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.
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?
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
China is socialist and has been since October 1st 1949.
counterpoint, no, not even close
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
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
Anything’s possible when you make shit up