That’s what I said; the center defines the standard. The US is authoritarian by social-democratic standards.
They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle.
“Class struggle” is not a one-dimensional variable, and the mode of production is to a significant extent a choice made by those within the system. A revolution has degrees of freedom for who is in its circle of solidarity.
Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power.
State communists mistake the state/vanguard as a neutral outsider rather than a material entity. Authority left to fester will shape the material conditions to enshrine the authority at the cost of those without authority.
Social democrats tend not to call the US authoritarian (I have yet to see it). They’re too busy negotiating their cut of imperial plunder, welfare states built on extracted surplus and “human rights” rhetoric that conveniently ignores sanctions and coups. If “the center defines the standard,” then the standard isn’t about coercion; it’s about loyalty to capital (as I already pointed out). The label only sticks to those who break ranks (refuse to bend the knee to the EuroAmerikan hegemony).
On mode of production as “choice”: this is idealism, pure and simple. Putting the cart before the horse. Ideas don’t shape the material base; the material base shapes ideas. Capitalism didn’t arrive because someone imagined it. Feudal relations broke because they could no longer contain the productive forces, guilds choked industry, serfdom blocked labor, divine right couldn’t manage global accumulation. Socialism isn’t a fairy tale we opt into. It becomes necessary when capital’s own contradictions (overproduction, immiseration, ecological rupture) can no longer be managed within private ownership. And solidarity isn’t moral selection or simply who we like or don’t like. It’s determined by objective interests. The Chinese revolution for example united workers, peasants, and the national bourgeoisie not because of abstract ideals, but because all three had material stakes in smashing imperialist and feudal domination.
On the vanguard: have you read Lenin? Mao? The entire point is that it is NOT neutral. The vanguard is explicitly the organized, conscious detachment of the proletariat, an instrument of class rule, just like the bourgeois state, but inverted. The difference isn’t the existence of authority; it’s which class wields it, for what end, and whether its practice is tied to mass line feedback. To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.
Authority isn’t a substance that “festers.” It’s a relation, grounded in who controls production, who allocates surplus, who defends or transforms property forms. You can’t analyze it like a moral contaminant. You have to trace it to its material base. When authority serves to socialize wealth, decommodify life, and break imperial chains, it isn’t reproducing domination, it’s creating the conditions where coercion itself becomes obsolete.
That’s what I said; the center defines the standard. The US is authoritarian by social-democratic standards.
“Class struggle” is not a one-dimensional variable, and the mode of production is to a significant extent a choice made by those within the system. A revolution has degrees of freedom for who is in its circle of solidarity.
State communists mistake the state/vanguard as a neutral outsider rather than a material entity. Authority left to fester will shape the material conditions to enshrine the authority at the cost of those without authority.
Social democrats tend not to call the US authoritarian (I have yet to see it). They’re too busy negotiating their cut of imperial plunder, welfare states built on extracted surplus and “human rights” rhetoric that conveniently ignores sanctions and coups. If “the center defines the standard,” then the standard isn’t about coercion; it’s about loyalty to capital (as I already pointed out). The label only sticks to those who break ranks (refuse to bend the knee to the EuroAmerikan hegemony).
On mode of production as “choice”: this is idealism, pure and simple. Putting the cart before the horse. Ideas don’t shape the material base; the material base shapes ideas. Capitalism didn’t arrive because someone imagined it. Feudal relations broke because they could no longer contain the productive forces, guilds choked industry, serfdom blocked labor, divine right couldn’t manage global accumulation. Socialism isn’t a fairy tale we opt into. It becomes necessary when capital’s own contradictions (overproduction, immiseration, ecological rupture) can no longer be managed within private ownership. And solidarity isn’t moral selection or simply who we like or don’t like. It’s determined by objective interests. The Chinese revolution for example united workers, peasants, and the national bourgeoisie not because of abstract ideals, but because all three had material stakes in smashing imperialist and feudal domination.
On the vanguard: have you read Lenin? Mao? The entire point is that it is NOT neutral. The vanguard is explicitly the organized, conscious detachment of the proletariat, an instrument of class rule, just like the bourgeois state, but inverted. The difference isn’t the existence of authority; it’s which class wields it, for what end, and whether its practice is tied to mass line feedback. To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.
Authority isn’t a substance that “festers.” It’s a relation, grounded in who controls production, who allocates surplus, who defends or transforms property forms. You can’t analyze it like a moral contaminant. You have to trace it to its material base. When authority serves to socialize wealth, decommodify life, and break imperial chains, it isn’t reproducing domination, it’s creating the conditions where coercion itself becomes obsolete.
I love your writing comrade, and excellent points
Thank you 🫡