this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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A few things to keep in mind in addition to our comrade's reply:
I've never met or talked online with any tankie who is happy with the fact that the "authoritarian oppression" is necessary. We often just take the position of Marx's quote "we won't make excuses for the terror." You don't have to want it, but because it's necessary according to history and theory, we don't bother with the whole game of waiting for the perfect excuse, because then it's often too late for a movement.
The goal of tankies is to also reach that world of no necessary oppression and liberation from it for all through dialectical progression, however long and arduous that task is. We just try to be technical, tactical, and strategic about it. It can seem callous, but it's a mistake to think we can stay on the emotional/values-only plane of thought while attempting large scale socio-economic changes because the enemies of those changes have a system behind them which fulfills all these tasks with low effort.
When we say authoritarianism is meaningless, we mean that the dictionary definition you gave is all encompassing at state-level analyses, rendering it meaningless for distinctions. There is no power which doesn't fulfill all of those conditions (even just a low-level manager performs the contents of that definition, despite the form it takes being small scale. Like "reductions of the rule of law" can be as simple as asking you to do tasks on outside of your contract). The only difference is a vibe created in the mind of the user of the term.
The end of this authority at societal scale is communism. Countries sometimes called communist are better called socialist countries led by communists or something. The whole discussion is rendered confusing by mistaking a process/movement for some definitional standard. No socialist country is socialist for meeting definitions/conditions; they are socialist because they recognize and continue the process to progression to communism. See point 2 for the strategy which countries led by communists are doing.
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I appreciate the reply and break-down of some of these concepts in context. I struggle with the necessity of authoritarianism, not because of the required restrictions on freedom necessary to protect others from oppression, but by shielding a system from criticism as opposed to allowing critique to be heard and resolved through collective discourse. I definitely also recognize that's an arduous process that requires a necessary undermining of governmental authority, but I feel like there's a sort of unintended arrogance in the idea that any system could be free enough of flaws to be above criticism- or that it's good enough to be worth the oppression of the few without hearing their voices and honestly considering their plight.
I'm happy, always, to learn more and engage in conversations about this, I look forward to talking with folks on Hexbear and growing my understanding of these concepts!
I don't think there's many MLs that would argue against you here, at least as far as ideals go. In fact you'll find a lot of internal criticism of past socialist experiments. It's just not really criticism if it's not taking into account historical context and/or if it's based largely on western misinformation.
What most western criticism of AES lacks is key historical context (this comment is very stream of consciousness so forgive me for being all over the place):
Threats of invasion, sabotage, espionage, assassination, etc have always been a threat to vested power, but even more so against revolutionary movements. Rosa Luxembourg was killed. Lenin was nearly assassinated (may have caused him to die early). Stalin may have been assassinated. Castro somehow survived hundreds of attempts and plans. Che was killed. Allende was overthrown (and maybe killed). Árbenz was overthrown. Malcolm X was killed. Fred Hampton was killed. Sukarno was overthrown. Sankara was killed. All this just off the top of my head, there's plenty more examples.
The Soviet Union had 20 years to somehow industrialize well enough to face European invasion, withstanding both internal and external attacks. The alternative was quite literally death.
The absolute strength, size, and resources of the US empire are unprecedented, which significantly alters the material conditions and thus the strategies that must be employed by revolutionary movements for survival. US intelligence agencies have become very good at manufacturing or manipulating social unrest to destabilize a country and set up a coup. Check out The Jakarta Method for an overview of some of these strategies.
So yes, ideally we would all interact freely in the marketplace of ideas, and bad ideas would be refuted by facts and logic. But the unfortunate reality is that bad faith actors and saboteurs have proven incredibly effective at materially undermining revolutionary movements, and thus any criticism of those movements must take that into account or it's a useless criticism.