this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
227 points (97.9% liked)
Asklemmy
48540 readers
1391 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To be fair, the political compass absolutely does not bring nuance. All governments are authoritarian, all states are instruments of class opression. What matters is which class is being oppressed, by which. The political compass is closer to astrology for political nerds than a coherent theory.
Would you call communist states (an oxymoron, I know) instruments of class opression?
All governments are authoritiarian, but to what extent?
I more-meant the difference between the libertarian and authoritarian right/left, its a useful distinction to have.
Yes, absolutely. Socialist states governed by Communist Parties are states where the Proletariat oppresses the Bourgeoisie. You can't simply eliminate all property relations overnight, the role of a proletarian state is to sieze the large firms and key industries that are necessary to maintain that power, and gradually appropriate firms and industry until the entire economy can be publicly owned and planned.
There aren't really degrees of authoritarian or libertarian in a state, just what circumstances the system finds itself in. At times where class struggle is sharpened, the state employs more drastic measures to maintain the class in charge, and this goes for bourgeois states or proletarian states. It isn't a decision to be made on a sliding scale, but a reflection of circumstances.
Even comparing Anarchism with Marxism as "libertarian vs authoritarian" isn't apt. Anarchists also employ authority in overturning class relations, just via a horizontalist approach. Marxist states also are more comprehensively democratic than Capitalist ones, as they spread democracy to the economy, for the many rather than for the few.
Just my 2 cents as a Marxist-Leninist.
Side note: a higher stage Communist society where class has been abolished and the oppressive elements of government that make up the state have thus withered away would not be authoritarian, as there's no longer class struggle. That's more of a future thing though, not something that has immediate relevance.
This sounds like that rare thing in political science: a falsifiable assertion. Do you happen to know if anyone has tested it?
I'm not sure how you would test it, outside of looking at states through history, in different contexts. Germany is a good example. Germany in the early 20th century, after World War I, was in serious debt and had rising contradictions that led to increased worker organization. The bourgeoisie was terrified of a Communist uprising, so they employed the Nazis to purge them. After the fall of the Nazis, the system didn't radically change, but the need for the Nazis as a sort of alter-ego to stamp out Communism was done. They remained Capitalist throughout the entire time, but each change in policy was driven by changing conditions.
Marxists posit that the Mode of Production is the base, which creates the superstructure, which is the laws, ideology, and culture, which shapes the base. This cyclical relationship shows that biggest shaper of policy is the needs of the ruling class, and the conditions they are dealing with. I am not "inventing" this stance, of course, its been here for a long while.
I think to test it you'd need to do some kind of comprehensive analysis, something like a big spreadsheet of a convincingly unbiased sampling of states (or states-at-points-in-time), evaluated for libertarianism-vs-authoritarianism. But you'd need to have a way to distinguish whether differences between states were caused by inherent per-state effects (or by more mechanistic runs-with-the-state traits, like "having a written constitution" or "being a monarchy"), or by "circumstances". So you'd need a way to measure plausibly-causitive circumstances and then see how much of the variance they explained.
It'd be a big project and hard to do in a controlled way across a large enough sample, but if you sent enough history grad students out to rate things like "worker organization" in 1925 Germany and "protections for human rights in constitutional law" in 1975 New Zealand on 5-point scales, you might be able to get a data set that could answer this question.
The biggest thing is that, ultimately, it's the economic forces that drive development. It wasn't a coincidence that slavery was abolished when it was, it was driven by economic changes towards Capitalism and away from feudal and slave-driven economies, driven in turn by improvements in technology and the accumulation of the bourgeoisie. The class dynamics and economic structures at play are what makes the biggest impact on policy.
he did say communist governments are authoritarian, in them the capitalist class would be getting oppressed by the state in service of the working class. this is why it's called the dictatorship of the proletariat - the proletariat should still be getting their interests as a class represented in this arrangement, while bourgious have no special status or access due to their capital.
are there any examples of libertarian states?
a relevant passage from This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong
100%, excellent explanation!
In a neoliberal sense, kinda, but those are really just shifting who is oppressing people to capitalists.
I think that still qualifies as a bourgious dictatorship
Sure, but I think you're both missing why I brought up the political compass, to make a distinction between libertarian leftism, and authoritarian leftism.
My point is that there is no genuine divide between "libertarian" and "authoritarian" leftism. There are different types of leftism with different strategies and goals, different views of the state, etc, but there is no continuum between libertarian and authoritarian, period. All systems exist in context and in motion, and depending on the class character of the state will respond differently to heightened contradictions, which sharpen over time.
I understand, the point in response was that non-authoritatian states don't and haven't existed. The compass portrays a field that is equal, but in reality only the top half is anything but idealism, historically speaking.
a classless stateless society is what I would prefer. That's something we can conceive of, but getting there is another issue. Revolutions tend to be pretty authoritarian no matter how you slice it.
I should have used the word society instead of state.
What do you mean by "authoritarian" vs "libertarian," then? In which respect, and for which class of society? Capitalism is authoritarian for the working class, and Socialism is authoritarian for the bourgeoisie, but Capitalism is libertarian for the bourgeoisie and Socialism is libertarian for the working class. That's my point, really, terms like "authoritarian" vs "libertarian" don't really describe anything at a useful level.
For example, when comparing Anarchists with Marxists, Anarchists take the stance that horizontalism is necessary, while Marxists see centralization as a necessity. However, this centralization in Marxist Socialism means each worker has more of a say across society, while workers in Anarchist society have more say over a smaller area. That also is ignoring that Marxists typically break things up into local, regional, national, and international levels. These aren't "libertarian" vs "authoritarian" decisions, but decisions about how power should be structured, not where along a scale they reside.
The Political Compass, really, is just political astrology. People like to be sorted based on quizzes, that's it. There's no real political theory behind it. Whenever I take the test, I land solidly lib and max left, but I'm a Marxist-Leninist and support AES. It will then say those same systems I support are max authleft or somewhere up there. It's all a vibe check made by liberals.
My original point was that leftism isn't linear, and that marxism-leninism and anarchism are quite different.
Sure, that's a point I agree with, but that wasn't how you made that point, which is what I disagreed with.