WillStealYourUsername

all states are authoritarian

Not in the same ways. You support dictatorships where workers have no power, nor the means to eventually hold power later down the line. I support neither capitalist regimes nor dictatorships pretending to be socialist.

To get rid of the state, all property needs to be collectivized, which both gets rid of class and the state itself.

Yes.

There’s no “promising to abolish” anything, the state gradually withers away with respect to class withering away as property is sublimated and collectivized.

No marxist can describe how this will happen. The dictators in charge do not have incentives to give away their power, nor are there other mechanisms in place that can bring about socialism. It’s literally just propaganda. Inequality in china is not withering away, there’s just a growing middle class the same way we had a growing middle class in other places where industrialization happened. The state owning and running things does not equate to socialism. It could, if there was democracy of some kind rather than oligarchy supplemented with very minor political participation from a fraction of the population.

I am a Marxist, yes. I became one after engaging with history, theory, logic, and practice. The fact that poor logic and false history doesn’t sway me doesn’t diminish my points. I haven’t seen any ethical arguments being brought up here.

Your auth states commit all the evils of capitalist empires and yet you still defend them. That’s not exactly ethical. Authoritarianism can’t be ethical in practice because of the incentives the people in power have to keep their power, and the things they do to keep it. “Communist” states are far more authoritarian than most liberal democracies, which is why I call them authoritarian. I call you authoritarian because you defend them and wish to implement similar oligarchies/dictatorships elsewhere. This is not to say I like liberalism, just by comparison your system is in many ways worse. Unions are way more suppressed, people are less active politically, and there are no big benefits to make up for it. Genocide is still happening, billionaires are still being produced, freedom of speech is still suppressed, etc. Like yeah we can sit here and compare metrics and see both capitalist and marxist states are doing good and bad in all sorts of different ways. Both systems work to a point. I don’t care. I want actual democracy. I want actual freedom. I want actual socialism, or at least a system which can produce socialism unlike your auth vanguard states.

I will be blocking you after this.

Edit: To me the big mystery is why defend these states? Why aim for vanguard states? Can’t we aim for something better rather than something that has “succeeded”? Why do we have to choose between liberalism and marxism when we can instead try to work towards actual socialism?

The revolution comes, comrade :3

I will not be an enemy of existing socialism or of the working class of those countries.

You already are, auth

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The soviet union and the CCP today famously committed a number of genocides, killed dissenters, and are one party states. You seem to think I mean liberal democracy when I say democracy. I mean democracy.

Soviet Democracy by Priestland seems to disagree with you on how democratic the worplaces were. The power of the unions was greatly dialed back very quickly, with managers being reintroduced and the economy becoming more hierarchical as time went on.

Incorrect. You are referring to cooperatives,

Socialism being when the workers own the means of production is kinda essential, be it directly or indirectly. This is the basis on which I state that tankies are not socialists. I’m guessing you think that the workers indirectly own the means in the soviet union, or that the direct democracy you seem to think existed there for any meaningful amount of time counted (it did count, but again, only briefly).

Anything you’ve said about china is just flat out wrong. The soviet union is certainly complicated, and much could be debated there, especially since the power of the unions fluctuated with time, but workers have literally zero power under the ccp.

But we clearly disagree on reality, no further debate is necessary. Have a nice day I guess.

No actually. The Soviet Union was a union of national republics, hence the name.

Ah, I misremembered. I thought soviet meant council as in a union.

I’m not going to spend too much time debating a tankie, but I think most of these regimes kinda by definition are not socialist given how little power the workers had. When unions are suppressed and the military and the dictatorship are essentially the same thing, how could they be socialist? Socialism requires that workers own their workplaces, that they run them. This was not the case in the soviet union nor is it the case in china today, where businesses are either organized by the state (like in the soviet union) or mixed (CCP). The state organizing businesses or whatever you want to call them would be fine if the people owned the state, but again these were/are dictatorships.

The people don’t control anything at all in your so called marxist states, and so therefore they are not marxist. Centralization is not something that I’m opposed to, but what does it matter how decentralized or centralized something is if it’s not also democratically owned?

I would probably call myself a marxist if tankies hadn’t so thoroughly stained the term.

Edit: I am also well aware that there were unions in the soviet union, hence the name. However they had little power, and mostly could only ever push for worker safety regulations.

Historically it has never worked out very well for the anarchists, so I would hope that they have learned their lesson by now

It’s really not unorthodox in leftist spaces, only in tankie and non-leftist places :/

I dunno where to find sources on hexbear being bad, but please stop using marxist and tankie as if they are synonymous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

Hexbear has been problematic from the start. I would love to find some sources, but that would require effort that I’m not willing to expend right now. Basically hexbear has done a lot of brigading and bullying in the past, with blessings from their moderators.

I do not consider tankies socialists, as socialism is inherently anti-authoritarian, and I honestly have little respect for socialists and anarchists that hang out with them. History has seen the regimes the tankies defend ruin attempts at socialism and anarchy countless times, especially considering that these regimes are often military takeovers of actual socialist revolutions.

It’s a nice atmosphere if you aren’t a liberal.

Doesn’t sound like it would have a nice atmosphere for socialists or anarchists either

Edit: Also that place allows coordinated attacks against non-tankies, and the most troubling users from blåhaj ran to that place, so I’m not super impressed.

Fascism is by definition a form of capitalism :P As defined by Mussolini back then and by political scientists today. It’s not just about dictatorship, but about the relationship between private businesses and the state.

Why would anarchists associate with tankies? I don’t wanna share any space with authoritarians of any kind

I mean that’s why they are called tankies :P It’s a derogatory word originally used to describe “socialists” defending tanks being sent into ukraine by the soviet union, and then was quickly used to describe all “socialists” defending genocide, imperialism, and authoritarianism.

Then you don’t know what communism is. I’ve never met a non-socalist who knows what socialism is, or can describe how or why socialism has failed in the past.

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Tankies are authoritarians and therefore cannot call themselves socialist

I agree in spirit! However the soviet union was neither capitalist nor communist, and fascism is a form of capitalism which means the soviet union wasn’t fascist, but rather something else entirely.