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.
what is a working class state exactly? Why even call it a state if it’s “not the same” as a state?
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.
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”?
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.
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.
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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.
Ok so there’s no communism button, but there is a button that reverses the power structures in the state, make it make sense
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.
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, 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.
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?
Anything’s possible when you make shit up