no, but i’m not a fan of dogmatism in general. plus ‘stalinism’ gets used as a smear against MLs broadly, many of whom i don’t really take issue with. i have plenty of issues with stalin, but i don’t think ‘stalinism’ (or MLs more broadly) to be as much of a threat to my existence as say capitalism or fascism.
I mean your going to be called a tankie cause your on ml. Don’t hang out in the tankie bar if you dont want people to think your a tankie. Kinda cut and dry there. Doesn’t really matter what your beliefs are one way or another. If you hang out with a large group of people who are mostly one thing, everyones going to assume you are also that thing till proven other wise. Its stupid but its reality. Arguing against that is like arguing against gravity. The ground wins every time.
i made a post a while back about how a ‘anti-tankie’ comm in particular had a lot of talk about wanting to get rid of ‘degenerate roaches’ without any real moderation going on.
i find that kind of talk a lot more offputting than tankies.
i’ve run into a lot of people on here saying some gross ass shit and getting away with it because as long as they’re targetting ‘tankies’ anything goes.
usually when someone’s deploying the line ‘tankie bar’ it’s because they frequent meanwhileongrad, it is hosted on the same server as the person i was replying to, they even have a post history there.
So let’s do the ultimate test:
In your oppinion: is there any scenario where deploying the military (tanks) against civilians is a legitimate course of action?
obviously not, i am not a fan of state violence broadly.
now please let me reverse it: is there any scenario where using ‘sanctions’ or other economic warfare against a civilian population is a legitimate course of action?
In credit of the other poster though, most people on ml do defend the udssr doing that, so calling ml a tankie bar is not that far fetched.
And of course: no there is no way starving people is a legitimate course of action, ofc I condemn the Cuba blockade, friends of mine even went there this summer to help.
If you think I even remotely defend US politcs you heavily misunderstood my words.
(I consider myself a Marxist if this wasn’t clear)
that’s good to hear. i actually appreciate these spaces because i would rather know what the heterodox opinions are, the us media ecosystem is extremely anticommunist, pro-murica, and shallow. i organize with anarchists in my day to day, i consider myself an anarchist. i also have many comrades that i’ve shared struggle with over the years who are marxists, and that always made the everpresent online animosity feel weird to me.
tbh the test is kinda bs anyways, the libertarian/authoritarian axis naturalizes capitalism by treating state coercion as the only kind of coercion, as if unfettered ‘free market’ capitalism isn’t authoritarian too.
it makes the axis useless for actual analysis because it can’t account for economic power as a form of authority, for example a landlord evicting someone in a “free market” reads as libertarian while a workers state reads as authoritarian, even though the material experience of coercion for the person being evicted is very real.
Well from the view of political science this axis is meant to represent social norms, not economic.
So a workers state can be liberal, in a sense that there is no free market, but freedom of love, freedom of movement, freedom of lifestyle or freedom of job choice or it could be authoritarian in a sense of prosecution of gays, presribed places of living, prescribed places of work and forcing people to live in a certain way.
Left = money and power should be distributed
Right= money and power should be centralized
Liberal = do what you want in every other aspect then power and money
Authoritarian = live the way the majority dictates, dont diverge.
Those categories are not useless in and off theorself, its just that the website uses them wrong.
For example: anarchism - communism - socialism - Leninism are all on the political left, as they all want power to be distributed among the many, but they differ in their level of liberalism/authoritarianism.
(Though it is to note that none of the ideologies praises authoritharian policys, its just that some deem them more necessary in the beginning than others)
Left Liberal societies accept and protect minorities if they dont try to accumulat power/money
Left authoritarian societies try to extinguish/assimilate minorities into the hegemonial culture no matter what.
i gotta go back to my original point though; “freedom” in the libertarian ‘liberal’ sense presupposes a baseline of material security that capitalism doesn’t provide, i don’t think that ‘do what you want’ can be separated from power and money, especially under capitalism.
that axis still treats freedom as absence of state interference rather than presence of material conditions for actually exercising freedom
that assumption is specifically a liberal conception of freedom rather than a neutral one. it’s baked into the framework
You assume liberal and authoritarian policy is baked into capitalism, while the concept is way broader.
The concept also applies to feudal systems, tribes and socialist attempts.
One can compare two capitalist societies, which are similar on a power distribution and money distribution but are wildly different no the less.
For example one where you can express diverging oppinions without fear of prosecution and one where you can’t.
First would be more liberal, second more authoritarian.
Same applies to socialism, tribes etc.
Ofc this influences power and money distribution and vice verca, but it is still a different dimension, hence the different terminology.
Its about how much control is asserted on the people.
Does it make authoritarian socialism (e.g. stalinism) and authoritarian capitalism (e.g
Facism) the same, just because both prosecute gays, prosecute different religion, have hard punishment for dissidents? No, ofc not, they are still very far apart on the left right axis, they assert that control for very different reasons, but it is still a similarity that one can analyse, so it make sense to have names for it.
One can have authoritarian or liberal policy in any system.
The mistake is believing mixing up those scales and believing the ECONOMIC liberals fit into that spectrum. From an political science perspective its just a mislabeling.
If you use “soft” tools like free market to assert to control instead of “hard” tools like violence or prisons, its STILL an authoritarian policy.
So from a historical and political science perspective “neoliberals” in the sense of for example the Democratic party in america are not liberal.
Same as the national socialist of Germany were in fact not socialists, even if they called themself that.
Economic liberalism is a political agenda trying to disguise right wing policy, because it relables centralization of power as freedom of individuals, which ofc is not the case
Free accumulation of money/power is a question of left/right, NOT authoritarian/liberal.
And even if it were, it would be an authoritarian policy, as if you look at societies as a whole individual freedom in the mean DECREASES as capital/power accumulates, even if it increases for the few holding that power/money.
But as I said, the mistake is even trying to fit distribution of power/money onto the liberal/authoritarian spectrum
You assume liberal and authoritarian policy is baked into capitalism, while the concept is way broader.
it is though.
So from a historical and political science perspective “neoliberals” in the sense of for example the Democratic party in america are not liberal.
classical liberalism in the political science sense is explicitly pro-capitalist at its foundations. ie it means support of individual rights, rule of law, free markets and private property. distinguishing “real” liberalism from neoliberalism is mostly an internal debate within pro-capitalist thought about how much state intervention is acceptable in managing capital. it’s not a meaningful distinction from outside that framework. (ie where i am)
Economic liberalism is a political agenda trying to disguise right wing policy, because it relables centralization of power as freedom of individuals, which ofc is not the case
that’s why i have an issue with accepting that framing of liberal ‘freedom’ vs authoritarianism for the compass axis though, it seems like we agree on that tho.
Free accumulation of money/power is a question of left/right, NOT authoritarian/liberal.
the material conditions that allow free accumulation of capital necessarily require enforcement mechanisms (ie property law, police, courts, borders, prisons) which are themselves authoritarian. you can’t cleanly separate the economic from the political dimension because the economic system requires political enforcement to exist.
Does it make authoritarian socialism (e.g. stalinism) and authoritarian capitalism (e.g Facism) the same, just because both prosecute gays, prosecute different religion, have hard punishment for dissidents? No, ofc not, they are still very far apart on the left right axis, they assert that control for very different reasons, but it is still a similarity that one can analyse, so it make sense to have names for it.
and under authoritarian liberalism you get unpersoned for being unable to pay rent, not to put to fine a point on it, but what good is ‘freedom’ to an unemployed hungry person?
Should have put it clearer: you assume the scale of liberal/authoritarian is only applicable to capitalism.
Of course it is, just not only to that. Its a metric to describe societies, capitalistic ones and others.
classical liberalism in the political science sense is explicitly pro-capitalist at its foundations. ie it means support of individual rights, rule of law, free markets and private property.
No, liberalism is not explicitly pro capitalism. liberal people historically (for example in the French revolution) were pro democracy, as democracy is more liberal than what they had at the time, feudalism.
It is true that a lot of them were also pro capitalist, but there were (and are) also a lot anarchists and communists among the liberal.
You think of liberal in the sense of a political system again, which in the scientific meaning of the term it just is not.
Imagine an anarchist society with no markets, no rule of law, no private property. Such a society still has means of control, social isolation, or rejecting people from it.
This society can be more liberal (you can be gay, you can dress like you want, you can move a lot or stay in one place, you could criticize freely and you could have spiritual believes how you want)
Or this society can be more authoritarian (you are expected to behave a certain way, love a certain way, dress a certain way and dont criticize societal norms)
In an anarchist society the means of control are social rejection, in a (fully) capitalist one its money, in (fully) Democratic one its law, in a theocracy its faith.
Most societies are mixes of those.
Those are wildly different, but all can be more liberal or more authoritarian. The scale of Liberal or authoritarian describes how much control is asserted, not by what means the control is achieved and who or how many hold it.
the material conditions that allow free accumulation of capital necessarily require enforcement mechanisms (ie property law, police, courts, borders, prisons) which are themselves authoritarian. you can’t cleanly separate the economic from the political dimension because the economic system requires political enforcement to exist.
Yes off course they do, some political systems need a more authoritarian policy (facism > feudalism > capitalism > democracy) than others.
And some systems tend towards authoritarian policy by design, even if they actually need liberal policy to not die (e.g. our beloved parliamentarian democracy we have in Europe or our beloved two state hyper capitalism in america)
But now you are talking about state forms. Those can be left or right, and come in many levels of authoritarian, but its still a different question to ask.
So again:
State form: the method from which control is derived (faith, money, social norms, combat strength, parliament, councils, social norms)
Left/right: a measure of how distributed that power is amung the people (few: right, Manny: left)
Authoritarian/Liberal: how heavily that control is used (less: liberal, more:authoritarian)
I am aware that in political campaigns and nonscientific debate those terms are thrown around a lot and get used for wildy inadequate things (neoliberal, national socialist, liberal party of Britain, etc. Pp).
Mostly in an order to deceive.
That’s why I make my whole point, it is important to define the words you are talking about in the same way to understand each other. That’s why I speak of the political scientific meaning of the words. The technical terms if you want.
And in those, authoritarian vs liberal as two ends of a spectrum are quite useful to describe and compare different societies.
EDIT:
TO answer your melodramatic last sentence, what those freedom means to a hungry homeless person:
Nothing! Therefore a society in which the means of control (money) is used so heavily a person has nearly no options/choices is not a liberal one.
Capitalism has that tendency to get more and more authoritarian, because of the baked in need for continuous accumulation of capital, even to the point where it stops being capitalism and starts being facism.
You can’t have authoritarian liberalism, that’s an oxymoron.
Its like saying you have hot cold.
Both are adjectives on opposite ends of a spectrum.
You need a state form in there to make sense.
In an anarchist society the means of control are social rejection, in a (fully) capitalist one its money, in (fully) Democratic one its law, in a theocracy its faith. Most societies are mixes of those.
in a capitalist society the means of control are all of those simultaneously. money, law, social norms, and ultimately violence when the others fail. they’re layered and mutually reinforcing. the state apparatus exists precisely to backstop the money-based control when it breaks down. you can’t separate them.
i dont disagree with there being authority under anti-capitalist systems, the premise that i disagree with is the assumtion that liberal societies are maximally anti-authoritarian, which is ignoring the whole capitalism and state apparatus required to enforce that.
this just feels like you’re trying to whitewash liberalism when its real core value is protecting private property
you really need to reflect on how your political science education is rife with smuggled-in assumptions
You can’t have authoritarian liberalism, that’s an oxymoron.
Its like saying you have hot cold.
you’re just definitionally asserting your own conclusion
liberal authoritarianism is what we live under now; we have unlimited choices and freedom if we’re rich, evicted from our houses or arrested for being poor.
no, but i’m not a fan of dogmatism in general. plus ‘stalinism’ gets used as a smear against MLs broadly, many of whom i don’t really take issue with. i have plenty of issues with stalin, but i don’t think ‘stalinism’ (or MLs more broadly) to be as much of a threat to my existence as say capitalism or fascism.
I mean your going to be called a tankie cause your on ml. Don’t hang out in the tankie bar if you dont want people to think your a tankie. Kinda cut and dry there. Doesn’t really matter what your beliefs are one way or another. If you hang out with a large group of people who are mostly one thing, everyones going to assume you are also that thing till proven other wise. Its stupid but its reality. Arguing against that is like arguing against gravity. The ground wins every time.
‘tankie bar’ is not a real thing.
you sound like the kind of person to hang out in a nazi bar though
Assuming anyone who doesn’t agree with you is a Nazi is very tankie fashioned though. U sure u not one of them?
i made a post a while back about how a ‘anti-tankie’ comm in particular had a lot of talk about wanting to get rid of ‘degenerate roaches’ without any real moderation going on.
i find that kind of talk a lot more offputting than tankies.
i’ve run into a lot of people on here saying some gross ass shit and getting away with it because as long as they’re targetting ‘tankies’ anything goes.
usually when someone’s deploying the line ‘tankie bar’ it’s because they frequent meanwhileongrad, it is hosted on the same server as the person i was replying to, they even have a post history there.
So let’s do the ultimate test: In your oppinion: is there any scenario where deploying the military (tanks) against civilians is a legitimate course of action?
obviously not, i am not a fan of state violence broadly.
now please let me reverse it: is there any scenario where using ‘sanctions’ or other economic warfare against a civilian population is a legitimate course of action?
Okay, not a tankie then.
In credit of the other poster though, most people on ml do defend the udssr doing that, so calling ml a tankie bar is not that far fetched.
And of course: no there is no way starving people is a legitimate course of action, ofc I condemn the Cuba blockade, friends of mine even went there this summer to help. If you think I even remotely defend US politcs you heavily misunderstood my words.
(I consider myself a Marxist if this wasn’t clear)
that’s good to hear. i actually appreciate these spaces because i would rather know what the heterodox opinions are, the us media ecosystem is extremely anticommunist, pro-murica, and shallow. i organize with anarchists in my day to day, i consider myself an anarchist. i also have many comrades that i’ve shared struggle with over the years who are marxists, and that always made the everpresent online animosity feel weird to me.
Okay, if you did it would been even more clear that this compas is bs putting you in liberal corner.
tbh the test is kinda bs anyways, the libertarian/authoritarian axis naturalizes capitalism by treating state coercion as the only kind of coercion, as if unfettered ‘free market’ capitalism isn’t authoritarian too.
it makes the axis useless for actual analysis because it can’t account for economic power as a form of authority, for example a landlord evicting someone in a “free market” reads as libertarian while a workers state reads as authoritarian, even though the material experience of coercion for the person being evicted is very real.
Well from the view of political science this axis is meant to represent social norms, not economic.
So a workers state can be liberal, in a sense that there is no free market, but freedom of love, freedom of movement, freedom of lifestyle or freedom of job choice or it could be authoritarian in a sense of prosecution of gays, presribed places of living, prescribed places of work and forcing people to live in a certain way.
Left = money and power should be distributed Right= money and power should be centralized
Liberal = do what you want in every other aspect then power and money
Authoritarian = live the way the majority dictates, dont diverge.
Those categories are not useless in and off theorself, its just that the website uses them wrong.
For example: anarchism - communism - socialism - Leninism are all on the political left, as they all want power to be distributed among the many, but they differ in their level of liberalism/authoritarianism.
(Though it is to note that none of the ideologies praises authoritharian policys, its just that some deem them more necessary in the beginning than others)
Left Liberal societies accept and protect minorities if they dont try to accumulat power/money
Left authoritarian societies try to extinguish/assimilate minorities into the hegemonial culture no matter what.
i gotta go back to my original point though; “freedom” in the libertarian ‘liberal’ sense presupposes a baseline of material security that capitalism doesn’t provide, i don’t think that ‘do what you want’ can be separated from power and money, especially under capitalism.
that axis still treats freedom as absence of state interference rather than presence of material conditions for actually exercising freedom
that assumption is specifically a liberal conception of freedom rather than a neutral one. it’s baked into the framework
That’s not true in political science.
You assume liberal and authoritarian policy is baked into capitalism, while the concept is way broader. The concept also applies to feudal systems, tribes and socialist attempts.
One can compare two capitalist societies, which are similar on a power distribution and money distribution but are wildly different no the less.
For example one where you can express diverging oppinions without fear of prosecution and one where you can’t.
First would be more liberal, second more authoritarian.
Same applies to socialism, tribes etc.
Ofc this influences power and money distribution and vice verca, but it is still a different dimension, hence the different terminology.
Its about how much control is asserted on the people.
Does it make authoritarian socialism (e.g. stalinism) and authoritarian capitalism (e.g Facism) the same, just because both prosecute gays, prosecute different religion, have hard punishment for dissidents? No, ofc not, they are still very far apart on the left right axis, they assert that control for very different reasons, but it is still a similarity that one can analyse, so it make sense to have names for it.
One can have authoritarian or liberal policy in any system.
The mistake is believing mixing up those scales and believing the ECONOMIC liberals fit into that spectrum. From an political science perspective its just a mislabeling.
If you use “soft” tools like free market to assert to control instead of “hard” tools like violence or prisons, its STILL an authoritarian policy.
So from a historical and political science perspective “neoliberals” in the sense of for example the Democratic party in america are not liberal.
Same as the national socialist of Germany were in fact not socialists, even if they called themself that.
Economic liberalism is a political agenda trying to disguise right wing policy, because it relables centralization of power as freedom of individuals, which ofc is not the case
Free accumulation of money/power is a question of left/right, NOT authoritarian/liberal.
And even if it were, it would be an authoritarian policy, as if you look at societies as a whole individual freedom in the mean DECREASES as capital/power accumulates, even if it increases for the few holding that power/money. But as I said, the mistake is even trying to fit distribution of power/money onto the liberal/authoritarian spectrum
it is though.
classical liberalism in the political science sense is explicitly pro-capitalist at its foundations. ie it means support of individual rights, rule of law, free markets and private property. distinguishing “real” liberalism from neoliberalism is mostly an internal debate within pro-capitalist thought about how much state intervention is acceptable in managing capital. it’s not a meaningful distinction from outside that framework. (ie where i am)
that’s why i have an issue with accepting that framing of liberal ‘freedom’ vs authoritarianism for the compass axis though, it seems like we agree on that tho.
the material conditions that allow free accumulation of capital necessarily require enforcement mechanisms (ie property law, police, courts, borders, prisons) which are themselves authoritarian. you can’t cleanly separate the economic from the political dimension because the economic system requires political enforcement to exist.
and under authoritarian liberalism you get unpersoned for being unable to pay rent, not to put to fine a point on it, but what good is ‘freedom’ to an unemployed hungry person?
Should have put it clearer: you assume the scale of liberal/authoritarian is only applicable to capitalism. Of course it is, just not only to that. Its a metric to describe societies, capitalistic ones and others.
No, liberalism is not explicitly pro capitalism. liberal people historically (for example in the French revolution) were pro democracy, as democracy is more liberal than what they had at the time, feudalism. It is true that a lot of them were also pro capitalist, but there were (and are) also a lot anarchists and communists among the liberal.
You think of liberal in the sense of a political system again, which in the scientific meaning of the term it just is not.
Imagine an anarchist society with no markets, no rule of law, no private property. Such a society still has means of control, social isolation, or rejecting people from it.
This society can be more liberal (you can be gay, you can dress like you want, you can move a lot or stay in one place, you could criticize freely and you could have spiritual believes how you want)
Or this society can be more authoritarian (you are expected to behave a certain way, love a certain way, dress a certain way and dont criticize societal norms)
In an anarchist society the means of control are social rejection, in a (fully) capitalist one its money, in (fully) Democratic one its law, in a theocracy its faith. Most societies are mixes of those.
Those are wildly different, but all can be more liberal or more authoritarian. The scale of Liberal or authoritarian describes how much control is asserted, not by what means the control is achieved and who or how many hold it.
Yes off course they do, some political systems need a more authoritarian policy (facism > feudalism > capitalism > democracy) than others. And some systems tend towards authoritarian policy by design, even if they actually need liberal policy to not die (e.g. our beloved parliamentarian democracy we have in Europe or our beloved two state hyper capitalism in america)
But now you are talking about state forms. Those can be left or right, and come in many levels of authoritarian, but its still a different question to ask.
So again:
State form: the method from which control is derived (faith, money, social norms, combat strength, parliament, councils, social norms)
Left/right: a measure of how distributed that power is amung the people (few: right, Manny: left)
Authoritarian/Liberal: how heavily that control is used (less: liberal, more:authoritarian)
I am aware that in political campaigns and nonscientific debate those terms are thrown around a lot and get used for wildy inadequate things (neoliberal, national socialist, liberal party of Britain, etc. Pp). Mostly in an order to deceive. That’s why I make my whole point, it is important to define the words you are talking about in the same way to understand each other. That’s why I speak of the political scientific meaning of the words. The technical terms if you want. And in those, authoritarian vs liberal as two ends of a spectrum are quite useful to describe and compare different societies.
EDIT: TO answer your melodramatic last sentence, what those freedom means to a hungry homeless person: Nothing! Therefore a society in which the means of control (money) is used so heavily a person has nearly no options/choices is not a liberal one.
Capitalism has that tendency to get more and more authoritarian, because of the baked in need for continuous accumulation of capital, even to the point where it stops being capitalism and starts being facism.
You can’t have authoritarian liberalism, that’s an oxymoron.
Its like saying you have hot cold.
Both are adjectives on opposite ends of a spectrum. You need a state form in there to make sense.
Liberal parliamentarism ✅
Authoritarian capitalism✅
Liberal socialism✅
Authoritarian theocracy✅
Liberal authoritarianism ❌
Authoritarian liberalism ❌
in a capitalist society the means of control are all of those simultaneously. money, law, social norms, and ultimately violence when the others fail. they’re layered and mutually reinforcing. the state apparatus exists precisely to backstop the money-based control when it breaks down. you can’t separate them.
i dont disagree with there being authority under anti-capitalist systems, the premise that i disagree with is the assumtion that liberal societies are maximally anti-authoritarian, which is ignoring the whole capitalism and state apparatus required to enforce that.
this just feels like you’re trying to whitewash liberalism when its real core value is protecting private property
you really need to reflect on how your political science education is rife with smuggled-in assumptions
you’re just definitionally asserting your own conclusion
liberal authoritarianism is what we live under now; we have unlimited choices and freedom if we’re rich, evicted from our houses or arrested for being poor.