Death to America

Bad faith bullshit

ya get what ya give

I’m talking about people who advocate the forceful spread of their ideology through violence.

this describes every state on earth. calling revolutionary violence ‘the forceful spread of ideology’ only works if you pretend policing, prisons, borders, coups, and wars aren’t already doing exactly that for capitalism.

feel free to step out of your bubble and read some of the responses here from the ‘tankies’ commenting from instances you’re defederated from.

‘i assure you my straw man exists’

I am not fans of either of them, nor am I fan of any other world leader.

That doesn’t mean I’m going uncritically accept every propaganda narrative that the country I live in pumps out about its state enemies.

feel free to elaborate, otherwise I think this is a Mandela effect

I was asking you about the whole him being run over moment.

I’m old AF and saw shit sir happen in real time.

You saw him get run over?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen that footage

and you guys think that’s great

I don’t, and I don’t think anyone else commenting here does. just another unfounded assertion

I think that the US was authoritarian before Trump, and it will continue to be after him unless the political economy fundamentally changes.

If you think the US goes away when the authoritarians take over,

The US is authoritarian, your statement seems to imply that it isn’t. it’s a dictatorship of capital, as someone living in the US, your humanity is largely contingent on your ability to pay rent. Those who are unable to will end up unhoused, the targets of state violence, disenfranchised, and increasingly likely to end up in the worlds largest prison system.

It is nice to see something other than the usual shitflinging online.

I don’t think I’ve been particularly abstract. Treating ‘authoritarianism’ as the primary lens encourages moral sorting over structural analysis, which in practice narrows what kinds of resistance people see as possible or legitimate.

I’m questioning what this taxonomy explains about how power operates and reproduces itself, while you keep restating its usefulness for labeling positions. That’s not the argument I’m making, and I’ve expressed my concerns several times now without you addressing them.

Taking revolutionary failures as proof that the whole framework was wrong or should be ignored reduces complex material conditions to a moral judgment after the fact.

My argument was that the framing reproduces liberal ways of evaluating power, even when applied internally to the left.

My point isn’t that anarchism borrows its opposition to authority from liberalism, but rather that liberalism is relevant because it shapes the dominant criteria by which authority is judged, even within left and anarchist discourse.

You seem very certain that there’s three distinct orientations. I’m not convinced those are discrete or stable categories in practice, rather than overlapping tendencies that emerge differently under specific material conditions.

What does this three-part distinction explain that a structural analysis of power doesn’t?

I don’t deny the need for accessibility or simplification. I’m questioning whether centering ‘authoritarianism’ is a neutral simplification, rather than one that imports liberal assumptions about power and legitimacy.

Critiquing authority is central to anarchism precisely because liberalism already critiques some authorities while normalizing others. That distinction tends to get blurred when domination is understood more in moral terms than in structural ones.

I don’t disagree that expanding participation and unity matters. I don’t see that specific type of messaging as constructive to that end.

Most mass movements that achieved real gains did so by forcing confrontation with material conditions, not by first correcting public misconceptions. Simplified messaging tends to follow success rather than generate it.

Also that simplification isn’t exactly neutral, it shapes how people understand power, struggle, and possibility. Messaging that gains accessibility by adopting liberal moral frames around ‘authoritarianism’ may broaden appeal in the short term, but it does so by narrowing the horizon of what opposition to capitalism can look like.

That tradeoff isn’t just about completeness, it’s about whether unity is built around confronting material structures of domination or around reassuring people that nothing too disruptive is required. I think we’re simply at different conclusions.

I appreciate the conversation, even if we don’t agree.

I think you replied to me twice with the same comment:

What is the practical constraint?

I already said I dont think there’s value in approaching this as a messaging campaign. I also don’t see how this would be an important priority.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to convey by saying this is a ‘pure form of communication’. I think that this is a material struggle and trying to approach it like a marketing campaign is not constructive, it also reproduces liberal assumptions about power by treating domination as a matter of style rather than structure.

Regardless, state capitalism is not any kind of opposition to capitalism. We certainly should exclude opposition that is not meaningful.

I don’t think wholesale denunciation of past revolutionary movements in the name of consciousness-raising is useful. It turns complex, material struggles into symbols of what not to be, tailored for acceptability rather than understanding. That kind of simplification doesn’t challenge domination, it reassures people that nothing more disruptive need be imagined.

I’m not interested in sorting leftists into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories for public consumption because that approach accepts the premise that left politics must earn legitimacy by distancing itself from its own radicals.

Even as purely a messaging exercise, this reinforces the idea that domination is a matter of posture rather than structure. That orientation leads the public to see liberation as a branding/mental exercise instead of a material struggle.

That type of approach narrows what kinds of opposition to capitalism can even be imagined as legitimate.

I quoted the last sentence of your last response because I disagreed with it, and gave the reasons for why in my response. I don’t think simplifying things in the way that you are is either constructive or complementing nuanced discourse.

I don’t see how that’s quote mining.

Saying authoritarian leftism is ‘quite similar’ to rightism collapses historically and materially different projects into a moral equivalence that explains very little about how power is produced, resisted or dismantled.

Rejecting all authority is an essential commitment that we do agree on. However, if that rejection erases distinctions in context, structure and antagonism then it becomes less a tool for emancipation and more a shorthand that discourages serious analysis of how domination actually operates and how it might be undone.

I agree that all states reproduce domination and justify it through ideology, but framing liberation primarily as a matter of expanding consciousness is overly deterministic in its own way.

Capitalist domination is enforced through material institutions that constrain people regardless of what they believe. Rejecting the narrative is necessary I don’t think it’s sufficient to actually end the system.

Treating all authority as equivalent, or differences as superficial, flattens real differences in how power is exercised and contested. It does so without meaningfully explaining how domination is actually dismantled.

Communist governments will often suppress liberatory currents, that outcome follows from centralized power reproducing itself. However, that is also contextualized by capitalist governments attempting to undermine them. There’s not some inevitable law that makes all revolutionary struggle collapse into the same form, which is what the’authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian’ lens implies.

“Authoritarian” as is commonly used often conflates people trying to abolish class domination with those working to uphold it. It flattens very different forms of power by treating coercion that arises in a revolutionary context, where entrenched elites are unlikely to give up their position voluntarily, as equivalent to the everyday normalized coercion that sustains capitalist rule.

Liberal democracies enforce property relations through police, courts, and prisons, yet this use of authority is typically treated as neutral or simply how society works. Challenges to that order are then singled out as specifically authoritarian.

Framing politics around “authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian” also allows capitalist domination in general to pass as freedom while collapsing the entire radical left into a caricature, for example by dismissing it all as “tankie.”

As an anarchist, I want to see class society abolished altogether, not endlessly managed or reformed. Every social order exercises authority, the real question is whose interests are being served by that authority.

happy to put my editing skills to work