Post #2764052

I am not going to pretend to be an expert on Anark’s whole body of work. I have only watched a handful of his videos, on recommendation from an anarchist I know. But what I did see was enough to recognize: petty-bourgeois anarchism dressed up in the language and strappings of rigorous theory. The starting point it appears is never class struggle, production, imperialism, state power, colonial pressure, or the actual historical tasks of socialist construction. It is abstract “power,” abstract “authority,” abstract “domination,” and then a moral judgment against every real revolutionary state for failing to match an idealized fantasy of immediate anti-authoritarian purity. In theoretical terms: phrase-mongering and infantile ultra-leftism. From what I have seen, his understanding of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, and existing socialist states is paper-thin. Socialist construction under siege, blockade, sabotage, civil war, peasant backwardness, imperialist encirclement, and restorationist pressure gets flattened into a morality tale about “authoritarianism.” His definition of power is fine, if overly individualist: “the ability to successfully enact one’s will.” This makes sense given individualism being a pillar of anarchism. But the definition of “authoritarianism” is yet another vacuous redefinition to add to the pile. It strips analysis of class content, state form, property relations, and historical function. “The degree to which a power structure monopolizes control over the total social implementation of some power” sounds precise, but it tells us almost nothing. Which class controls it? Through what institutions? On the basis of what property relations? Against whom is coercion being used? In what historical situation? A workers’ state, a fascist state, a colonial state, a bourgeois liberal state, and a revolutionary army can all be made to fit vague language about monopoly, coercion, and implementation. Returning it once again to a label for designated bad countries™. Your claim that defending proletarian power is “not materialist” because it supposedly relies on people with the correct ideas doing domination is a misunderstanding of the argument. Marxist-Leninists do not defend proletarian state power because the people wielding it have nicer opinions. We defend it because class power is materially rooted. A bourgeois state defends private property, capital accumulation, wage labour, imperialist extraction, and the dictatorship of capital not because they have bad ideas but that it is directly within their class interest to do so. A proletarian state, however imperfectly and under real contradiction, is a transitional instrument for suppressing the old exploiting classes, socializing production, defending the revolution, and reorganizing society toward communism not because they have better ideas but again because it is directly in their class interest to do so. You also misunderstand class when you claim that administrators in socialist states simply become a ruling class of bureaucrats because they administer. Administrators, planners, party officials, and state functionaries can absolutely develop bureaucratic distortions, careerism, privilege, and contradictions. Marxist-Leninists do not need anarchists to discover bureaucracy for us. But a bureaucrat without private ownership of the means of production, without the legal right to buy, sell, bequeath, and accumulate productive property as capital, does not occupy a different class but a different stratum of the same class. And it is obviously valid to point out that words were specifically chosen for their negative connotations. An unrelated example to show the point: there’s a reason western media uses regime for talking about “designated bad countries™” governments despite it effectively being a synonym of government, it’s the connotation. Criticising this is again obviously valid.