finds themselves in.

Take Germany, for example. The rise of the Nazi party was an explicit reaction to ongoing labor organizing, capitalist decay, and a crisis in economy due to the inter-war debts. However, Germany of today has had less of a need to exert authority, so it hasn't. This is changing, though, as pro-Palestinian protestors are beaten, and the far-right is rising due to intense economic crisis and the downfall of imperialism as a means to inflate the economy.

The same applies to the USSR. The system of the soviet union was fundamentally democratic. 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, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.

What happened wasn't a crisis in structure, but a reaction to existing heightened class struggle and siege from imperialists. Fascists and tsarists, kulaks and capitalists, all manner of those opposed to socialism remained in the USSR long after its inception. Revolution does not immediately abolish them, no matter how democratic or egalitarian your new society is, because the older ruling classes lose in socialism. Class struggle continues under socialism.

That's why my question is simple: what could the USSR have done to be "less authoritarian?" That isn't to say that the soviet union never made mistakes or errors, or was structurally perfect, but instead to ask about the nature of authority itself, and why it's applied more or less in different conditions. Is it as simple as a choice made by the state? Or is it deeper than that, a result of dialectical contradictions working themselves out?