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.
Obvious to who? Can’t agree with what? You still have not said what “that” is. You keep saying China is not worker control, but you refuse to define what worker control actually means in institutional, political, economic, and military terms. Not slogans. Not negation. What form of ownership? What organs of power? What planning mechanism? What enforcement mechanism? What defence against restoration, sanctions, invasion, sabotage, and capital flight? If it is so obvious, state it clearly.
That is at least honest. You are not arguing that China fails the Marxist definition of socialism. You are saying you reject that definition because you prefer another one that you still will not explain. Fine, but then stop pretending this is a material analysis of China. It is not. It is you rejecting the socialist transition because it contains state power, authority, contradiction, uneven development, and the use of controlled markets.
You call China a bourgeois state with red aesthetics, so prove it. Which section of the bourgeoisie rules China? Through what institutions? How does it command the army? How does it control the land? How does it dictate the central bank, the five-year plans, the SOEs, the party-state, the courts, and national development strategy? How does it reproduce itself as a ruling class above the CPC? How does it turn private wealth into sovereign political power? Because in an actual bourgeois state, capital rules the state. In China, capital exists under the state and is disciplined when it steps outside the boundaries set by socialist construction.
You are not more principled because you reject every existing socialist project for failing to be the finished form of communism. That is not principle. That is purity politics detached from the problem of transition. To quote Jones Manoel : According to Perry Anderson there is a separation between Western and Eastern Marxism, and Western Marxism is basically a kind of Marxism which has, as a key characteristic, never exercised political power. It is a Marxism that has, more and more frequently, concerned itself with philosophical and aesthetic issues. It has pulled back, for example, from criticism of political economy and the problem of the conquest of political power. More and more it has taken a historic distance from the concrete experiences of socialist transition in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba and so forth. This western Marxism considers itself to be superior to eastern Marxism because it hasn’t tarnished Marxism by transforming it into an ideology of the State like, for example, Soviet Marxism, and it has never been authoritarian, totalitarian or violent. This Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth — this is a very important point. Wherever a victorious socialist revolution has taken place in the West, like Cuba, it is much more closely associated with the so-called eastern Marxism than with this western Marxism produced in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and parts of South America. This Marxism is proud of its purity, and this is the first elemental characteristic that derives from Christianity.
Name the alternative and explain it. This vague hand-waving is useless. “There are theories” is not an argument. I have read anarchist, left-communist, Trotskyist, syndicalist, council communist, and autonomist arguments. I reject most of them because they collapse the moment they are forced to deal with actual state power, actual imperialism, actual war, actual scarcity, actual uneven development, actual logistics, and actual complex production. If your alternative is better, explain how it works.
And stop twisting my point about stateless communism. I did not say communism means people take turns running a nuclear plant. I said your treatment of authority collapses into that nonsense if you cannot distinguish class rule from technical and administrative authority. The state and government are not identical. The state is the coercive instrument of class rule. It withers away when class antagonisms are abolished. Government in the administrative sense remains: planning, coordination, production, logistics, health, education, infrastructure, allocation, safety, and public administration. Communism is not the abolition of coordination. It is the abolition of class rule.
I believe in communism. I just do not believe it can be wished into existence by pretending the transition is unnecessary.
No, I believe communism is possible when capitalism is overcome globally and the material basis for class society has been abolished. Until then, socialism is the transition. That transition requires proletarian state power because the bourgeoisie does not disappear when you declare it abolished. Imperialism does not stop being violent because you announce stateless communism. Sanctions, invasion, sabotage, comprador forces, separatism, capital flight, technological dependency, and military encirclement do not vanish because you find authority distasteful.
This is where your politics becomes fantasy. You treat the means necessary to defend and develop the revolution as proof that the revolution is fake. By that logic, any revolution that survives reality has already betrayed itself.
I know. The issue is not whether other theories exist. The issue is whether they work. So stop gesturing vaguely at “entire theories” and state your actual position. What is the superior model? How does it seize power? How does it defend itself? How does it organise production? How does it prevent bourgeois restoration? How does it coordinate chip fabrication, rail, ports, energy, hospitals, agriculture, housing, medicine, disability care, and military defence? How does it function at the scale of hundreds of millions or billions of people? How does it survive imperialist encirclement?
If your answer is “go read theory,” then you have no argument here. I am not asking whether books exist. I am asking what your politics can actually do in the world.
The CNT-FAI is a perfect example of what I mean. It may appeal to you aesthetically because it looks closer to your ideal form (which you have yet to elaborate on in any meaningful way), but what did it actually achieve historically? a durable socialist transition? It did not consolidate state power. It did not defeat fascism. It did not survive imperialist and reactionary pressure. It did not industrialise a poor country. It did not lift hundreds of millions from poverty. It did not build a sovereign development model. It did not construct an enduring workers’ state capable of defending revolutionary gains over generations. It was heroic in places, but heroism is not the same as a viable path to communism.
A form that briefly looks purer but cannot survive is not “closer to socialism” in any serious historical sense. It is closer to your preference. That is different.
Communism is the end goal. Socialism is the transition toward it. You cannot skip the transition by denouncing every actual attempt to carry it out as “red capitalism.” If you want to learn Chinese, you do not start at HSK6. If someone is not yet at HSK6, that does not mean they are not learning Chinese. It means there is a process between the starting point and the goal. Society is no different. You do not get from semi-colonial poverty, imperialist domination, underdevelopment, and class society to communism by pressing a magic button.
China is socialist because the proletarian-led state holds political power, commands the strategic economy, controls the commanding heights, subordinates capital to national development, maintains public ownership of land, plans development, disciplines the bourgeoisie, defends sovereignty, and works through the contradictions inherited from capitalism under global imperialist pressure.
Also if you have figured out how to go from the present reality of global capitalism, imperialist violence, scarcity, uneven development, technological dependency, sanctions, militarised borders, and class struggle straight into pure end-stage communism, then by all means, press the communism button. The reason you have not is obvious: there is no button. There is only transition, struggle, state power, production, defence, planning, contradiction, and the hard work of building communism out of the world capitalism leaves behind. Pretending otherwise is not revolutionary. It is contrarian wrecker politics.