Serious post warning, sleep-deprived wall of text ahead.
Someone who I dare say I respect publicly discouraged joining or supporting Lemmy on the basis of being The Tankie Place, linking this raddle post, a collection of horrifyingly flimsy evidence that Dessalines (lemmy.ml admin, maintainer of the wonderful dessalines.github.io/essays/) is a freedom hating redfash tankie who likes it when the evil CCP genocides uyghurs and bans femboys.
Naturally it all sucks but now i’m investing too many brain cells into thinking: how do you even refute this garbage?
I’m not proud of it, but I was an “anti-authoritarian leftist” too. I unironically said “tankie” once. And if i were told there is no Uyghur genocide, i would react exactly as if they had told me there was no holocaust. To the westerner, China really is as bad as nazi germany and straightforwardly saying otherwise, in their mind, is no different than if you replace Uyghurs with jews and China with germany. When this narrative is so deeply ingrained, how do you fight it? How the hell did I get here?
i really have no idea how to address it when, to them as it once was to me, it is so obviously true that anyone suggesting otherwise is not even worth listening to. these are fundamental beliefs and challenging them is grounds for instant block and report. its not open for discussion. all i can do is hope they find the truth on their own.
i’ll stop rambling now and sleep instead. so i wont respond for a while. sorry if theres a better community to post this in i just needed to get this out before i spontaneously combust. good night comrades.
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Friendly text block and two audio theory links incoming:
The thing about the terms aurhoritarianism and authoritarian is, they aren’t terms that describe a meaninfgul distinction. Like “terrorist” before it, “authoritarian” is just the latest rhetorical cudgel used to draw an arbitrary distinction between Our violence, (justified, righteous, at worst regrettable but necessary) and Their violence (unjustifiable, irredeemable, the result of some shared societal moral defect). This applies both to traditional violence, as you can see with how the western press has been framing the war in Ukraine, and to social violence, such as with western coverage on points of friction such as protests in rival countries. In every case, the same actions will be framed differently. Not only are exceptions carved out for certain kinds of explicit violence, but implicit violence is made invisible. It’s very easy to find a million threads online about China Bad posted under a photo of several tanks not running over a guy (or a clip shortened to imply they did), but not as easy to find discussions about all the recordings of US police just straight up running over protestors in 2020(explicit), and nobidy would venture any optimistic guesses as to the healthcare they may or may not have recieved afterwards (implicit).
When the US incinerates a million people half the world away, displaces thirty million more, poisons their land, water and DNA for generations with DU shells, that’s spreading democracy, or at worst a tragic mishap that could have been handled better. When Russia, (and to be clear, I have zero love for the Russian Federation, they are a ghoul state, but if they’re a ghoul state then the US is the vampire that bit them) when they respond to 8 years of shelling and Azov death squads operating with impunity in a majority-Russian province where people’s own language has been made illegal…it is now immediately genocidal to interrupt these actual processes of genocide. The only explanation I’ve heard for this is that “Putin is trying to kill every single Ukranaian, for reasons unclear.” Because to them, only people on our side have depth. Anyone on the other side is a Terrorist, Authoritarian, Commie, Tankie, Traitor, Looter Thug RussianChinese AgentBot. Whatever term can be used to justify reducing human beings to caricatures on which to project your own worst impulses instead of trying to understand. A Marvel capeshit villain. There’s a reason the saying exists about scratched liberals, they’re already primed to accept fascist answers to the questions raised by the holes in their understanding of the world. The process of shutting out any alternative answers begins with simple, thought-terminating epithets than can be brandished with empty confidence.
Ultimately all violence is authoritarian, even defensive violence, because state authority is violence. Unlike liberals though, we’re materialists, which means we don’t content ourselves with shallow grandstanding moral denunciations. We can admit that most violence (barring consensual violence like sparring or bdsm) is ugly, corrosive and undesirable, while also sometimes being necessary to stop greater suffering. Liberals, who are capitalists and champion an ultraviolent capitalist world order, are backed into the corner of supposedly being the enlightened, noviolent intellectual successors of MLK and Ghandi (or at least the sanitized image they’ve created of them) while literally supporting Nazis who do Nazi shit, and they have normalized reconciling this contradiction by way of assuring themselves and each other that anyone pointing out their hypocrisy is either naive, a kid trying to be trendy, or secretly an agent of Them.
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Whether authoritarianism is bad or good depends primarily on the result. An authority that focuses on serving the people, building infrastructure, and putting food in people’s stomachs is very different from an authority that focuses on scapegoating the people.
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Of course there is, although the extent of it will depend on how good workers have it before the revolution. If a revolution accomplished degrowth in the US, for example, workers would have to suddenly live with a lot less than before, especially if they were in the labor aristocracy. Revolutions are also by their nature disruptive and you can expect to see disruptions in all kinds of supply chains and the food supply, and possibly some extent of purges of the old bureaucracy and reeducation of the people in order to defend the revolution from the counterrevolution. After some time this evens out and typically the one famine that occurred after the revolution is the last famine in that country, climate change notwithstanding. And not too long after a successful revolution depending on conditions workers will have better access to things they actually need like housing, food, healthcare, steady employment, public health, education, ability to live if disabled, and public transit at the possible cost of luxury goods, amenities, and little treats.
Not to disagree – because I agree – but I want to unpick the degrowth point a little.
Would workers necessarily feel the impact of degrowth negatively? Most things produced under capitalism is pointless, easily-broken, tat (how many versions of sink drainers and spectacles cases do we really need?). It’s all marketed hard to create demand.
Stopping the production of that tat would surely lead to job losses but without the advertising would people really miss the goods? If Apple and Microsoft weren’t allowed to make their machines redundant via software updates and they stopped manufacturing desire for the latest model, would normal people realise and if they did would they be upset? I’d imagine that most would sigh relief.
There would have to be a shift in employment and the division of labour but that’s not necessarily painful if people can e.g. stay indefinitely in the home they currently occupy (or be given a home if homeless/houseless). Expectations would have to be adjusted – I fully agree, but if the bourgeois ideological apparatuses can be stopped, I reckon that most people would adjust quite well and quite quickly.
Just imagine if the number of total working hours halved because we decided to shut down lots of harmful industries, then guaranteed everyone a fair share of those hours, with the guaranteed services that you listed. I suppose the labour aristocracy, as you say, may be pissed off with the change because they already have access to all those services and they’ve been propagandised to think that they have it all because they’re special. Everyone else might be right on board and willing to tell the ex-labour aristocrats to boil their arses.
It’s hard to say for sure without a deeper analysis and a real revolution to analyze. It depends on how much is destroyed in the course of revolution, whether the economy collapses or not, and all of that and more is basically a crapshoot. I guess it might not be strictly inevitable because of the inefficient characteristics of our current economy, so thank you for the food for thought.
Very likely, depending on the state and on whether other states have or move towards a revolution at a similar time. When the Soviets seized power in Russia, they were later invaded by over 15 states, including the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan. ‘Post-revolutionary’ conditions will not necessarily deteriorate because the workers are in control (although as bobs-guns points out, there will be logistical issues, etc, to contend with). Conditions will deteriorate because capitalists will fight until the last capitalist or socialist is gone.
I put ‘post-revolution’ in quotation marks to emphasise a need for care with the notion of revolution. The bourgeois way of thinking treats events as isolated and chronological. First one event happens, then another, then another, and each one finishes neatly just as the next is about to begin. From the perspective of historical materialism (HiMat), this is an error.
HiMat is the application of dialectical materialism (DiMat) to human society. For DiMat, the world is not made of things but of internally contradictory relations and processes. The struggle within these relations drives change. But change is not linear. Change happens linearly until it leaps. Even then, the ‘new’ has traces of the ‘old’, just as the ‘old’ contained the seeds of the ‘new’.
From the perspective of HiMat, a revolution takes a long time, as one mode of production slowly transforms into the next mode of production until suddenly the revolution is achieved. I say all this to suggest that the ‘post-revolution aftermath’ is the process of revolution itself.
There’s another way of explaining this. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:
If revolution is a process of changing the mode of production, and if communism is the process of abolishing the old mode of production, then communism is the revolution and the post-revolutionary state of things.
To go back to my opening paragraph, we know that capitalists are counter-revolutionary anti-communists who will make things as difficult as possible for the revolutionary communists before and during the revolution. NATO spent however many decades in a Cold War with the USSR before brutally dismantling Soviet society more-or-less overnight.
Today NATO embargoes ‘post-revolutionary’ Cuba and pre-revolutionary Venezuela while provoking China and banning successful Chinese businesses from the States – this is the cause of the difficult ‘aftermath’ of a revolution, not the socialist government.
Once the revolution is fully achieved and there are no capitalists (a long time in the future), we can properly use the phrase ‘post-revolution’, and the disruptive ‘aftermath’ will be a thing of the past. In the meantime, the task of the socialist/communist government will be to provide for the people. Remember, that while this government must be authoritative, that government is composed of the people.
A rhetorical question: what would your first decisions involve if you were one of the workers who seizes power? Because the point of the revolution is not to put an elite in charge but to put you in charge (collectively, of course).
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