• TrismegistusMx@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’ve come to realize that the absurd beliefs of authoritarians are like a badge of honor. They’re willing to accept any untruth from their masters and will gleefully and violently enforce those untruths as a form of worship of authority.

    • ComradeChairmanKGB@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Leveling accusations of authoritarianism here is kind of missing the point. As if the problem with their ideology is anything besides the fascism. It’s needless obfuscation and a liberal view of authority besides.

      Could I ask you to take a read of On Authority? It is very brief and quick reading, like 5 minutes tops.

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

      Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society.

        • ComradeChairmanKGB@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          I’m telling you that authoritarianism is a useless word. It’s used as a pejorative against any government that the wielder doesn’t like, and it misses all the actual problems of the regime being criticized. Authority is not by itself a bad thing, you have to look at how and why it is wielded. Is the problem with fascism that there is an authority? Or is it all the fascism?

          Seriously you could argue that any country that has ever existed is authoritarian, the proper functioning of a state requires concentration of authority. It’s incredibly silly to just throw the term at whatever you don’t like. Don’t conflate authority with whatever actual problems a political ideology might have. You just end up whitewashing them.

          • TrismegistusMx@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            Every country is a little authoritarian, and in equal measure fascist. The authority that enforces the hierarchy is the spiritual ignorance that gives rise to all of the social evils of this world. Your personal feelings about the word are totally irrelevant.

            • ComradeChairmanKGB@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              Every country is a little authoritarian, and in equal measure fascist. The authority that enforces the hierarchy is the spiritual ignorance that gives rise to all of the social evils of this world.

              This is pure idealistic nonsense.

              Your personal feelings about the word are totally irrelevant.

              Did you bother to read On Authority? It’s not my personal feelings, but rather actual Marxist political philosophy. It’s bizarre for you to dismiss it as irrelevant while simultaneously insisting that your own bizarre word salad is fact.

              • TrismegistusMx@lemmygrad.ml
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                1 year ago

                It’s not idealism. It’s the nature of authority [the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience]. Every government assumes the authority to enforce its laws. Every country fails to represent fringe populations. The measure at which a country uses its authority to use violence to silence, eliminate, control, or otherwise fail to represent the fringe is it’s degree of fascism.

                When I said “Your personal feelings” I was referring to your opinion that fascism is a white supremacist term, which isn’t based in fact at all.

                Now how will you twist my words?

                • ComradeChairmanKGB@lemmygrad.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Every country is a little authoritarian, and in equal measure fascist. The authority that enforces the hierarchy is the spiritual ignorance that gives rise to all of the social evils of this world.

                  This still remains idealism. Your expansion on this idea does not hold up to scrutiny. And the second sentence has no basis in historical material analysis.

                  The measure at which a country uses its authority to use violence to silence, eliminate, control, or otherwise fail to represent the fringe is it’s degree of fascism.

                  You have said that authoritarianism is in equal measure fascism, and then more specifically here that using authority for bad things is fascism. But your idea hinges quite heavily on the vague term “fringe group”. What if the fringe group you are eliminating is fascists? Presumably the act of silencing and eliminating them is still authoritarian, but is it still equal to fascism?

                  Equating authority with fascism makes no sense. It only waters down fascism from an actual political ideology that can be criticized, to a vague umbrella term for bad things. This dilution of fascism is dangerous, equating it with other umbrella terms and stuffing it into them renders the term meaningless. And saying that every country is fascist to some degree whitewashes the ideology by pretending there is any equivalence between states that were colonial victims and actual fascist states.

                  I was referring to your opinion that fascism is a white supremacist term

                  I never said that. Are you referring to Muad’Dibber’s comment?

                • JucheBot1988@lemmygrad.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Time to post On Authority by Engels (1,385 words debunking the entire corpus of anarchist theory drivel):

                  A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.

                  Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it, whether — given the conditions of present-day society — we could not create another social system, in which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear.

                  On examining the economic, industrial and agricultural conditions which form the basis of present-day bourgeois society, we find that they tend more and more to replace isolated action by combined action of individuals. Modern industry, with its big factories and mills, where hundreds of workers supervise complicated machines driven by steam, has superseded the small workshops of the separate producers; the carriages and wagons of the highways have become substituted by railway trains, just as the small schooners and sailing feluccas have been by steam-boats. Even agriculture falls increasingly under the dominion of the machine and of steam, which slowly but relentlessly put in the place of the small proprietors big capitalists, who with the aid of hired workers cultivate vast stretches of land.

                  Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to have organisation without authority?

                  Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form? Let us see.

                  Let us take by way of example a cotton spinning mill. The cotton must pass through at least six successive operations before it is reduced to the state of thread, and these operations take place for the most part in different rooms. Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy. The workers must, therefore, first come to an understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed, must be observed by all, without any exception. Thereafter particular questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if possible, by a majority vote, the will of the single individual will always have to subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled in an authoritarian way. The automatic machinery of the big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the portals of these factories: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate! [Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]

                  If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.

                  Let us take another example — the railway. Here too the co-operation of an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no accidents may happen. Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority. Moreover, what would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. passengers were abolished?

                  But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

                  When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that’s true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

                  We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.

                  We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this authority. Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.

                  Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

                  Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

        • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, Canada, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.

          British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially “becoming british colonialists.” They haven’t changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.

          This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.