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Sucrose posted:What are the terms for authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian Marxism? "Authoritarian" is itself a nonsense term. The vertical axis on the political compass was made up to make it seem like Ron Paul had a real constituency.
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Dec 7, 2020 21:52
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I don't think that's true, there are absolutely trends of thought that place greater primacy on either personal liberties or society-wide cohesion, or sometimes the capabilities of its most empowered, as if the worth of society can be measured in how much crap it outputs or how big its biggest buildings are built, either at the direction of the state or wealthy individuals, rather than the material and immaterial welfare of its lowest constituents. It is more complex than the two axis graph but authoritarian/libertarian does touch upon an actual spectrum in political thought, though I would suggest perhaps "distributive/concentrative" might be a better descriptor. Not least because libertarian runs up against the issue of the concept of positive and negative liberty which can produce very different political outcomes. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 22:24
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I don't really think that liberty and societal cohesion are terribly at odds beyond the basic social expectations of an ethical society. The conflict lies more with how to deal with antisocial behaviors, bad actors, and external threats. In particular, to what extent indoctrination and state coercion have to be used to maintain communism.
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Dec 7, 2020 22:33
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I mean in the context of the entire political spectrum you absolutely have people who think that everyone needs to follow either the party line or the founding principles of the country or the true religion or the right sexual or gender rules or whatever. I think there certainly are people for whom rigid yet arbitrary ideas about society are the point. Either because they just believe in them for their own sake or because they consciously or unconsciously recognize that they afford them a degree of power over others because of their adherence to them, which I think I would describe as fairly authoritarian. I think there is certainly on an immediate, personal level, a difference between people whose concept of their own wellbeing is determined by their position inside a social hierarchy (and do not want to dismantle hierarchies because being above other people on them is very important to them) and people who dislike the concept of hierarchies and would rather not have them and who derive no pleasure or satisfaction from participating in them. Though this can be harder to map to larger scale political projects. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 22:36
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Personal liberty vs. social cohesion is, itself, a dichotomy made up by right-wingers. In reality, social cohesion is desirable in a just society (we would prefer that everyone agrees that racism is bad) but undesirable in an unjust society (we don't want everyone to agree that slavery is good). Here's the challenge: name a society, state, nation, or whatever that is on the "libertarian right" quadrant of the classic political compass meme, i.e. the bottom right corner.
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Dec 7, 2020 22:46
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For certain conceptions of liberty, anywhere that allows people to become extremely wealthy, which as I said runs up against the concept of positive or negative liberties which is why I said I don't think that term works on the graph because the bottom left and right are often working off two quite different conceptions of what liberty means.
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Dec 7, 2020 22:50
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Ferrinus posted:Here's the challenge: name a society, state, nation, or whatever that is on the "libertarian right" quadrant of the classic political compass meme, i.e. the bottom right corner. Grafton, New Hampshire
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Dec 7, 2020 22:54
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Ferrinus posted:Here's the challenge: name a society, state, nation, or whatever that is on the "libertarian right" quadrant of the classic political compass meme, i.e. the bottom right corner. Epstein's Island
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Dec 7, 2020 22:55
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It is only natural really that the absolute excess of personal freedom of the few to do whatever the want at the expense of everyone else should transcend nations and states, after all. No state could afford them such a lifestyle, but as a class propelled entirely by money above all states, it can come quite close.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:03
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Aruan posted:Grafton, New Hampshire Grafton had an unusually weak social safety net, to the extent that the basic civic functions that prevent bears from marauding the streets were no longer present. Did that increase or decrease the personal freedoms of Grafton's residents? Were those residents more or less subject to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the needs of capital? OwlFancier posted:It is only natural really that the absolute excess of personal freedom of the few to do whatever the want at the expense of everyone else should transcend nations and states, after all. No state could afford them such a lifestyle, but as a class propelled entirely by money above all states, it can come quite close. In fact I think it's only the bourgeois state that could afford them such a lifestyle. If there weren't special bodies of armed men guaranteeing the private property of all the members of the pedophile cabal, they couldn't do all the things they do.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:08
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They were quite free to be mauled by bears, which the free-est free you can get.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:14
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But that is the stated goal of the right libertarian project, they don't like the word "state" but they advocate for the creation of a form of societal organization in which property rights determine your amount of personal freedom, and those with more property rights can dictate terms to those without via monopolistic control of the means through which society is sustained. And that is a quite accurate description of just how capitalism works. The limitations they come up against are not necessarily so much legal as they arguably are the limitations of what society at large can bear, for example they cannot quite own anybody they want as a slave openly, because society can not bear open chattel slavery in many parts of the world any more, because enough people exist with the need and means to fight against such a thing that it would be quite difficult to enact, and indeed that need and means is what helped to abolish it in the first place. What right libertarians describe is broadly just "how capitalism works if you're rich enough". Or "feudalism adapted for industrialization" I guess. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 23:16
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The thing is that the libertarian project is pure fakery. A wealthy property owner doesn't become more free as the state weakens. It's only an incredibly powerful and oppressive state that can allow someone to be and stay rich, because otherwise people could just take what they need to survive from you rather than having to jump through hoops until you give it to them. Here's an article on the topic I've always liked: https://inthesetimes.com/article/floating-utopias quote:Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:22
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I can't find them, but my two favorite articles about libertarians were one about a bunch of libertarians who moved to Venezuela to celebrate the collapse in evil restrictive laws and had a Real Bad Time, and the article about how cell phone networks in Somalia are an example of a libertarian utopia because the absence of a functioning state has allowed wildcat cellphone operators to setup shop with no accountability which is good for Reasons.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:28
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Yes, it is wrong about what it advocates and fundamentally misunderstands that it is not the state but rather the state of reality itself which prevents the way of life it idealizes from applying to every one of its adherents, but I don't think that diminishes the idea that it does describe an actually real way of life it just describes a state of being that already exists and applies to the maximum number of people it can at any given time, which is however many people have managed to become rich enough to achieve it within the system of force monopolies that facilitates the acquisition of that wealth. They are living, essentially, inside other people's libertarian paradise and cannot comprehend that the laws and states are their private security and company policy agreements. A philosophy of capitalist inadequacy is correct, it describes a thing that exists under capitalism, but it does not understand how and why it exists or their place in relation to it. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 23:28
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But the crucial thing that it fails to understand is that there is no real distinction between "authoritarian" and "libertarian". The freedom libertarians dream of is only attainable through the exertion of massive coercive forces, some passive and structural and others actually involving interpersonal violence by jackbooted thugs. Loosening regulations and stripping away welfare systems doesn't actually increase the societal level of personal freedom; it just strengthens one class relative to another.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:32
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I think they do understand that because they articulate it perfectly well, they understand that they want some people to own others, some people to make the rules and others to follow, they just call that liberty because their concept of liberty is centered in the maximum number of liberties that can be afforded to one hypothetical person, rather than the actual number of them that every member of society posesses on average. Which again loops back to my preference for calling it distrbutive or concentrative, right libertarians want to build the highest possible tower out of one person's personal freedom and think that if that is possible then it will somehow reflect an ideal society. They also seem to view liberty in a way whereby it correlates with the making of decisions, regardless of the meaningfulness of the decision, so they are very concerned with people choosing specific products or DROs to subscribe to or whatever, the ability to make a decision is what is important to them, not how different the possibilities are, possibly because they believe that the decision making process is somehow an engine of societal advancement. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 23:37
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Oh I found it: https://mises.org/library/stateless-somalia-and-loving-it Enjoy: quote:Somalia is in the news again. Rival gangs are shooting each other, and why? The reason is always the same: the prospect that the weak-to-invisible transitional government in Mogadishu will become a real government with actual power.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:38
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OwlFancier posted:I think they do understand that because they articulate it perfectly well, they understand that they want some people to own others, some people to make the rules and others to follow, they just call that liberty because their concept of liberty is centered in the maximum number of liberties that can be afforded to one hypothetical person, rather than the actual number of them that every member of society posesses on average. But that is also what right "authoritarians" want to do. What's the difference between libertarians and authoritarians?
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Dec 7, 2020 23:43
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Ferrinus posted:But that is also what right "authoritarians" want to do. What's the difference between libertarians and authoritarians? Well I would probably classify right libertarians as a form of authoritarian, as I have said repeatedly I don't think that the two axis graph is very good. They are, basically, just hypercapitalists, which I would describe as an authoritarian or at least, hierarchical, concentrative, individualist political philosophy, it believes in hierarchies as a good thing in and of themselves, it believes that the measure of societal value is concentrated in a small number of things, and it specifically believes that those things are the personal power of the individuals with the most money. But I think this can differ somewhat with say, nationalists, who are probably going to be hierarchical, also believe that societal value is concentrated, but they are probably more likely to be collectivist in that they believe that the abstract concept of the nation is what is important and view people by their ability to adhere to the nation and its values, and this can put them in conflict with capitalists, which you see with a lot of the protectionist xenophobic rhetoric that often gets bandied about by the right on the ground, even if obviously their actual parties are usually very capitalist. I would also probably describe them as authoritarians. I suppose the "left wing" version of this would be those tankies who clearly just want some sort of tinpot dictatorship except everything is painted red, they may not necessarily be nationalists but they clearly love the idea of a central command telling everyone what to do (which obviously they would be on the good side of if not actually in charge of) and often spend a lot of time going on about how LGBT people are counterrevolutionary and bourgeois and whatever. Like politics are complicated and I don't pretend to have a cohesive system of cataloguing them but as I said, I think authoritarian/libertarian does touch on a real trend but it doesn't fit well on the two axis graph.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:58
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So an authoritarian might be someone whose nationalism might conflict with their liberalism. But, as you point out, these people always end up on the side of capital whatever square of the board they managed to start from. Since national values themselves vary widely (for instance, American values are basically capitalist values to start with) it doesn't really make sense to me to try to separate out particularly nationalistic liberals from weakly or not-at-all nationalistic liberals - certainly not on the basis of "individualist" versus "collectivist", which itself is a nonsense dichotomy. Or, an authoritarian might be someone who wants a "tinpot dictatorship" in which there is a central command telling everyone what to do. But what exactly does this mean? How is this state of affairs brought about, and how is it different from the bare dictatorship of one class over another that constitutes all modern states? Or, an authoritarian might be someone who is socially conservative and doesn't want there to be LGBT people. However, this doesn't strike me as having much to do with the concept of authority as such. After all, what if someone wanted to make sure there was no discrimination against LGBT people anywhere? Would that also be authoritarian?
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Dec 8, 2020 00:43
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I would suggest that there is a difference between people who want LGBT people to freely live however they want and those who don't, yes. Because the point of wanting to suppress them is to uphold a power structure that empowers the ones trying to uphold it. That issue is not value neutral and reducible merely to "one class having power over another" and certainly I don't know of anybody looking to create a power structure whereby the gayer you are the more social power you hold. A lot of LGBT advocates are actively approaching it from the perspective of looking to dismantle structures like that so that nobody can utilize them, which is why it intersects well with things like feminism. Which also, I assume you are aware, is not looking to institute a matriarchy.
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Dec 8, 2020 00:49
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Making sure that LGBT people don't socially exist and making sure that LGBT people are able to prosper both require the exertion of power across a societal scale, though. It means indoctrinating people into certain belief systems through both formal education and informal cultural osmosis, and it means policing interpersonal behavior to, for instance, discourage people from throwing around certain slurs. Right-wingers frequently decry as "authoritarian" the measures that require, say, public school teachers to talk about homosexuality in health class, or bakers to put two little men in tuxedos on top of wedding cakes. If you just go completely hands-off and let the chips fall where they may with regards to LGBT acceptance, you may not like the results! And if those results do end up being that LGBT people are discriminated against (which is quite likely given the enormous head start the patriarchy has when it comes to shaping societal attitudes), how is that any less "authoritarian" than reifying homophobia as legal policy?
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Dec 8, 2020 01:02
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I would disagree and suggest that the censure of LGBT identities and practices is an exertion of institutional power while the desire to liberate people from that is the natural condition of humanity asserting itself. LGBT identies emerge despite the prevailing hegemonic order and it is their innate need to be expressed freely that drives people to form political organizations to advocate for what they want, but we have human nature, such as it is, on our side. Once the repressive norms are removed that nature asserts itself more freely in more people and more people internalize it into their own identities and that forms the basis by which protection for our welfare is maintained and advanced. I do not believe cis-heteronormativity is something that must be allowed to exist, that yearns to exist, or that will reassert itself were its institutional support destroyed, I believe it is entirely constructed while a more universally accepting model of human gender and sexuality is something that there is an innate pressure within us to see actualized because very, very few of us are ideally served by the current model. The more the space exists for people to experience and internalize the full range of human existence the more people will see an immediate need to have that range accepted in society at large, and that impetus I believe is built into us, it is rooted in something that emerges in people in direct contravention of societal conditioning. I do not believe the same would be true (or at least not in such a significant volume) for the alternative. The alternative is sustained by old and failing power structures. We can and do utilize other power structures to try and accelerate their collapse and enshrine rights and such legally, to advance visibility and try to create environments whereby more of us can be realized, but ultimately I think the best hope for the future lies with that assertion of our nature, that universalizing of the realization on a personal level by more and more people, that we do not need to assign people value by their adherence to a pointless and arbitrary norm. We do not win by establishing a powerful LGBT advocacy vanguard to establish dominance of our ideas over the cishets, we win by going straight to the end state, by showing that normativity itself is the thing that is holding all of us down, and that we can live without it very easily. We win by invalidating the terms of the conflict. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 01:21
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Sucrose posted:What are the terms for authoritarian vs. non-authoritarian Marxism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Marxism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-communism these all broadly overlap
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Dec 8, 2020 01:37
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Sucrose posted:Anarchists are against the state and any form of hierarchy though, no? Is there any form of pro-democracy, explicitly anti-authoritarian Marxism that isn't anarchist? Anarchists want power to be as diffuse as possible but will still defer authority to experts on something, like doctors or scientists for example.
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Dec 8, 2020 01:40
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VictualSquid posted:Anarchists are against some definitions of state and against most definition of hierarchy. The buzzwords are unjust and/or coercive states and hierarchies. It means that the ultimate decision power should lie at the bottom layer with the people, for some even indirectly. Bad hierarchies are ones that give someone who has a responsibility more authority then he needs to solve the specific problems he was elected for. This is a really relevant aspect of discussion re: current leaderless protest movements in America and around the world
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Dec 8, 2020 01:45
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Kanine posted:This is a really relevant aspect of discussion re: current leaderless protest movements in America and around the world There is an upside and downside to this approach. On the upside, LEO can't target leaders like they normally attempt to do. However, succ libs tend to coopt these movements incredibly easily. Just look at what happened to many of the BLM protests.
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Dec 8, 2020 01:49
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Cpt_Obvious posted:There is an upside and downside to this approach. On the upside, LEO can't target leaders like they normally attempt to do. However, succ libs tend to coopt these movements incredibly easily. Just look at what happened to many of the BLM protests. That is more because a leaderless system actually needs a well thought out structure and organisation to prevent informal leader from taking over. Even if you are lucky you get someone who had specialized talent for a "high-status" task getting treated as a leader, as described in tyranny of structurelessness. I you are unlucky you get grifters and libs. It is the kind of thing that actual anarchist orgs spend a lot of thought on solving.
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Dec 8, 2020 02:17
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OwlFancier posted:I would disagree and suggest that the censure of LGBT identities and practices is an exertion of institutional power while the desire to liberate people from that is the natural condition of humanity asserting itself. LGBT identies emerge despite the prevailing hegemonic order and it is their innate need to be expressed freely that drives people to form political organizations to advocate for what they want, but we have human nature, such as it is, on our side. Once the repressive norms are removed that nature asserts itself more freely in more people and more people internalize it into their own identities and that forms the basis by which protection for our welfare is maintained and advanced. LGBT identities and practices emerge despite the prevailing hegemonic order, sure. But, unfortunately, a prevailing hegemonic order has emerged despite LGBT identities' need to be expressed freely. So which is actually the default? There's really no reason to believe that the natural state of affairs is the one you'd personally prefer. In fact, I'd go one step further: the very idea of a "natural" state of affairs is itself fallacious. There's no prelapsarian Eden to return to. If you're not willing to proactively educate people that homosexuality is acceptable, and not willing to crack down on homophobia, that's actually not more "libertarian" or "natural" or whatever than doing those things. Either way you're allowing one power to prevail over another. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 02:38
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Sucrose posted:Anarchists are against the state and any form of hierarchy though, no? Is there any form of pro-democracy, explicitly anti-authoritarian Marxism that isn't anarchist? socialism of the 21st century, basically Bolivian MAS and other latin american countries. It's a fusion of multiple things but has a bunch in common with Marxism (not Marxism-Leninism). There are anarchist influenced ideas in it but by and large it does not lean strongly on anarchist praxis.
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Dec 8, 2020 15:30
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dex_sda posted:socialism of the 21st century, basically Bolivian MAS and other latin american countries. It's a fusion of multiple things but has a bunch in common with Marxism (not Marxism-Leninism). There are anarchist influenced ideas in it but by and large it does not lean strongly on anarchist praxis. So it's Leninism that is the "authoritarianism is ok" ideology?
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Dec 8, 2020 16:01
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Ferrinus posted:So an authoritarian might be someone whose nationalism might conflict with their liberalism. But, as you point out, these people always end up on the side of capital whatever square of the board they managed to start from. Since national values themselves vary widely (for instance, American values are basically capitalist values to start with) it doesn't really make sense to me to try to separate out particularly nationalistic liberals from weakly or not-at-all nationalistic liberals - certainly not on the basis of "individualist" versus "collectivist", which itself is a nonsense dichotomy. Authoritarianism = all power is concentrated in the hands of one leader or small group, and there's no realistic way to remove them from power other than through violence. There's no checks and balances, and the average citizen has no voting power.
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Dec 8, 2020 16:03
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Sucrose posted:So it's Leninism that is the "authoritarianism is ok" ideology? The more I read about Marxist-Leninism the more I feel it is the science of revolution more than an ideology. It's very hands-on as opposed to theoretical. ML seems to use vertical leadership structures as a way to overthrow oppressors, but does not really justify it beyond its practical applications. Therefore, if a horizontal structure would be more useful under a different set of material conditions, ML would expand to include that as well.
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Dec 8, 2020 16:05
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The more I read about Marxist-Leninism the more I feel it is the science of revolution more than an ideology. It's very hands-on as opposed to theoretical. ML seems to use vertical leadership structures as a way to overthrow oppressors, but does not really justify it beyond its practical applications. I guess my point is, in Marxism, how do you make sure you don't end up living in just another Communist dictatorship? Where did those societies go wrong?
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Dec 8, 2020 16:21
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Sucrose posted:Authoritarianism = all power is concentrated in the hands of one leader or small group, and there's no realistic way to remove them from power other than through violence. There's no checks and balances, and the average citizen has no voting power. This state of affairs might specifically exist in something like the Pinochet regime where a vastly bigger foreign power installs a government despite the wishes of a majority of the people, although it can't really last for structural reasons. Otherwise, however, it doesn't actually make sense to claim that a single leader or small group somehow holds all power despite the peoples' wishes. There's no such thing as mind control; there's no army big enough to overcome the basic fact that it's the civilians who grow all the food and manufacture all the ammunition. Hitler and Stalin, the two classic "authoritarian" leaders (and perhaps worse yet, "totalitarian" as well...!), were very popular. They were enacting agendas that their populace had been sold on, rather than somehow bullying their entire citizenry into meekly going along with their dictates. People constantly call Trump an "authoritarian", yet he is being removed from power through nonviolent means in a way concomitant with his relatively low popularity. On the other hand, if we're able to wrench our eyes away from individual leaders and small groups and instead consider classes, we see that it is always the case that a ruling class cannot be removed from power other than through violence. In class terms, every society is a dictatorship of one class over another, such that, once again, trying to distinguish between some as "authoritarian" while others are not doesn't make sense. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 16:26
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Sucrose posted:I guess my point is, in Marxism, how do you make sure you don't end up living in just another Communist dictatorship? Where did those societies go wrong?
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Dec 8, 2020 16:27
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Sucrose posted:I guess my point is, in Marxism, how do you make sure you don't end up living in just another Communist dictatorship? Where did those societies go wrong? To be able to properly address this question we would have to get into a discussion of why you'd consider I'm assuming the USSR to be a "dictatorship".
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Dec 8, 2020 16:35
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I wanna add a note that in my experience there's a western chauvinist/racist element to any deployment of "authoritarian". What kind of country is it that has tin-pot dictators again?
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Dec 8, 2020 16:37
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Ferrinus posted:This state of affairs might specifically exist in something like the Pinochet regime where a vastly bigger foreign power installs a government despite the wishes of a majority of the people, although it can't really last for structural reasons. You're crazy. This is flat-out dictatorship apologia right here. What about North Korea, is everything hunky-dory there too? There's no such thing as mind control, but leaders absolutely can rule through fear.
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Dec 8, 2020 16:54
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