I feel like maybe I’m missing something because I tried Bazzite for a bit (before switching to vanilla Fedora) and found it kind of overwhelming? Like there was so much stuff installed by default and it wasn’t super clear to me how it all was supposed to work together to do basic things like package management (esp. since dnf doesn’t work)

May I propose: China is probably better for many of its citizens compared to the U.S. and is objectively run by more competent people. The western world is built on mountains of anti-communist and anti-Chinese propaganda that makes discerning the truth about the reality of living there hard for the average westerner who hasn’t actually spent time there. At the same time, absolute power corrupts, and any system that concentrates power into centralized structures is at very high risk of that power being co-opted and abused by counter-revolutionary, power-hungry assholes. Regardless of whether that has happened in China (or any other socialist state), the risk is there, and the way to mitigate it is to dismantle the structures that allow it to happen.

Thank you! I will read these.

Side note, I think knowing that you put both the Zapatistas and the CPP in the same category of “authoritarian socialism” is helping me understand your perspective better. I think you’re wrong, but I can at least understand where you’re coming from, so thank you for that.

Challenging and limiting institutional power is not relevant to conversations about avoiding authoritarianism?

Please educate me about how authoritarian socialist countries ensure and maintain accountability to the people (or point me to where I can research myself)! I’d love to be wrong about this

Clearly we’re not getting anywhere. Read some anarchist theory if you want to understand this “word salad” 💕

I think you’re on the right train of thought but missing a key aspect. I’m with MLs that without some sort of organized counter-authority, existing power structures will overrun the revolutionary forces. But that authority needs to be fully accountable to the people it serves, otherwise it will become disembodied and “institutionalized” in the more specific sense, leading to a power structure that justifies its own existence instead of deriving the justification through the people. MLs, to me, are missing this power analysis. They seem to try to argue that an authoritarian communist-party-run government has this accountability to the people by the fact that…they serve the people? That’s not enough. You need to organize your revolution around accountability, around the idea that institutional power must always be justified by the will of the people and not the other way around. The Zapatistas understood this, which is why they built their governance around consensus-building and have since actively removed institutional power as it no longer served the people.

See my other reply

They enforce the authority of the people against institutional power, using a method (consensus-making) that ensures that it’s truly reflective of the will of the people (and not what a group of faux intellectuals think is the will of the people) and that it cannot be divorced from that will.

The Zapatista territories in Chiapas come to mind.

The comment I’m responding to is saying authoritarianism isn’t a thing. Whether or not the dictatorship of the proletariat the “right kind” of authoritarianism isn’t relevant to that conversation.

Authoritarianism is a system of institutionalized domination, and yes this includes pretty much every government on earth currently.

Weird because I was describing the USA

A state that is committing multiple genocides, controlling outside populations via military occupation, challenging the sovereignty of a neighboring nation, attacking foreign vessels, financing a war they have no business being in, propping up dictators, and massively expanding their military to an alarming degree… is worse than the USA??