The problem is authoritarian doesn’t have a precise mechanical definition at all. Anarchists and liberals don’t use the word in the same way. A lot of my anarchist comrades don’t even use the term because of how imprecise it is. Instead I’ll see anarchists mention lopsided hierarchies in general, imperialism, or how a hierarchy can lead to abuses of power. Or more broadly they might disagree with seizing state power as a tactic, but I think well-read anarchists realize that authoritarian is not a coherent ideological position. No one identifies as an authoritarian, for instance.

Liberals use it as a way to conflate fascists and communists. They use it to mean there’s a lack of representation from groups/interests they believe are inherent to any society. Since all socialist countries exclude or restrain representation of the capitalist class, that makes all socialism authoritarian by a liberal point of view. They see a single party state as tyrannical, because they would prefer to see a state with various competing bourgeois elements rather than the single uniting interest of the working class.

Liberals also use the term (and tankie) in a completely racist way. White countries aren’t authoritarian, that’s reserved for scary foreigners

A lot of people make the claim that individualist anarchism is right wing because they just don’t know what it’s actually about and think it’s some kind of philosophical anarcho-capitalism. But I’ve never met someone who read Renzo Novatore and thought he was right wing at all. Edgy? Extremely so. Kinda dumb? Honestly I think so too. But right wing as in in favour of the reaction and the capitalist class, no way.

Maybe that’s the correct way to frame anti-authoritarianism to actually get people to start recognising the need for some authority if you’re going to see change.

We might honestly be slowly re-treading ground that the neoliberal thinktanks have already been over in their decision-making to support, back and push this ideology.

I mean, sorta?

The distinguishing feature of anarchists is that they do in fact want revolution and are willing to shoot guns over it. While there is no such feature of ancaps, the NAP is explicitly anti-revolutionary, and opposes all capability to effect change within the system through any means other than the use of money and property.

So yes. I can kinda see that comparison. The only thing I will say however is that the anti-authoritarians that can be pipelined leftwards are usually still in favour of use of authority for some things, such as enforcing the age of consent. Whereas the libertarians seem to be against authority in even that case too. This distinguishes which group of anti-authoritarians that pipeline left vs which group of them pipeline right.

I wrote a longer rely to op but I think it’s when the rights and liberties of the individual are made supreme to the point of overriding the rights of the community, that’s when it’s just crypto-libertarianism masquerading as anarchism.

I don’t think anti-authoritarianism (as you describe it) can be separated from leftism (anarchism is right there)

Anti-authoritarianism is distinguishable from anarchism because anarchists do not oppose use of authority for revolution nor to maintain post-revolution, they support authoritarian means in those cases.

Anything that opposes revolution upholds the status quo.

The anti-authoritarians might be a pipeline into the left, but are not yet among the left in that their ideology literally upholds neoliberalism by opposing all use of authority to change it. You could view them in the same way that belief in alternative medicines isn’t right wing but is a pipeline into right wing conspiracy thought. Distinguished from the right but you can see how it leads into it. Anti-authoritarians are distinguishable from the left in that they oppose all the things we need to bring about any real change, but they can be a pipeline into the left by making them realise this.

This is also why the anti-tankie rhetoric is so necessary for liberals. It makes it harder to do the work to pipeline the anti-authoritarians into the left by aiming to kick all real leftists out of the anti-authoritarian spaces and shut down all thought-processes of anti-authoritarians if/when they speak to people that are part of the proper left.

(it’s largely correct in many cases

This seems to be the case mainly because the principal authorities in capitalist society are ones that should be opposed and destroyed. That doesn’t make it a coherent political position. See Gramsci’s letter to anarchists.

Sure, but we must articulate it in a specific way or people continue to join them in the genuine belief that they’re not.

American actions abroad since WW2 are definitely not authoritarian!

and then the counter-argument is always just “I don’t know anything about American actions abroad since WW2”

< Me staring at this trying to work out what it’s supposed to mean

Like, there’s a word for an antagonism to authority. It’s anarchism. This doesn’t imply an ignorance of power or of its present application in the real world, nor does it imply that all authorities are indistinguishable, but it does imply that we hold no structures so sacred as to be above question. That’s not counterrevolutionary: it’s the very thing that revolution consists of.

I’ve literally read all of these before.

Nothing I said is a critique of anarchism.

Not to mention, Marx and Engles were against the state as a revolutionary apparatus

No. This is definitely nonsense, I don’t want to get into sectarian bollocks but you deserve correcting. Marx is completely explicit about it here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm

But again. Nothing I fucking said was a criticism of anarchism. This isn’t about anarchism this is about something explicitly different to it, anti-authoritarianism is not the same thing as anarchism, anarchists are not universally anti-authority.

Stop trying to turn this into sectarianism. Nothing I said was about anarchism. Fuck off. Wrecker somewhere else.

Did you actually read the article on Marx? It misrepresents Stalin tremendously and slightly misrepresents Lenin (who was at first the biggest proponent of a “state capitalist” DotP), but it clearly and explicitly defends the notion of the DotP as a socialist state preceding stateless communism, as all Marxist-Leninists do. It would have been better to include more of the writing Lenin quotes in his own work about the paradox of the “free state”, maybe even Lenin’s own thoughts, but we can only expect so much from a Trot rag like this.

You aren’t making a good case for your “informed criticism” plea, as though it had a chance when you call Leninists “statists”. Just say “tankie” if you refuse to say ML, it is unironically less irritating.

“The State is Counterrevolutionary” Pt. 1:

This quote from Lenin’s work What Is To Be Done? is quite instructive of the attitude he takes toward revolutionary organization: “Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” Leninism is predicated on a fundamental lack of faith in the workers to organize themselves and to arrive upon a coherent conception of their class position without a party to lead them. To Lenin, the vanguard, occupied by enlightened socialist thinkers, was a representative body of proletarian class consciousness. Thus it was the job of the revolutionary party to tutor the masses on their liberation ‘from without.’ Wherein the workers lacked such a guiding hand, Lenin took a dim view of their mass potential, believing that the highest state that they could achieve on their own was what he called trade union consciousness; that is to say, the ability to band together into trade unions.

Should all workers attain class consciousness at once? Even the real means of material liberation will be distributed equally or in separate intervals. Why, then, should a worker’s vanguard be opposed? Leadership is absolutely necessary, and nobody is calling workers stupid. In fact, the theoretically advanced and devoted as those making up the vanguard are derived from the workers themselves. The quote from What is to Be Done is so deliberately misconstrued as to invoke a great suspicion of dishonesty. We will begin from where OP left off:

“The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. For that reason, the reply to the question as to what must be done to bring political knowledge to the workers cannot be merely the answer with which, in the majority of cases, the practical workers, especially those inclined towards Economism, mostly content themselves, namely: ‘To go among the workers.’ To bring political knowledge to the workers the Social Democrats must go among all classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their army in all directions.”

Either Anark read, “We therefore beg the reader not to get wrought up, but to hear us patiently to the end” and ignored this warning, or neglected to read the work entirely. In any case, this is a grave mistake that risks discrediting their entire argument.

Although, I do remember a few years ago a comrade on this site made a vent post about how they were literally called a bot in an offline argument with a coworker. That one absolutely boggles the mind.

When a lib calls someone a bot, they aren’t trying to make a factual statement about the world. It’s a social signal: “I don’t have to listen to or engage with the content of what you say because you’re on the Bad Team.”

I would hope that liberals don’t literally believe that we are all AI chatbots that are replying to each other over and over, I think it’s just used in the same way that chuds use “NPC”. like, the only way you could get to our views is if you have zero critical thought about the world, know very little, are hyper suggestible to the first narrative you see, etc, which is very funny coming from (typically American) liberals whose entire concept of the world is generated by scrolling through reddit and half-remembered thoughts from high school

I thought the obsession over the advertisements were deflection from the Wikileaks e-mail dumps (DNC & Podesta leaks) about the Clinton campaign and the confirmation of the open secrets within those e-mails. (e.g: incestuous relationship between the campaign and the media, the Clinton campaign preemptively taking control of the DNC, and the Pied Piper strategy to set up radicals like Trump to enable Clinton to have an easier time getting elected.)

Those leaks created a crisis of legitimacy, which has only been resolved artificially through self-delusion, and has only served to institutionalize learned helplessness and alienation from power.

We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.

deleted by creator

Ah, fair enough.

In that case I’d avoid slinging shit at the mod and just keep it to the fact that you were stating your own political beliefs, you weren’t using personal insults against anyone, and despite that fact you were given no warnings you were immediately banned. I’d also mention that the other user was given multiple warnings for actually breaking the rules and yet they weren’t banned.

If you can get a message across to the head mod, try to explain that you feel as though the mod that banned you allowed their own personal bias to influence their actions in a way that was unjustly harsh against you, unjustly tolerant of the other user, and how this ultimately crrates a hostile community that could rapidly become toxic if allowed to continue.

I think in future, especially in broad left spaces, I’d recommend hiding your power level and avoiding getting too involved in ideological debates. There’s a time and a place for that stuff and when you are marginalised it can be hard to come across safer spaces for finding community and, unfortunately, it often means that you have to bite your tongue and then vent later on in a place like Hexbear or you can take out your ideological frustrations on some unwitting “anti-tankie” on some other platform.

I know it fucking sucks to find a place that accepts you and is safer only to find out that it’s openly hostile to your politics (despite being for leftists 🙄) but often it’s a choice of whether you want to be right or if you want to be accepted. (I’m not trans myself but I’m queer and very much neurodivergent so there aren’t that many spaces which are welcoming and supportive for me that are actually safe enough. I often find myself needing to compartmentalise my capital-P politics in these spaces.)

Congrats on finding someone to meet up with! I hope you enjoy the sushi.

Good luck with it.

It sounds like it is possible that the other mods would significantly disagree with your ban