Comment on .ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this
binux@sh.itjust.works 2 days agoNotice I wrote ‘as you’ve described it’. I shouldn’t have to explain that the criticism the term tankie is calling attention to in theory is authoritarianism, not communism or socialism as a whole (as the term was literally created by communists). Unless you’re arguing that authoritarianism is a good thing. I guess I wouldn’t be all that surprised.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
It isn’t so much that “authoritarianism is a good thing,” and more that it isn’t a useful term. All states are a tool by which one class exerts its authority, all states are therefore “authoritarian,” including socialist states. Therefore, “authoritarian communists” just means “communists” in practice.
binux@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
This is a semantic argument so it’s pretty much a nothingburger. I’m just gonna go ahead and apply Alder’s razor and call it here
RiverRock@lemmy.ml 22 hours ago
Yes, exactly, it’s a purely semantic distinction that serves no useful purpose other than to decontextualize regular-ass socialist democratic policy and recast it as some kind of dark foreign despotism.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
I think it’s pretty critical to the discussion, considering it tries to designate some communists as “authoritarian” and others presumably as not so.
binux@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
It’s come to my attention that you’re someone who genuinely believes Russia is not an imperialist nation (where you ironically also attempt to hand-wave the definition of imperialism as forceful authority over another nation and imply that the only right one is that it’s a direct and unique result of capitalism—as if a word can’t have more than one definition), so I doubt you’re someone I can have a rational discussion about authoritarianism with regardless.
And again, you’re fixing the term based on your own perception to make it support your point, which doesn’t really have any merit when it comes to using these words as they are by academics essentially ubiquitously. Until we can both accept that authoritarianism has a set definition independent of many ideologies and therefore cannot be universally applied to them, this will remain a purely rhetorical argument.
zbyte64@awful.systems 1 day ago
It must look strange to those who conflate authority with power. A state that has power without authority is a state that is in crisis. Calling a government authoritarian is to say it’s authority comes from it’s exercise of power.