It wasn’t a hostile discussion or anything, i didn’t even go full “the kulaks deserved it” (although the mod that single-handedly banned me did go full “the kulaks did not deserve it”). I just laid out plainly and calmly that revolutions are inherently authoritarian, that Luxemburg said “the revolution will be as violent as the ruling class makes it necessary” and that there’s one Trotzki quote i 100% agree with: “If the October Revolution hadn’t succeeded, the world would have known a Russian word for fascism 10 years before Mussolini’s March on Rome”. Basically the whole “Jakarta Method” train of thought laid out clearly and without calling anybody names.
Note that this was on an explicitly left-leaning server that does not allow cops and troops to join. Also after several days of another poster starting destructive, aggressive bad faith arguments in the politics channel until a number of users went “disengage” on her and the channel had to be frozen until recently, when she immediately started being hostile and arguing in bad faith again, which got her not one, but two warnings from the same mod without further consequences. Meanwhile, when i defend AES without attacking anybody, that’s apparently too much for her to handle. No advance warning, no “sis, you’re talking to me as a mod here”, not even a notification that i got banned.
The best part is that according to screenshots a friend just sent me, she’s now completely going off about “authoritarians”. The nerve some people have.
Sorry for posting pointless internet drama here, i just needed to vent.
The problem is authoritarian doesn’t have a precise mechanical definition at all. Anarchists and liberals don’t use the word in the same way. A lot of my anarchist comrades don’t even use the term because of how imprecise it is. Instead I’ll see anarchists mention lopsided hierarchies in general, imperialism, or how a hierarchy can lead to abuses of power. Or more broadly they might disagree with seizing state power as a tactic, but I think well-read anarchists realize that authoritarian is not a coherent ideological position. No one identifies as an authoritarian, for instance.
Liberals use it as a way to conflate fascists and communists. They use it to mean there’s a lack of representation from groups/interests they believe are inherent to any society. Since all socialist countries exclude or restrain representation of the capitalist class, that makes all socialism authoritarian by a liberal point of view. They see a single party state as tyrannical, because they would prefer to see a state with various competing bourgeois elements rather than the single uniting interest of the working class.
Liberals also use the term (and tankie) in a completely racist way. White countries aren’t authoritarian, that’s reserved for scary foreigners
it’s also why, for instance, the political compass is such an awful concept in general
but yeah, I try to be cognizant of how different parts of the Left just have fundamentally different definitions behind the same words, like “authority” for instance, and so bringing up e.g. Engels to somebody who doesn’t think authority means what Engels defines it as is kinda pointless, but the liberals have turned “authority” into such a meaningless term now that I can understand why your anarchist comrades don’t care to use it
There’s a line in the explanation of that compass, I guess written by the authors, saying that Stalin and Hitler could have a cordial discussion about politics so long as economics aren’t mentioned. Which is absurd. Stalin was a Marxist and Hitler believed politics was a matter of skull measurements and racial destinies.
what the fuck? did they think WW2 and millions of deaths was just an economics debate that got too far? the only possible way you could think this is true is if you literally didn’t know shit about fuck. “yeah, actually, the guy who liberated the Jews from the concentration camps was actually basically the same politically as the guy who put them in there”