https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

this is like a page long, maybe worth a read

No, those activities would not be authoritarian over bad actors. Authoritarianism specifically involves concentrated hierarchical power that operates without accountability or consensus. Anarchist communities would handle bad actors in a bottom-up manner, even from the perspective of the bad actor.

Also, your use of the terms "psychopath" and "sociopath" are harmful. These are medical conditions and should not be stigmatized. People with these conditions can lead normal lives if they get the help that they need.

Edit: Apologies if I come across as a bit of a pedant. I just think it's important that these terms are used correctly. <3

If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Democracy works

Citation needed

Based on history, Anarchism appears to be the system most immune to human corruption, to the point where George Orwell (of 1984 and Animal Farm fame) traveled to Spain to fight for the Anarchist society that had formed there (where he got shot in the neck, and while recovering was then hunted by tankies that betrayed the Anarchists, requiring him to quickly flee).

For you to be able to decide something like that, you'd at least need to have a basic grasp of his work.

Trotsky the person was acceptable, I don't agree with him, but he was acceptable. Trotskyists... idk, they've really embarrassed themselves lately.

I was meaning authoritarian as in the sense of authority being commonly understood as the legitimate power of a person or group over other people. And my argument was that even communist and anarchist societies will use power over other bad actors inside that society if those bad actors pose as threats to the prevailing political system.

If a bad actor seeks the pain and suffering of others, regardless of their mental health, or even if a bad actor seeks to persuade a society's peoples away from the prevailing political principles, such as someone advocating for hierarchy in an anarchist society or a capitalist advocating for private property in a communist society, then those societies will still use their power to self preserve those modes of political power.

To the bad actors, those societies will appear authoritarian.

Tankie here. I would agree on the following point -- that we are not the same. But, neither are communities where most people are respectful of others' liberties the same as, or suited to the same kind of rule as, communities where most people are authoritarians. Anarchism doesn't work among authoritarian populations.

In some places, there isn't a whole lot of class struggle -- I could see anarchism working in those places, but not with most modern people. Those are typically isolated places where people are self-sustaining and disconnected from modern industry, places where states can't naturally grow on account of the pre-existing lack of class struggle in those areas.

Who are you comparing to an anti-semite?

"Lesser evil!"

"No! Not like that!"

Probably cause they both get their funding from moscow and don't care about anything other than destroying western society, so they voted for the disrupter even though he's a fascist. Typical tankie behavior.

walks steps like a duck goose...

FTFY

You dont even have to do anything and they show up.

Benevolent idiot vs malevolent idiot, or as they were historically called: trotskyites and stalinists.

What the fuck? The Bolsheviks were incredibly popular, especially in the cities, which led to them leading the socialist revolution as the vanguard.

Why do liberals love their anti-communist historical revisionism so much?

The conditions under which democracy works are well understood.

You need a populace educated on how the society and government works at least in its broad strokes. That education should also instill a preference for democracy and describe the pitfalls of other systems.

An independent media system to keep the voter base reasonably informed.

Systems in place to prevent corruption.

Every single one of these have been eroded over 1-2 generations by crony capitalism to enable wealth accumulation.

I would not say that democracy in the US is a reasonable example of what democracy can look like. It is what happens when democracy is being deliberately sabotaged.

i don't think that rich people are inherently better any respecting the rights of minorities.

the current system demonstrably does not protect minorities either.

also the current system actively manufactures consent through media ownership and economic coercion. capital owners play a major role in that process.

what looks like majority opinion is often manufactured preference serving capital. a democracy where people had actual material security and genuine information might produce very different majorities.

i don’t think that rich people are inherently better any respecting the rights of minorities.

I didn't say that though, so how about you go have this imaginary argument with someone else.

an ideal democracy would be a democracy where the people have power, as opposed to one where money rules.

The problem is “the people” in a democracy literally just amounts to “the majority”, and would thus favor the average and the interests thereof over the interests of underprivileged minorities.

the way i read your point was 'the elites protect minorities from the mob' as a defense of the current system.

do you have some alternative vision?

The idea of a real person believing US State Department canards about places they have zero personal knowledge of is far sadder.

You call this a democracy? The entire system is built to extract wealth from the working class

You also need a fully open and transparent government, any information being classified top secret or anything of the sort means you cannot have a democracy. No secrets can be allowed, ever. And really the only way to reasonably guarantee stuff like that is to make officials surrender all privacy related rights for life, just permanent publicly open insight into every aspect of your life, past, present, and future if you want to pursue office. I'd argue for attaching 24/7 live streamed cameras to them during their time in office as well. Obviously this would only currently work for rich countries with obscene military expenditures, like the US, but if the big guys were to do it then it would eventually be safe enough for the rest of them.

This is no better than the MAGA bubble, where everything is “fake news.” You live on another planet.

There has never been a democracy, so we don't know if it works or not. Democracy is an ideal state. We all live under a dictatorship of capital.

Call what democracy? I didn't post about any place in particular. But no, the US is not a healthy democracy if that's what you are getting at.

They will tell you what I said.

Honestly the base concept is fine, we've just never seen a working model.

We just don't really see many governments that are actually for and by the people. Most are closer to an oligarch tribunal that boils down to a slightly distributed dictatorship, then the slap a non-dictatorship name on it and press play.

Engels claims organization requires authority, but it really only requires agreements, coordination, and sometimes rules; a strict hierarchy isn’t a necessary requirement for that to exist.

Yeah, horizontal organization has been very effective historically and definitely doesn't create unspoken hierarchies that are actually far more damaging than explicit hierarchies under democratic control by the masses.

There's definitely a single example in history you can point to of that working that won't make everyone laugh as they post long winded essays about exactly how hierarchy was enforced in whichever organization or area you choose as an example.

Yes, one where things aren't true just because abserious-looking millionaire in a suit said them into a camera.

You think Americans learn about the governments of other countries just from watching cable news? Regular citizens from western countries travel there, and expats from those countries come over here. And because we have freedom of speech (unlike in Russia, China, and North Korea), they are able to tell us what those places are like.

Yeah, but "democracy" looks exactly like western liberal democracy, right? Multiple parties and uses some European country as an example? All third world countries are dictatorships and should bow down to the superior ways of their white overlords? Or they just don't know what real democracy looks like and they're misled by Islam or something? Real democracy is a racist as fuck country like Finland, that has de-industrialized, has an economy of basically only consumers, exports nothing and imports everything from the global south that carries the social and environmental burden of actually producing everything? Democratic socialism seems to only be for the imperial core, the rest of the world is just too backwards to understand it, I guess.

(These are rhetorical questions, I know it's not what you sound like, but it's what it seems like all of you people are implying with pretend civility.)

If you don't both-sides the genocide of Palestinians or the war on Iran, by bringing up that they aren't democratic systems of government so that somehow makes them deserve getting bombed more than if they were. (If you do, then I just don't have to talk to you.) If you can believe that, than you do actually believe that the struggle against imperialism matters more than the ideals of democracy.

Translation: you listened to Yeonmi Park and Falun Gong's propaganda show, and believed them.

Amerikkkan politician in the gif, lmao.

So it’s a vast conspiracy that everyone who travels to or has lived in these places is in on. Got it.

Idealist philosophy is the worst thing that has ever happened to humanity. Just totally decouple your goals from actual reality, and make zero plans on how to get there, then critique movements that fail to measure up to your pie in the sky. You see, actually achieving things is secondary to these people, what REALLY MATTERS is looking like a good person when you're doing it. "They don't want power, they just want to endlessly critique power."

The ruling class has put in place a system that is impossible to change without doing horrible, violent, and socially unacceptable things, that is why it's so stable.

I really wished we lived in this world where convincing people of your ideas was enough to bring systemic change, it just won't for some things.

No, but if that's what you have to tell yourself to avoid thinking critically about the "every man in the DPRK must have Kim Jing Un's haircut" narrative then I guess no one can stop you.

This reminds me of the book "Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When it's Gone".

Never heard that one. I have heard about the hereditary dictatorship, though. Is that made up?

Edit (one day later): *crickets*

I mean small bits of democracy exist everywhere. Charity groups often work as a democracy. The youth organization I was in as a kid operated as a great democracy.

There are little democratic groups all over the world working just fine. It’s the large scale corporate hellscape that keeps it from working for us as a whole.

I'll keep saying this:

One side is a hyper-financialized economy of almost only consumers, which sits at the endpoint of the most global supply chains, devouring on a scale that is devastating the planet, pushing the environmental and human cost of that production on the global south, and who basically only export loans, monopoly priced essential goods, and IPs back to the rest of the world, that feeds their surplus production into an enormous military industrial complex that they use to force this global extraction system on the rest of the world.

While the other "side", we'll start with Russia, is an impoverished hellhole place to live in that has been economically gutted, and now has been fighting a war against Ukraine that has been going on for over 12 years, a war that is being used to throw the entire military might of NATO member states against, not to liberate Ukraine, but to try to use the opportunity to fight a proxy war directly against Russia, and the real goal is to bleed out Russia so it submits again to other side and they can put in a new dictator in charge that they can actually control this time. (I, for one, remember the time when Putin was their neoliberal darling.) Supporting Russia is a bit like supporting Saddam, you shouldn't support Saddam, the Ba'athists were morally corrosive (maybe too unfairly bad for this analogy, actually), but you definitely shouldn't support the US military and their allied countries in the Iraq war. (Like if you want to support the people of Ukraine, do it in a way that doesn't feed into the war, like hunger relief, or humanitarian aid.)

And China hasn't been at war with any other country since the Korean war. I guess China just kinda sits there, menacingly, as they build their productive capacity. And they're against Taiwan (which literally calls itself the "Republic of China" btw), but I don't think they do anything at all other than negotiate and respond in kind when the US moves more ships and drones there. Then there's the Uyghur stuff and the Tibet stuff, which I know there is probably a kernel of truth to, but I think that's up to people in China to deal with, and definitely won't be solved by like the US sending aid there, because again, when the imperial core does these things it isn't actually about the people, it's about exploiting the problems countries those countries have in order to tear them apart.

After I found out about Lottery Democracy, everything clicked into place. I can finally have a true political goal that I can actually see working. Easy to convince people too, if people just watched the Lottery Democracy video from Spectacles.

Imperialism isn't a policy that states have, it's a global system of extraction from poorer countries into the countries that control most of the finance capital on Earth, it's not "big country goes to war with smaller country." Russia does not control global finance, global finance will pretty much always be their enemy. A stronger Russia (if it was still a semi-periphery country) probably would be better than a strong US, you're underestimating just how terrible the US is, and you're comparing apples to oranges, because the US is a country in the imperial core and its bourgeoisie control capital on an international scale, the bourgeoisie of Russia have almost no power outside of their country.

The concept of imperialism that you're using was first used popularly by Lenin, and it was an economic definition that described a global system. You should learn what unequal exchange is and what super-exploitation is, I think they're good concepts. Also read Neocolonialism by Kwame Nkrumah.

wikipedia, lmao, I could go in there and change the definition, lol.

Anarchists and what would become social democrats were calling Marx an authoritarian socialist during the 1st International. This is not new. This debate has existed for at least 160 years, just let that sink in, we haven't come to an agreement on this stuff for 160 years.

I'll check it out, thanks. I always just think about the way my academic department is organized as an example. There's a rotating chair, and nobody wants to do it because it's a bunch of bureacratic bullshit, but people do their time and then go back to getting actual work done. This is how politics should be.

Hear that? Thats goal posts moving.

You went from no definition, to not liking mine. Instead of clicking on any cited sources, you closed off.

Go ahead, change it, see how well that actually works and how wikipedia is actually moderated.

Yeah, exactly and also if you mention the Gaza genocide on Wikipedia without putting in a billion allegeds then you'll also be banned, the article you linked even admits the definition has changed throughout history to refer to different things.

This seems extreme. I agree with more transparency of politicians, but I don't see our current problems as stemming directly from the fact that our military has top secret information and an intelligence service.