The political compass is an attempt to reduce incredibly complicated political questions into two simple lines, and people accept it because it aligns with oversimplified narratives and cultural preconceptions.

"Liberty" and "authority" have little meaning beyond "good" and "bad." If authority is defined more rigorously, or if we use more neutral terms like "centralization" or public vs private, then it becomes a lot less clear that what we're talking about is contrary to "liberty." The private sector, and private individuals, can be just as restrictive of liberty.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is the American Civil War. The southerners were the champions of decentralization, they spoke constantly about how they were fighting for "liberty" against the supposed tyranny of the northerners - and the reason they wanted "states' rights" and decentralization is that they would be able to keep people enslaved. It was big, centralized government, that evil "authoritarian" force imposing it's authority that resulted in a greater degree of liberty. But that is not just some freak exception.

If someone can't go out at night without fear of being attacked, that person is no more "free" to go out than if they feared legal repercussions. Governments are, at their worst, no different from a criminal organization, and yet there is this tendency to assign special status to restrictions imposed by the law, rather than being on the same level as restrictions imposed by private individuals or organizations.

And again, we can see how "big government" or "authoritarianism" can increase liberty in the context of regulations, of pollution, of food safety, and of untested drugs. If I can trust regulators to stop a restaurant from serving anything unsafe, then I'm free to order anything off the menu, whereas if not, then everything's a gamble and I might feel restricted to foods I expect to be "safe," if I don't avoid the restaurant entirely.

There once was a time when states viewed things like murder as a personal dispute between families, and didn't generally get involved. This led to all kinds of generational feuds, with people killing each other over a long forgotten dispute between their great-grandfathers. Was that "liberty?" Is that something we should idealize and try to return to?

I'm sure there are people who will read this as me being "pro-authoritarian" and ignoring all the bad things done by states. But that's missing the point. The point is not that centralization or state power are always good, the point is that it's not automatically bad. Having a knee-jerk reaction against it is just oversimplifying complicated issues, and doing so in a way that lots of powerful people want you to do. Because the ruling class understands that they can wield private institutions and privatization just as they can wield public institutions.

You can't just blindly apply an idealist ideological framework of "anti-authoritarianism" to every problem and expect that to produce good results. You have to look at things on a case-by-case basis, applying class analysis.

The way I see it, it's a matter of where a person's mind is at — that doesn't necessarily mean that, A, you know everything about their opinions (those will be formed partially by their environment and experience) or B, that they'll never change.

My understanding on liberty vs authority is that everybody (generally) believes they have the right to liberty, to determine the course of their lives. Liberty means you believe others are as well, and authority means you believe liberty should be determined by the government.

Regarding restaurants, I never thought of it that way. I always thought of liberty as personal liberty, not the liberty to start a company and do bad things. But you're right, someone who is 100% for liberty and 0% for authority would seem to be opposed to all kinds of regulation, thinking "you are free to start a company that has no safety considerations and I am free to seek work elsewhere," with the reasoning being that the society will self regulate, that the company will push safety to attract workers. But it's never that simple.

So when I say I lean heavily toward liberty on that scale and heavily toward progression (as opposed to conservatism), you may be able to guess some of my positions and some of my votes, but you're right in that things aren't that simple, and people vote against their interests all the time.

The compass is also stupid because it made me very libertarian just because I'm socially progressive, and I'm a communist. It seems to me to just be an attempt to confuse well meaning, politically illiterate people.

Really, it's a Marxist critique of the liberal political compass. I believe that while class struggle exists, the state must exist, and since that's the case the working classes should hold state power and use it in their interests. This maximizes personal liberty for a large majority of society while curbing the liberty of the former ruling classes, while also being "authoritarian" in the eyes of liberals.

Naturally you have to have a certain amount of authority to create a system with guaranteed rights. But the words are still accurate:

If you want to guarantee lots of rights for all (or some) you'll want powerful government with lots of authority. Authoritarian.

Feel like strong government is too much of a threat for personal freedom to be worth it? Libertarian.

do communists want a classless, stateless society?

Yeah, but we contend with material reality and understand we can't just press the communism button and will it into existence, the transition to a classless and stateless society is a very complex process that requires solving societal contradictions

Yes, but we also recognize that the path to statelessness involves abolishing the basis of the state, that being class struggle, and that this can't happen overnight, so the working classes need a working class state as this is accomplished. Further, administration is not the same as what we think of as the state.

A lot of what you're saying seems to be related to the concept of "negative liberty" and "positive liberty."

I'm not sure if the US south framed it as "states rights"/decentralization at the time. The confederacy was authoritarian. Slavery is authoritarian, and the Confederacy forced its member states to agree to never abolish slavery (removing states rights to abolish slavery).

Anyways, IDK if "authority is the opposite of liberty" or not, but I'm opposed authority (including capitalism which is inherently authoritarian). I think regulations, law enforcement, etc can be enforced by the community in a bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down one. Such things are handled that way in some autonomous areas, communes, and tribes.

Anyways, IDK if “authority is the opposite of liberty” or not, but I’m opposed authority

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.

Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it, whether — given the conditions of present-day society — we could not create another social system, in which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear.

On examining the economic, industrial and agricultural conditions which form the basis of present-day bourgeois society, we find that they tend more and more to replace isolated action by combined action of individuals. Modern industry, with its big factories and mills, where hundreds of workers supervise complicated machines driven by steam, has superseded the small workshops of the separate producers; the carriages and wagons of the highways have become substituted by railway trains, just as the small schooners and sailing feluccas have been by steam-boats. Even agriculture falls increasingly under the dominion of the machine and of steam, which slowly but relentlessly put in the place of the small proprietors big capitalists, who with the aid of hired workers cultivate vast stretches of land.

Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to have organisation without authority?

Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form? Let us see.

Let us take by way of example a cotton spinning mill. The cotton must pass through at least six successive operations before it is reduced to the state of thread, and these operations take place for the most part in different rooms. Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy. The workers must, therefore, first come to an understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed, must be observed by all, without any exception. Thereafter particular questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if possible, by a majority vote, the will of the single individual will always have to subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled in an authoritarian way. The automatic machinery of the big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the portals of these factories: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate! [Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]

If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.

Let us take another example — the railway. Here too the co-operation of an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no accidents may happen. Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority. Moreover, what would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. passengers were abolished?

But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.

We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this authority. Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight against the word.

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

I’m not sure if the US south framed it as “states rights”/decentralization at the time.

They were very much about decentralization, even in terms of the structure of the military. Governors had control of their own armies and there were frequent problems with coordination because of it. There wasn't even a standardized size for railroad tracks so they often had to unload cargo and transfer it.

Even the term "Confederacy" was a nod to the decentralized system of the Articles of Confederation. Of course, the fact that decentralization is often wildly impractical sometimes forced them to deviate from their ideological preferences (the exact same thing that had happened with the Articles of Confederation).

The confederacy was authoritarian. Slavery is authoritarian

(including capitalism which is inherently authoritarian)

Again, I think you're using "authoritarian" to just mean "bad."

Is it more or less authoritarian to live under a central authority that outlaws slavery? Obviously, the answer is less. But that would mean that a central authority being present can be less authoritarian than a decentralized system. That seems like a completely nonsensical statement to me, but I guess that's the language I'm forced to use if you insist on the language of "authoritarianism."

Applying this in the context of capitalism is even more problematic. Are minimum wage laws authoritarian? They are the product of a central authority telling people what they can and can't do. On the other hand, if they result in the average person having more money in their pocket, that would give them more freedom to act as they please. Once again, it seems possible that the imposition of authority on the market reduces overall "authoritarianism."

I think regulations, law enforcement, etc can be enforced by the community in a bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down one. Such things are handled that way in some autonomous areas, communes, and tribes.

But if impositions by a central authority are not inherently authoritarian, if authority can be anti-authoritarian, then why do we need to limit ourselves to looking at a few scattered examples in remote, low population tribes with material conditions that are vastly different from our own? Why can't we look at policies imposed by a central authority that have reduced authoritarianism?

The political compass is an attempt to reduce incredibly complicated political questions into two simple lines

uphold multipolarist thought /hj

Hmm, this is mostly a semantic argument on what authority is. I don't necessarily disagree with most of it, up until he starts getting prescriptive. I do disagree with "transitional governments" that never seem to relinquish their authority though. I do think it's possible to tear down the state and replace it with more bottom-up/accountable structures that are radically different fairly quickly.

Engels is very obviously not making a semantic argument. He explicitly addresses that dodge himself: changing the name does not change the thing. If a delegate, committee, workers’ council, commune, or assembly can make binding decisions, enforce them, discipline obstruction, coordinate labour, and compel compliance where necessary, then authority still exists. Calling it a “commission,” “community enforcement,” or “bottom-up structure” does not abolish authority. It just obscures what is actually happening.

The deeper problem is that you are treating all authority as if it were identical. It is not. The real question is: authority by which class, over whom, and for what purpose? Bourgeois authority exists to preserve exploitation. Proletarian authority exists to suppress the exploiters, defend the revolution, and reorganize society on a collective basis. Those are not the same thing.

And yes, bureaucratic degeneration is possible. Marxists have never needed fairy tales about that. Socialist construction can generate bureaucracy, ossification, careerism, and detachment from the masses. But that is not an argument for abandoning authority altogether. In the current hostile world, that idea is absurd. Socialist countries exist under siege: sanctions, sabotage, subversion, military encirclement, espionage, capital flight, ideological warfare, and constant pressure from imperialism. Under those conditions, the notion that a socialist society could simply dissolve all organized authority and still survive is not radical, it is politically unserious. It would be suicide.

You are also collapsing state and government into one thing, which is a common mistake. The state is a specific instrument of class rule: special bodies of armed men, prisons, courts, coercive institutions arising from irreconcilable class antagonisms. Government, more broadly, is administration, coordination, planning, and the management of social life. Under communism, as classes disappear, the state withers away because there is no longer one class suppressing another. But administration does not disappear. Coordination does not disappear. Collective decision-making does not disappear. Government in that broader administrative sense remains, even when the state as an organ of class domination has been abolished.

Modern production makes this even clearer.

Take a modern computer chip. It is not made by autonomous individuals spontaneously harmonizing their activity. It is designed through coordinated labour by multiple digital design teams, analogue design teams, verification teams, software toolchains, and engineering managers, often across firms such as design companies and manufacturers. Then it goes to fabrication, where entirely different teams handle masks, wafer processing, testing, packaging, logistics, maintenance, quality control, and cleanroom operations. All of this also depends on cleaners, technicians, utility workers, transport, and upstream material supply. If everyone simply acted according to their own immediate preference with no binding coordination, you would not get advanced semiconductors. You would get breakdown, waste, delay, and failure.

Take also a nuclear power plant. Here the anti-authoritarian fantasy becomes openly ridiculous. A nuclear plant cannot be run on the basis that nobody has decisive authority, nobody can issue binding orders, and everything is handled through loose voluntary consensus at the point of crisis. That would be suicidal not only for the workers inside the plant, but for everyone living anywhere near it. Safety procedures, emergency response, maintenance schedules, chain of command, and operational discipline are not optional bourgeois prejudices. They are material necessities.

Most importantly (as any ideology that does not account for the sick and disabled is not serious or worth consideration) take modern pharmaceuticals and disability aids. Drugs and medical devices are researched, tested, manufactured, transported, and monitored through highly coordinated labour across laboratories, trial systems, factories, supply chains, hospitals, and inspection bodies. Even in a society without profit motive, mistakes, contamination, negligence, and accidents would still be possible. So you would still need rigorous standards, quality control, testing protocols, and regulatory oversight to ensure safety and efficacy. That is authority. Necessary authority. Social authority in the service of human need.

So no, this is not a dispute about words. Engels’ point is material from beginning to end. Complex social production and revolutionary struggle require authority, discipline, and subordination of particular wills to collective necessity. The only real question is whether that authority serves capital or the working masses.

So when you say society can be reorganized into more “bottom-up/accountable structures” quickly, that still does not escape Engels’ argument. Those structures, if they are real, would still have to make binding decisions, suppress counter-revolution, coordinate production, allocate resources, maintain infrastructure, and enforce standards. In other words, they would still exercise authority. The issue is not whether authority exists. The issue is whether the proletariat is willing to wield it consciously, or whether it disarms itself while imperialism and the bourgeoisie do not.

Again, I think you’re using “authoritarian” to just mean “bad.”

I guess "hierarchical" may be more apt than "authoritarian" for what I was trying to say.

Are minimum wage laws authoritarian?

Depends if they were mandated by an authority or by the people, and how they are enforced.

Why can’t we look at policies imposed by a central authority that have reduced authoritarianism?

Ignoring semantics. Yeah, you can look at these policies. I think most of the policies were borne out of threatening authority though. I also think many of those authorities around the world are feeling less threatened, and many of the good policies are being weakened or rolled back.

I am anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchy, because 1) it creates a single point of failure 2) it's easier to corrupt a few people than many or everybody 3) the people most interested in practicing corruption are the people who seek power 4) corruption is often rewarded.

Those are valid concerns, however, that ignores all the examples I've presented. If centralization is always bad and decentralization is always good, then how are there so many cases (or any cases at all) where a centralized government produces better results? Shouldn't that be impossible, even theoretically?

The fact is that decentralized systems have flaws too. They have a lot of problems operating at large scales, with collective action problems, and they can often lead to unnecessary redundancy. Like I said, your concerns about centralized systems are valid, but there are cases where even a corrupt or imperfect central government can solve problems that decentralized systems struggle with. That's why I argue that you have to look at things by a case-by-case basis.

Public transit is yet another example of this. A centralized government can recognize that ease of transit can promote economic growth and by extension tax revenue, and so it can afford to invest in public transit and it will pay for itself. A decentralized system will always struggle to do that. Maybe a private company runs it and recoups expenses by ticket sales, but that makes it less accessible and reduces the economic benefits. Or maybe people contribute out of the kindness of their hearts or something, but then the most generous will wind up with the least money/time/resources.

How am I supposed to accept that decentralization is always the correct answer when I'm surrounded by counterexamples with no explanation? It really seems like it's based more on ideological preconceptions than real life examples and evidence.

Take also a nuclear power plant. Here the anti-authoritarian fantasy becomes openly ridiculous.

There's a funny sketch about this.

what is a working class state exactly? Why even call it a state if it's "not the same" as a state?

Can you elaborate on that? Bc all I got from that is "it's a secret and only I know how to do communism"

The state is an organ of class rule, for the oppression of one class by another; under capitalism it is for the oppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, under socialism it is the exact opposite.

A working-class state is a state under the control of the working classes. It isn't the same as a bourgeois state or feudal state.

Ok so there's no communism button, but there is a button that reverses the power structures in the state, make it make sense

How is it different? How is it under the control of the working classes?

How is a feudal state different from a bourgeois state? What changed after the French revolution? The difference is who is in control of political power and whose representatives fulfill state roles. Surely you can see how Cuba and Brazil are entirely different?

How is a so called working-class state different from a bourgeois state? And also how is it under the control of the working class? How would you define "under the control of the working class"?

We have a lot of real-world historical examples of revolution, and the old ruling class doesn't simply vanish. They're going to still be around, and as long as the bourgeois class exists they'll need to be oppressed. There's no button that just gets rid of them.

This is especially true when capitalist imperialism is the dominant world system. Building stateless communism in one country is nonsensical. The bourgeois rule the world, what we can do under socialism is repress them with a worker's state.

The difference is that the state is made up of the working classes, quite literally, and runs the state in the interests of the proletariat. I don't know why people need to keep explaining this over and over.

Sure, you expel bourgeois people from the state somehow. Then you use the state to oppress them. What I'm still not understanding is how that doesn't simply recreate the previous power structures. How does MLism prevent the administrative class from just becoming the new bourgeois class?

Well once a member of the working class becomes a member of the administrative/bureaucratic class, they stop being working class. There's still a class division in a so called worker state. The workers are still dominated by the state, they just have different bosses

There is no such thing as an "administrator class" or "bureaucratic class." These are subcategories of existing classes, not classes in and of themselves. Production run by collectively owned industry where the social surplus is used for the needs of the people, rather than to maximize profit, is proof of this. The issue with capitalism isn't management, it's ownership.

Well, why didn't the bourgeois simply make themselves into royalty? Why did they abolish feudalism and establish capitalism?

It's because the power structures are rooted in the material base, the material interests of the ruling class reflect the material base. They didn't just think up the idea to get rid of the aristocracy and then defeat them, they pursued their own material interests which meant the pursuit of markets and private property and commodity production and wage labor and bourgeois dictatorship.

It is the same for a workers' state, the material interests of the ruling class reflect the interests of the new ruling class and that makes them inherently different at the base level. This isn't as simple as simply expelling the bourgeois from the state, it requires a total revolution of the material base as well. We have to build an economy where it doesn't even make sense to have a bourgeois class, where worker control and central planning and collective ownership are the best system for managing production.

And during this transition phase, there will still be a bourgeoisie. That's why there needs to be a state to oppress them.

Well that sounds nice but it kinda sounds like fantasy to me, with very little material proof without massive amounts of mental gymnastics. It sounds too convenient. Bureaucrats will have their own class interests. This isn't even remotely controversial.

Having more or less privledge isn't inherently an issue, we learned that from existing socialism. Socialism is not equalism. You see a problem that doesn't exist. Marxists seek to abolish class, which in turn abolishes the state. Bosses are not the problem. Managers are not the problem. The material relationship when workers collectively own the means of production absolutely changes as compared to capitalism, which is why socialist countries deliver far more with far fewer resources for their people. You're making idealist errors.

Anything's possible when you make shit up

we learned that from existing socialism

Ok, so you should have started with that. There is no “existing socialism” if socialism means workers actually owning and controlling the means of production. Or is that not what socialism means?

If I had known you were starting from the premise that socialism already existed in some meaningful form, I could have avoided this entire conversation.

The material relationship when workers collectively own the means of production

Again, that would be super cool. It would also be diametrically opposed to a state standing over those workers, controlling production, suppressing independent organization, and calling that “collective ownership.”

You’re making idealist errors.

Absolutely wild thing for someone who believes MLism is still valid to say.

There is existing socialism, collective ownership is the principal aspect of the economies of socialist countries, and the working classes control their states. Examples include the PRC, Cuba, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, and former USSR. This is a socialist community, of course we support existing socialism.

Again, that would be super cool. It would also be diametrically opposed to a state standing over those workers, controlling production, suppressing independent organization, and calling that “collective ownership.”

This is nonsense. The state is not above or outside class society, but within it and subordinated to it. Working class states do not stand outside of the working classes, they are made up of workers organizing.

Absolutely wild thing for someone who believes MLism is still valid to say.

How so? Marxism-Leninism has delivered and successfully established socialism in many countries, and is the only branch of socialist ideology to meaningfully establish lasting socialism. You keep making idealist errors like separating class from its material basis.

COVID gave us material proof. Why did China pursue a policy that was so detrimental to its overall productive capacity and economic growth? Even if you multiply their numbers by ten (which is absurd) they had a death toll in the same order of magnitude as islands like Japan and New Zealand, and they outperformed every continental capitalist nation because they waited until vaccination rates were high enough to reopen. China saved millions of lives because they were guided by science, not markets.

It's hard to explain that without accepting that China is doing something different, because they're a workers' state.

China's response to covid being proof that they're socialist isn't convincing. Good for them, but is the existence of forces coercing the ruling class into decisions that benefit the working class proof that it's a working class state?

In instances where a capitalist state does something which benefits the working class, it is coerced by forces outside the state. The capitalist state may implement policies and programs to protect workers, but historically we see that this only happens when the capitalist state is coerced by organized labor and mass movements.

In China's case, the forces that coerced their bourgeoisie into decisions that benefited the working class came from the state itself. That's why Zero COVID convinced me, back when I was still more of an anarchist and very anti-China. China proved it is a workers' state when it acted in workers' interests without needing to be coerced.

And in so doing they saved countless lives, while we were all marched to our deaths for the money line.

Look, the covid stuff is important to me too, I still wear a well fitting n95 everywhere that's not my own apartment. I think China probably did a better job than the USA in terms of covid. Even as someone much closer to anarchism than anything resembling state socialism, I am all for lockdowns/shelter in place and whatever is required to protect the populace from pandemic. I would just suggest not being uncritical when it comes to China. Better than the US, sure.

All that said, I'm not convinced any of this "proves" that china is a worker controlled state. In fact I'm convinced that it doesn't prove that. Really I don't think any of your logic connects. whatever forces coerce the ruling class into things that are beneficial for the working class, in whichever state structure, it exists because the working class is not in control. It's bizarre to bring up China in this. Certainly you don't believe they're actually socialist

Certainly you don’t believe they’re actually socialist

China is socialist and has been since October 1st 1949.

counterpoint, no, not even close

Explain why is china not (never even close to being) socialist in your mind?

Because workers doesn't control the means of production? Unless you make some massive and stupid logical leaps, it's not fucking socialist

What would count, in your view, as workers controlling the means of production?

Because if your answer is every workplace instantly becoming a self-managed island with no state, no party, no planning authority, no contradictions, no markets, no hierarchy, no technical authority, and no transition period, then you are not describing socialism. You are describing an abstract fantasy of communism detached from history and honestly reality.

Socialism is the transitional period between capitalism and communism. It still contains contradictions inherited from capitalism: classes, class struggle, law, administration, uneven development, commodity forms, wages, technical hierarchy, bureaucracy, and limited market mechanisms. The question is not whether contradictions exist. Of course they do. The question is which class holds political power, which class commands the decisive levers of the economy, and in what direction society is moving.

China has been socialist since October 1st 1949 because the old landlord-bureaucrat-comprador state was destroyed and replaced by a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class through the Communist Party (over 100M members, 1/14 people). Landlord power was destroyed. Foreign imperialist domination was broken. The commanding heights were brought under public ownership and state direction. The new state was built to suppress reaction, defend sovereignty, develop the productive forces, and transform society.

Also, the state is not “the government.” Government, broadly, means administration, coordination, planning, record-keeping, infrastructure management, public decision-making, and the organisation of social production. That does not disappear under communism. Hospitals, transport systems, power grids, agriculture, housing, logistics, education, science, and industry still need coordination.

The state, more specifically, is government as an instrument of class rule. It is the organised force by which one class suppresses another. Under capitalism, even the most democratic republic is a dictatorship of capital because capital controls production, finance, land, media, lobbying, courts, policy formation, and the basic conditions of social life. You can vote every few years, but you do not vote on whether banks, factories, logistics networks, mines, ports, data infrastructure, and energy grids serve profit or social need.

Under socialism, the state does not vanish overnight. It changes class character. It becomes a tool of proletarian rule against old exploiting classes, new bourgeois elements, comprador forces, imperialist pressure, corruption, sabotage, and restorationist tendencies. Only when class antagonisms are abolished does the state, as a tool of class domination, wither away. Government as social administration remains, but it ceases to be a state in the strict sense because there is no antagonistic class left to suppress.

That is also why “socialism means no hierarchy or authority” is infantile. Engels already dealt with this. Large-scale production requires authority in the technical and organisational sense. A hospital cannot run on the idea that the surgeon, nurse, cleaner, patient, and administrator all have equal authority over surgery. A nuclear power plant cannot run as a vibes-based commune where everyone takes turns deciding reactor procedure. Railways, ports, mines, aerospace, flood control, public health, and defence all require expertise, discipline, command structures, and binding decisions.

The issue is not whether authority exists. The issue is what kind of authority, rooted in which class power, serving which social purpose, and subject to what supervision. Authority as such is not the problem. Class exploitation is.

In China, the bourgeoisie exists, but it does not rule as a class. Capitalists can own firms, make profits, and accumulate wealth within limits (as quickly advancing the productive forces serves social goals), but they do not command the state, the army, the land, the central banking system, or the strategic direction of the economy. They do not sit above the Communist Party as sovereign power. When they conflict with the long-term interests of socialist construction, they are disciplined, subordinated, investigated, broken up, or politically neutralised.

That is not how bourgeois dictatorship works. In a bourgeois dictatorship, the state serves capital. In China, capital is permitted to exist and develop under conditions set by the socialist state, because developing productive forces, technology, infrastructure, industry, and national strength is not optional in a world still dominated by imperialism.

People act as though China could press the communism button in 1949 after the century of humiliation, semi-colonial dismemberment, warlordism, Japanese invasion, civil war, mass poverty, illiteracy, and productive backwardness. That is childish. Socialism does not abolish scarcity by decree. It inherits a real society at a real level of development inside a hostile capitalist world system. If a socialist country remains poor, weak, dependent, and militarily vulnerable, it gets strangled, sanctioned, invaded, or colour-revolutioned.

China’s use of markets after reform and opening was not a restoration of bourgeois rule. It was a controlled and dangerous method of developing the productive forces under the leadership of a socialist state. Dangerous, yes. Full of contradictions, yes. But “contradictions exist” is not the same as “capitalism has been restored.”

Capitalist states across Europe and America impose austerity while telling people there is no money for housing, healthcare, rail, wages, or basic infrastructure; China, without funding itself through imperial plunder, lifted over 800 million people out of extreme poverty (excluding China global poverty is actually worsening), and saw the most successful and equal land reform project in history. A capitalist state does not build HSR at world-historical scale because of its immense social value, even when many lines have little or no profit on the books.

And (I know what you're about to say) no, bureaucrats or administrators are not automatically a ruling class because they administer. Class is decided by relation to the means of production. Can they privately appropriate surplus as owners? Can they sell, inherit, and transfer productive property as capital? Can they reproduce themselves as a property-owning class independent of the state and above society? If not, they are not a separate ruling class. They may become privileged, corrupt, revisionist, or bureaucratic. They may become a site of class struggle. But that is not the same as being a bourgeoisie.

The Chinese state is not withering away tomorrow because the conditions for that do not exist. The state withers away when class antagonisms disappear, and class antagonisms cannot disappear in one country while global capitalism and imperialism still exist. So long as hostile bourgeois states, finance capital, military encirclement, sanctions, comprador forces, separatist projects, colour revolution networks, etc. exist, the proletarian state remains necessary. Giving up the state before the bourgeoisie is defeated globally would not be more socialist. It would be suicide.

The end goal is the abolition of class society. But you do not abolish class society by pretending class enemies no longer exist, and you do not abolish administration by pretending complex production can run without coordination. You abolish class rule by using proletarian state power to suppress reaction, develop production, socialise the economy further, reduce material inequalities, discipline capital, and expand the real capacity of ordinary people to govern society.

That is what China has been doing, unevenly and with contradictions, since 1949. China built sovereignty where there was semi-colonial subjugation. Industrialised on a world-historical scale. Eliminated extreme poverty. Built infrastructure, education, healthcare capacity, science, technology, and productive power at enormous speed. Maintained public ownership and planning over the commanding heights. Kept the Communist Party, not the bourgeoisie, at the centre of political authority. Repeatedly disciplined capital when capital threatened social stability or party leadership.

So no, “China has markets” is not an argument. “China has billionaires” is not an argument. “China has inequality” is not an argument. “China has hierarchy” is not an argument. These are observations of contradictions and organisational necessities inside a socialist transition. They only become arguments if you can show that the bourgeoisie rules the state, commands the commanding heights, controls the army, determines national policy, and has turned the Communist Party into its political instrument.

That is the actual standard.

China is socialist because the proletarian-led state holds political power, commands the strategic economy, subordinates capital to national and social development, suppresses reactionary threats, and continues the long transition out of capitalism under conditions of imperialist encirclement and uneven development.

This is really thought provoking, thank you for sharing. I disagree fundamentally with a lot of claims stated as settled fact such as "engels has already dealt with this" and ok, I'll accept that an ML would believe this, but that's more of the type of tautological thinking that just can't be escaped when discussing anything with state socialists.

That said, at the end of the day this is just a really long way of saying “China will become actually socialist eventually, trust me bro.” I don't see anything here that actually proves the CCP has demonstrated worker control, but rather redefines worker control as whatever the CCP is doing, cuz reasons. "capitalists get punished sometimes" ok bro, do the workers control the means of production? Are the workers at foxconn secretly calling the shots?

I should also mention a total lack of understanding of concepts outside of MLism/MLMism. Nobody serious is saying abolishing hierarchy or authority means people are just going to take turns running the nuclear power plant. You are repeating the same reactionary talking points capitalist media uses against communism itself. that without bosses, cops, and centralized state authority, society instantly collapses into chaos. The way you frame stateless communism is basically indistinguishable from capitalist propaganda. No one who thinks this way will ever relegate power to the working class, they'll just redefine who the working class is to include themselves and not the actual workers.

I understand why this stuff is seductive, I just wish you guys would contend with material reality.

In a bourgeois state, the state will never coerce the bourgeoisie to do anything unless the state itself is coerced to do so by outside forces (organized labor, mass demonstration, revolutionary violence, etc etc). None of that happened in China. In China, the state decided on its own to force Zero COVID policies onto its bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie are not the ruling class in China.

The forces that coerced the bourgeoisie are not mysterious. The CPC coerced them, because politics are in command.

Explain why China had Zero COVID policies while the rest of the developed world abandoned us to our deaths.

I feel like we're devolving into talking about one anecdote that doesn't represent China or the CCP on its own. This is a logical fallacy. the ccp did something that one could describe as being evidence of china being a worker state, thus, china is a worker state. And there were tons of bourgeois countries that responded to covid in ways that hurt capital

In a bourgeois state, the state will never coerce the bourgeoisie to do anything unless the state itself is coerced to do so by outside forces (organized labor, mass demonstration, revolutionary violence, etc etc).

This is also patently false. I get what you're trying to say here, but there are way too many examples of this NOT being true to even list. It would support your argument if it were true. But it's not.

your zero covid example demonstrates an episode in which the ccp made a policy decision that potentially negatively effected the bourgeois in the country, but it does not prove that the ccp is worker controlled.

I could point to the fact that in china, the vast majority of production is actually private enterprise. Or the fact that the police regularly crack down on labor strikes to protect bourgeois interests. How about that it's literally illegal to form a union in china?

"Oh but those are totally normal contradictions in socialism" well then I don't want your fucking brand of socialism

This is also patently false. I get what you’re trying to say here, but there are way too many examples of this NOT being true to even list. It would support your argument if it were true. But it’s not.

There's too many examples to even list, but you don't provide even one.

We are only given concessions when the bourgeois state is forced to do so by the things I listed: organized labor, mass demonstration, revolutionary violence, etc. It's only ever an external threat that can force the capitalist ruling class to give anything to the working class, and that's true across capitalist nations. You don't think they have NHS in the UK because they're just so jolly nice, do you? No, it was because there were all those communist revolutions happening and it scared the shit out of them.

Yet in China none of that was necessary. They recognized a threat to their workers and they addressed it, without workers needing to strike or protest or bomb political offices. Compare this to capitalist countries, where every concession we get we pay for in blood.

“Oh but those are totally normal contradictions in socialism” well then I don’t want your fucking brand of socialism

No, these are contradictions that exist during socialist development. Socialism isn't a switch you can just flip and suddenly wage labor and the commodity form are abolished. Revolution doesn't simply magic socialism into existence, it has to be built first.

But it's still a workers' state because politics are in command, unlike under capitalism where markets are in command. That's why China can tell the markets to shut down, but capitalist "democracies" have to open up before it's safe to appease the market.

There’s too many examples to even list, but you don’t provide even one.

you can very easily find this yourself, if you can bring yourself to not make some excuse as to why it doesn't fit into your ideology.

No, these are contradictions that exist during socialist development. Socialism isn’t a switch you can just flip and suddenly wage labor and the commodity form are abolished. Revolution doesn’t simply magic socialism into existence, it has to be built first.

Ok then it's not socialist then! It's promising you socialism at some point in the future. ....when no other bourgeois nation exists. More tautology from the ideology built on tautology.