Saying Anark displays a poor understanding of Marxism is not an ad hominem. It is an observation about the content of his analysis. An ad hominem would be “he is wrong because he is personally bad or stupid.” I am saying his categories are weak because they fail to grasp class content, state form, property relations, and historical development. That is directly relevant to the argument.
I also never said individualism is the only or the main pillar of anarchism. I said it is a pillar, which it plainly is, and this has been a Marxist criticism of anarchism since Marx and Lenin. The fact that there is a collectivist anarchist tradition does not erase the petty-bourgeois individualist core of much anarchist theory: the tendency to begin from abstract individual autonomy, abstract anti-authority, and abstract moral opposition to coercion rather than from class struggle and historically specific relations of production.
Your defense of the “authoritarianism” definition as merely “abstract” misses the point. The problem is not abstraction as such. Marxism uses abstraction constantly. The problem is bad abstraction: abstraction that removes the decisive features of the thing being analyzed. A useful abstraction helps reveal the essence of a process. This one obscures it. It tells us there is concentrated power, coercion, and administration. That describes every state and every serious revolutionary process in class society. What it does not tell us is which class holds power, what property relations are being defended or abolished, what state form exists, what social base sustains it, what historical pressures condition it, and whether the coercion is being used to preserve exploitation or suppress exploiters.
My objection is not that the definition is “too abstract.” It is that it is vacuous. It explains nothing of substance while pretending to explain everything. It takes the unavoidable existence of state power under class antagonism and gives it a scary liberal gloss. Then, in practice, it becomes a ready-made tool for flattening the difference between a bourgeois imperialist state and a socialist state under siege. You can say the critique is “against all states,” but that is infantile. Critiquing all states in the same moral register, without class content, only benefits the existing hegemonic order. The bourgeois state already exists globally as the dominant power. Treating proletarian state power as equally evil for exercising coercion does not transcend the bourgeois state; it disarms opposition to it.
You also accuse me of hiding behind the abstraction of “class interest,” but class interest is not an empty abstraction. It is rooted in material relations to production, ownership, surplus extraction, and the reproduction of social relations. The bourgeoisie has an interest in maintaining private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus value. The proletariat has an interest in abolishing those relations because it does not own the means of production and survives by selling labour-power. That is not idealism. That is basic historical materialism.
Your claim that party members or state administrators in socialist states are automatically not proletarian because they administer is nonsense. Class is not determined by whether someone performs administrative labour or exercises authority. Class position is determined principally by relation to the means of production, particularly ownership thereof. A school principal is not less proletarian than a teacher merely because they administer. A doctor, safety inspector, engineer, planner, or workplace coordinator may exercise authority in a technical or administrative capacity without thereby becoming a capitalist. The key question is whether they privately own productive property and appropriate surplus value as capital.
The same applies to government administrators in socialist states. Their existence creates contradictions, and bureaucracy can become a serious danger. Marxist-Leninists have written extensively on this. But a state functionary operating inside a socialized property system, without private ownership of the means of production, without the legal right to buy, sell, bequeath, and accumulate productive property as capital, is not automatically a bourgeois class simply because they administer. You are confusing function with class position.
Saying “they administer via authoritarian and domination strategies” does not solve this. It just repeats the same empty categories. Every state administers through coercive mechanisms because every state is an instrument of class rule. The question is not whether coercion exists. The question is coercion by which class, against which class, defending which property relations, and moving society in which direction. Without that, “authoritarianism” and “domination” become little more than moral labels for power you dislike.
I do not think “authoritarian” is inherently a Western propaganda term. The problem is that it is a vacuous political label: it covers a wide range of state forms and social relations while explaining very little about their actual class content. In that sense, it functions much like “regime.” It can describe almost anything with centralized power, but it tells us nothing decisive about which class rules, what property relations are being defended, whose interests the state serves, or what historical conditions produced it. Precisely because of that vagueness which abstracts away the core of the matter, it becomes useful to Western propaganda under the current conditions of Western hegemony: it allows imperialist states and their ideological apparatuses to flatten socialist, anti-imperialist, or otherwise non-aligned states into a moral category of “bad governments,” they can then point to and shout look at these authoritarians who are just as authoritarian (read bad) as the Nazis.
Saying Anark displays a poor understanding of Marxism is not an ad hominem. It is an observation about the content of his analysis. An ad hominem would be “he is wrong because he is personally bad or stupid.” I am saying his categories are weak because they fail to grasp class content, state form, property relations, and historical development. That is directly relevant to the argument.
I also never said individualism is the only or the main pillar of anarchism. I said it is a pillar, which it plainly is, and this has been a Marxist criticism of anarchism since Marx and Lenin. The fact that there is a collectivist anarchist tradition does not erase the petty-bourgeois individualist core of much anarchist theory: the tendency to begin from abstract individual autonomy, abstract anti-authority, and abstract moral opposition to coercion rather than from class struggle and historically specific relations of production.
Your defense of the “authoritarianism” definition as merely “abstract” misses the point. The problem is not abstraction as such. Marxism uses abstraction constantly. The problem is bad abstraction: abstraction that removes the decisive features of the thing being analyzed. A useful abstraction helps reveal the essence of a process. This one obscures it. It tells us there is concentrated power, coercion, and administration. That describes every state and every serious revolutionary process in class society. What it does not tell us is which class holds power, what property relations are being defended or abolished, what state form exists, what social base sustains it, what historical pressures condition it, and whether the coercion is being used to preserve exploitation or suppress exploiters.
My objection is not that the definition is “too abstract.” It is that it is vacuous. It explains nothing of substance while pretending to explain everything. It takes the unavoidable existence of state power under class antagonism and gives it a scary liberal gloss. Then, in practice, it becomes a ready-made tool for flattening the difference between a bourgeois imperialist state and a socialist state under siege. You can say the critique is “against all states,” but that is infantile. Critiquing all states in the same moral register, without class content, only benefits the existing hegemonic order. The bourgeois state already exists globally as the dominant power. Treating proletarian state power as equally evil for exercising coercion does not transcend the bourgeois state; it disarms opposition to it.
You also accuse me of hiding behind the abstraction of “class interest,” but class interest is not an empty abstraction. It is rooted in material relations to production, ownership, surplus extraction, and the reproduction of social relations. The bourgeoisie has an interest in maintaining private ownership of the means of production and the extraction of surplus value. The proletariat has an interest in abolishing those relations because it does not own the means of production and survives by selling labour-power. That is not idealism. That is basic historical materialism.
Your claim that party members or state administrators in socialist states are automatically not proletarian because they administer is nonsense. Class is not determined by whether someone performs administrative labour or exercises authority. Class position is determined principally by relation to the means of production, particularly ownership thereof. A school principal is not less proletarian than a teacher merely because they administer. A doctor, safety inspector, engineer, planner, or workplace coordinator may exercise authority in a technical or administrative capacity without thereby becoming a capitalist. The key question is whether they privately own productive property and appropriate surplus value as capital.
The same applies to government administrators in socialist states. Their existence creates contradictions, and bureaucracy can become a serious danger. Marxist-Leninists have written extensively on this. But a state functionary operating inside a socialized property system, without private ownership of the means of production, without the legal right to buy, sell, bequeath, and accumulate productive property as capital, is not automatically a bourgeois class simply because they administer. You are confusing function with class position.
Saying “they administer via authoritarian and domination strategies” does not solve this. It just repeats the same empty categories. Every state administers through coercive mechanisms because every state is an instrument of class rule. The question is not whether coercion exists. The question is coercion by which class, against which class, defending which property relations, and moving society in which direction. Without that, “authoritarianism” and “domination” become little more than moral labels for power you dislike.
I do not think “authoritarian” is inherently a Western propaganda term. The problem is that it is a vacuous political label: it covers a wide range of state forms and social relations while explaining very little about their actual class content. In that sense, it functions much like “regime.” It can describe almost anything with centralized power, but it tells us nothing decisive about which class rules, what property relations are being defended, whose interests the state serves, or what historical conditions produced it. Precisely because of that vagueness which abstracts away the core of the matter, it becomes useful to Western propaganda under the current conditions of Western hegemony: it allows imperialist states and their ideological apparatuses to flatten socialist, anti-imperialist, or otherwise non-aligned states into a moral category of “bad governments,” they can then point to and shout look at these authoritarians who are just as authoritarian (read bad) as the Nazis.