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this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Very hard to be authoritarian when you're at the bottom of the economic totem pole. Are you sure you're not just talking about the police, writ large?
I was speaking of the general authoritarian vs libertarian divide in the left. It's not about power excercised, it's about the power some on the left feel entitled to exercise to achieve their goals.
Everyone on the left wants to make the world a better place, eliminate hunger and homelessness, all that good stuff.
--> The terminology is confusing though as different groups use different words or definitions.
On the one side you have your (authoritarian) "socialists", and "communists" those who believe that order must be imposed from above by a powerful government and this government. Good social behavior is coerced by implied threat of force. This government of course is supposed to be and remain benevolent and always controlled by well-meaning socialists to ensure a functional socialist system. The DSA fits in here on the lighter side, "tankies" fit here on the extreme authoritarian end.
On the other side you have your anarchist types (who are also typically non-authoritarian communists), those who feel that any entity powerful enough to control society will inevitably end up controlled by the worst type of people (because this is what's happened in every state/government that has ever existed) and the we should look to non-state and non-coercive solutions.
This reads more like a right-wing interpretation of leftism than any kind of leftist internal critique.
That's an Orwellian critique. But Orwell was a Burmese cop turned UK intelligence official under Churchill. The Animal Farm / 1984 view of left-libertarianism is far more a right-wing propaganda critique intended to discourage any form of organizing or collective action. Hell it might as well be lifted directly from the CIA Guidebook on how to disrupt a meeting rules 1, 7, and 8.
And, in the end, the reflexive flight from any kind of organizational structure demonstrably doesn't work. You can have fully decentralized entirely non-violent organically assembled student protests on college campuses, and you'll still be accused of operating as violent, bigoted, fifth columnist dupes of wicked foreign governments. Meanwhile, you're squaring off against a heavily financed, tightly managed, rigid state hierarchy that can act with impunity in the face of a fractured and easily infiltrated opposition.
The foundation of left-anarchism is the cultivation of networks of trust. Not a reactionary fear of authority. When anarchists trust one another, they can and do form hierarchies and develop party discipline and even form state structures once they've achieved sufficient degrees of success. And its these trust networks that allow a community of anarchists to preserver after decades under siege by militant capitalists.
Ya, this is the response I always get from tankies.