Authoritarian is a meaningless pejorative. All states/countries/political groups etc. must be authoritarian by necessity in class society
Historicially, classes have been created or destroyed in order to create more or less centralized authority-driven decision making, and societies with less centralized authority have called ones with more centralized authority “authoritarian”.
Feudalism, dictatorship and even economic subjugation are called authoritarian by less authoritarian states.
In practice, the criterion for “authoritarianism” is however far back on that scale makes your current political center have anxiety about their ability to keep their current privileges from the authority.
But in theory you can see that the social organisation with the least authority possible would be an anarchist one, designed to dissolve class hierarchy when possible (e.g. abolition of private property) and apply anti-authoritarian safeguards if not (e.g. teach children how to take class action against adults, and make it easy for them to do so).
While such a society will still accumulate authority, it is designed to process it like any other waste product.
This means “authoritarian” is as meaningful as “filthy”. We can never be fully clean, but someone who chooses not to bathe to the standards of their time can be called filthy, and those standards can improve over time.
Your framework sounds nice in the abstract, but it doesn’t hold up against the concrete reality of how the term functions today. “Authoritarian” isn’t applied based on some neutral scale of centralization. It’s very clearly deployed selectively as a moral weapon by the Euro-Amerikan ideological apparatus to delegitimize any state or movement that resists imperial integration or challenges capitalist property relations.
If the criterion were truly about concentration of coercive power, the United States (with the world’s largest incarcerated population, extrajudicial drone programs, domestic surveillance architectures like COINTELPRO and it’s successors, and an executive branch that operates beyond legislative or judicial restraint on the whims of the president) would be the paradigmatic case. Yet it rarely (never) receives the label in mainstream discourse. Why? Because the term isn’t neutral.
On the historical point: classes aren’t created or dissolved to adjust the “level” of authority. They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle. The bourgeois revolutions didn’t aim to “spread” or “centralize” authority. They smashed feudal state forms to erect new ones that secured the dictatorship of capital (parliamentary democracy, rule of law, private property enforcement) all presented as “freedom” while materially consolidating a new class rule. The question was never how much authority, but authority for whom and against whom.
Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power. In a world still structured by antagonistic classes, the relevant distinction isn’t between “more” or “less” authority, but between authority that reproduces exploitation and authority that dismantles it. The proletarian state, like any state, exercises coercion, but its historical task is to render itself obsolete by abolishing the class relations that make coercion necessary.
In it’s modern usage the term obscures more than it reveals. As it’s not meant to be a useful tool for analysing states, power or history, but a bat to beat those who don’t get in line.
That’s what I said; the center defines the standard. The US is authoritarian by social-democratic standards.
They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle.
“Class struggle” is not a one-dimensional variable, and the mode of production is to a significant extent a choice made by those within the system. A revolution has degrees of freedom for who is in its circle of solidarity.
Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power.
State communists mistake the state/vanguard as a neutral outsider rather than a material entity. Authority left to fester will shape the material conditions to enshrine the authority at the cost of those without authority.
Social democrats tend not to call the US authoritarian (I have yet to see it). They’re too busy negotiating their cut of imperial plunder, welfare states built on extracted surplus and “human rights” rhetoric that conveniently ignores sanctions and coups. If “the center defines the standard,” then the standard isn’t about coercion; it’s about loyalty to capital (as I already pointed out). The label only sticks to those who break ranks (refuse to bend the knee to the EuroAmerikan hegemony).
On mode of production as “choice”: this is idealism, pure and simple. Putting the cart before the horse. Ideas don’t shape the material base; the material base shapes ideas. Capitalism didn’t arrive because someone imagined it. Feudal relations broke because they could no longer contain the productive forces, guilds choked industry, serfdom blocked labor, divine right couldn’t manage global accumulation. Socialism isn’t a fairy tale we opt into. It becomes necessary when capital’s own contradictions (overproduction, immiseration, ecological rupture) can no longer be managed within private ownership. And solidarity isn’t moral selection or simply who we like or don’t like. It’s determined by objective interests. The Chinese revolution for example united workers, peasants, and the national bourgeoisie not because of abstract ideals, but because all three had material stakes in smashing imperialist and feudal domination.
On the vanguard: have you read Lenin? Mao? The entire point is that it is NOT neutral. The vanguard is explicitly the organized, conscious detachment of the proletariat, an instrument of class rule, just like the bourgeois state, but inverted. The difference isn’t the existence of authority; it’s which class wields it, for what end, and whether its practice is tied to mass line feedback. To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.
Authority isn’t a substance that “festers.” It’s a relation, grounded in who controls production, who allocates surplus, who defends or transforms property forms. You can’t analyze it like a moral contaminant. You have to trace it to its material base. When authority serves to socialize wealth, decommodify life, and break imperial chains, it isn’t reproducing domination, it’s creating the conditions where coercion itself becomes obsolete.
If material conditions are all that shapes ideas, why are you speaking ideas at me? Either you are incorrect or you are wasting your time, and I don’t think you’re wasting your time.
In a world where ideas don’t matter, either of us working against our class interests through ignorance is incoherent. If we can be deceived to act against our class interests to change material conditions to serve the rich, then ideas can change material conditions.
People can interpret their interests different ways. People can ally themselves with specific groups but not others. People can have different levels of risk aversion. People can be affected by propaganda and charisma. Ideas skew praxis skews the development of material conditions.
Neglect this at your own peril. Use it to make fairy tales come true.
To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.
What class attributes do the authorities in the vanguard have in common with the proletariat?
Ok, I’m going to try lay this out as clearly as I can, because I think you’re mixing up what materialism and idealism actually mean (even if we haven’t used their names to this point it is the core of the argument).
The main tool of my analysis is materialism. Put simply: the way people organise production, how they meet their needs, who owns what, who has to sell their labour, this is the foundation. Ideas, culture, politics, they arise from and reflect that material base. They aren’t illusions, but they don’t float free. People think and act, but they do so within conditions they didn’t choose.
Ideas matter. People can be persuaded, misled, organised, educated. But those ideas only take hold because they connect to real conditions. You can’t sustain a set of ideas that are completely out of step with how people actually live. And you can’t just will a new society into existence because it sounds good. Ideas move things along, but they don’t set the underlying terrain.
What you’re arguing with is idealism. In short, idealism puts ideas first. It treats consciousness, values, or narratives as the engine of history, as if reality bends to what people believe rather than belief being shaped by reality. When you say the mode of production is a “choice,” or that solidarity is basically a matter of interpretation, you’re putting ideas in the driver’s seat. That treats history like a competition between narratives, where whichever idea wins out determines reality.
But that’s not how it works. People don’t get to pick a mode of production the way they pick a belief. Capitalism didn’t arise because it was persuasive. It arose because older systems stopped functioning under pressure and new relations became necessary to keep production going. The same logic applies to any transition out of it. There’s a reason certain ideas appear at certain times and not others, and it’s not just because someone made a good argument.
None of this means people are robots or that they can’t act against their interests. Obviously they can. Propaganda exists, divisions exist, fear exists. But even that happens within limits. If ideas were truly primary, you wouldn’t need to look at anything outside discourse to explain social change, and that clearly doesn’t hold up.
On your last point, you’re also treating “authority” as if it automatically creates a class, and that’s just not how class works. Class isn’t about who gives orders day to day. It’s about relationship to the means of production. Who owns them as property, who controls them in a way that lets them extract surplus, who can pass that control on.
Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn’t privately owned as capital, people in those roles don’t become a separate class just because they have authority. They don’t own the factories, land, or infrastructure as something they can sell or accumulate. Their position depends on the broader structure, not the other way around.
If that changes, if people in those positions start turning control into private, inheritable ownership, then you’re dealing with a class shift. But that has to be shown in actual material terms. You don’t get there just by pointing at hierarchy and calling it a class.
So you made a straw man of what I was saying. There are degrees of freedom in how material relations are shaped which can be chosen between by a revolutionary movement.
Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn’t privately owned as capital, people in those roles don’t become a separate class just because they have authority.
Feudalism did not primarily maintain its classes through ownership either. Like a feudal lord, an administrator primarily maintains their position by social maneuvers towards their near-peers. Justifying bad metrics as unavoidable while claiming responsibility for windfalls, shaping their domain to play better within these social dynamics, and sabotaging rivals who don’t fit in their narrative.
Unlike feudal lords, administrators don’t own a personal demesne, but for the most powerful feudal lords that demesne was miniscule compared to their power base that came from vassalage. A feudal lord conquering a rival kingdom would distribute it to loyal vassals like an administrator cannibalizing a rival ministry would distribute it to loyal managers.
In this game, administrators want to increase authority over their domain of responsibility to better weaponize it. Modes of production are turned towards political usefulness for the administrator rather than towards the benefit of workers, alienating workers in the process.
Simply put, authority becomes a form of control over the means of production which shapes an administrator’s class incentives differently from workers. It isn’t ownership but it doesn’t need to be.
And yes, administrator roles do tend to be leveraged into nepotistic inheritance of authority, with family being appointed to higher roles in exchange for favors.
No straw man. You said mode of production is a “choice” and solidarity comes down to “interpretation.” That’s putting ideas in the driver’s seat. If you want to soften that now, fine. But don’t rewrite what you said and call it misreading. Degrees of freedom exist, but they exist inside hard limits. Movements don’t invent new material conditions by thinking hard enough, they work through contradictions they actually inherit.
On feudalism, you’re stripping out the core of what made it feudal. Lords didn’t just maneuver socially. Their power rested on land, and on peasants being tied to that land. That’s how surplus was extracted. Vassalage was a political expression of that underlying relation, not a substitute for it. If you take away control over land and surplus, you’re not describing feudalism anymore, you’re just using the aesthetic of it.
With administrators you’re doing the same thing, collapsing authority into ownership. They’re not the same. Authority that can’t be turned into private property, sold off, or passed down as a right is conditional. A feudal lord could hand land to his heir. An administrator can’t hand a factory to their kid. If they start acting like they can, that’s not proof that authority magically equals a class. It’s a sign something in the system is breaking down, and the question becomes why, materially.
You’re right that bureaucrats can game systems, build networks, sideline rivals. None of that is controversial. But describing behaviour isn’t the same as identifying a class. You keep jumping from “they consolidate influence” to “therefore they are a class,” without showing the property relation that would actually make that true.
Even the well documented idea of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging isn’t a blank cheque for your argument. It’s a warning about a process, not a claim that any layer with authority already is one. There’s a difference between a contradiction that has to be managed and a fully formed class that reproduces itself through ownership. If every exercise of coordination produced a new ruling class, then no collective project would ever be possible and we should all just give up and kill ourselves now.
On nepotism, same issue. Favouritism exists in almost every system ever. That alone doesn’t define a class. For it to do that, those positions have to become something like property, stable, transferable, independently reproducible. If that happens, then yes, you’re looking at a real shift. If not, you’re still dealing with a deviation inside a different structure.
You’re not wrong to be wary of authority. Nobody serious ignores that problem. But right now you’re treating suspicion as if it’s analysis, and it isn’t. Analysis asks what the underlying relations are, who actually controls production, how surplus is allocated, whether positions can turn into property. Without that, you’re just pointing at hierarchy and filling in the rest by analogy and vibes.
Historicially, classes have been created or destroyed in order to create more or less centralized authority-driven decision making, and societies with less centralized authority have called ones with more centralized authority “authoritarian”.
Feudalism, dictatorship and even economic subjugation are called authoritarian by less authoritarian states.
In practice, the criterion for “authoritarianism” is however far back on that scale makes your current political center have anxiety about their ability to keep their current privileges from the authority.
But in theory you can see that the social organisation with the least authority possible would be an anarchist one, designed to dissolve class hierarchy when possible (e.g. abolition of private property) and apply anti-authoritarian safeguards if not (e.g. teach children how to take class action against adults, and make it easy for them to do so).
While such a society will still accumulate authority, it is designed to process it like any other waste product.
This means “authoritarian” is as meaningful as “filthy”. We can never be fully clean, but someone who chooses not to bathe to the standards of their time can be called filthy, and those standards can improve over time.
Your framework sounds nice in the abstract, but it doesn’t hold up against the concrete reality of how the term functions today. “Authoritarian” isn’t applied based on some neutral scale of centralization. It’s very clearly deployed selectively as a moral weapon by the Euro-Amerikan ideological apparatus to delegitimize any state or movement that resists imperial integration or challenges capitalist property relations.
If the criterion were truly about concentration of coercive power, the United States (with the world’s largest incarcerated population, extrajudicial drone programs, domestic surveillance architectures like COINTELPRO and it’s successors, and an executive branch that operates beyond legislative or judicial restraint on the whims of the president) would be the paradigmatic case. Yet it rarely (never) receives the label in mainstream discourse. Why? Because the term isn’t neutral.
On the historical point: classes aren’t created or dissolved to adjust the “level” of authority. They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle. The bourgeois revolutions didn’t aim to “spread” or “centralize” authority. They smashed feudal state forms to erect new ones that secured the dictatorship of capital (parliamentary democracy, rule of law, private property enforcement) all presented as “freedom” while materially consolidating a new class rule. The question was never how much authority, but authority for whom and against whom.
Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power. In a world still structured by antagonistic classes, the relevant distinction isn’t between “more” or “less” authority, but between authority that reproduces exploitation and authority that dismantles it. The proletarian state, like any state, exercises coercion, but its historical task is to render itself obsolete by abolishing the class relations that make coercion necessary.
In it’s modern usage the term obscures more than it reveals. As it’s not meant to be a useful tool for analysing states, power or history, but a bat to beat those who don’t get in line.
Great post comrade. We need a /c/bestoflemmy community to highlight comments like this.
Thank you always happy to hear when people find my contributions informative/useful.
That’s what I said; the center defines the standard. The US is authoritarian by social-democratic standards.
“Class struggle” is not a one-dimensional variable, and the mode of production is to a significant extent a choice made by those within the system. A revolution has degrees of freedom for who is in its circle of solidarity.
State communists mistake the state/vanguard as a neutral outsider rather than a material entity. Authority left to fester will shape the material conditions to enshrine the authority at the cost of those without authority.
Social democrats tend not to call the US authoritarian (I have yet to see it). They’re too busy negotiating their cut of imperial plunder, welfare states built on extracted surplus and “human rights” rhetoric that conveniently ignores sanctions and coups. If “the center defines the standard,” then the standard isn’t about coercion; it’s about loyalty to capital (as I already pointed out). The label only sticks to those who break ranks (refuse to bend the knee to the EuroAmerikan hegemony).
On mode of production as “choice”: this is idealism, pure and simple. Putting the cart before the horse. Ideas don’t shape the material base; the material base shapes ideas. Capitalism didn’t arrive because someone imagined it. Feudal relations broke because they could no longer contain the productive forces, guilds choked industry, serfdom blocked labor, divine right couldn’t manage global accumulation. Socialism isn’t a fairy tale we opt into. It becomes necessary when capital’s own contradictions (overproduction, immiseration, ecological rupture) can no longer be managed within private ownership. And solidarity isn’t moral selection or simply who we like or don’t like. It’s determined by objective interests. The Chinese revolution for example united workers, peasants, and the national bourgeoisie not because of abstract ideals, but because all three had material stakes in smashing imperialist and feudal domination.
On the vanguard: have you read Lenin? Mao? The entire point is that it is NOT neutral. The vanguard is explicitly the organized, conscious detachment of the proletariat, an instrument of class rule, just like the bourgeois state, but inverted. The difference isn’t the existence of authority; it’s which class wields it, for what end, and whether its practice is tied to mass line feedback. To conflate proletarian dictatorship with bourgeois state power is to erase the question of class content.
Authority isn’t a substance that “festers.” It’s a relation, grounded in who controls production, who allocates surplus, who defends or transforms property forms. You can’t analyze it like a moral contaminant. You have to trace it to its material base. When authority serves to socialize wealth, decommodify life, and break imperial chains, it isn’t reproducing domination, it’s creating the conditions where coercion itself becomes obsolete.
If material conditions are all that shapes ideas, why are you speaking ideas at me? Either you are incorrect or you are wasting your time, and I don’t think you’re wasting your time.
In a world where ideas don’t matter, either of us working against our class interests through ignorance is incoherent. If we can be deceived to act against our class interests to change material conditions to serve the rich, then ideas can change material conditions.
People can interpret their interests different ways. People can ally themselves with specific groups but not others. People can have different levels of risk aversion. People can be affected by propaganda and charisma. Ideas skew praxis skews the development of material conditions.
Neglect this at your own peril. Use it to make fairy tales come true.
What class attributes do the authorities in the vanguard have in common with the proletariat?
Ok, I’m going to try lay this out as clearly as I can, because I think you’re mixing up what materialism and idealism actually mean (even if we haven’t used their names to this point it is the core of the argument).
The main tool of my analysis is materialism. Put simply: the way people organise production, how they meet their needs, who owns what, who has to sell their labour, this is the foundation. Ideas, culture, politics, they arise from and reflect that material base. They aren’t illusions, but they don’t float free. People think and act, but they do so within conditions they didn’t choose.
Ideas matter. People can be persuaded, misled, organised, educated. But those ideas only take hold because they connect to real conditions. You can’t sustain a set of ideas that are completely out of step with how people actually live. And you can’t just will a new society into existence because it sounds good. Ideas move things along, but they don’t set the underlying terrain.
What you’re arguing with is idealism. In short, idealism puts ideas first. It treats consciousness, values, or narratives as the engine of history, as if reality bends to what people believe rather than belief being shaped by reality. When you say the mode of production is a “choice,” or that solidarity is basically a matter of interpretation, you’re putting ideas in the driver’s seat. That treats history like a competition between narratives, where whichever idea wins out determines reality.
But that’s not how it works. People don’t get to pick a mode of production the way they pick a belief. Capitalism didn’t arise because it was persuasive. It arose because older systems stopped functioning under pressure and new relations became necessary to keep production going. The same logic applies to any transition out of it. There’s a reason certain ideas appear at certain times and not others, and it’s not just because someone made a good argument.
None of this means people are robots or that they can’t act against their interests. Obviously they can. Propaganda exists, divisions exist, fear exists. But even that happens within limits. If ideas were truly primary, you wouldn’t need to look at anything outside discourse to explain social change, and that clearly doesn’t hold up.
On your last point, you’re also treating “authority” as if it automatically creates a class, and that’s just not how class works. Class isn’t about who gives orders day to day. It’s about relationship to the means of production. Who owns them as property, who controls them in a way that lets them extract surplus, who can pass that control on.
Administrators, officials, organisers, these are roles within a system. In a system where production isn’t privately owned as capital, people in those roles don’t become a separate class just because they have authority. They don’t own the factories, land, or infrastructure as something they can sell or accumulate. Their position depends on the broader structure, not the other way around.
If that changes, if people in those positions start turning control into private, inheritable ownership, then you’re dealing with a class shift. But that has to be shown in actual material terms. You don’t get there just by pointing at hierarchy and calling it a class.
So you made a straw man of what I was saying. There are degrees of freedom in how material relations are shaped which can be chosen between by a revolutionary movement.
Feudalism did not primarily maintain its classes through ownership either. Like a feudal lord, an administrator primarily maintains their position by social maneuvers towards their near-peers. Justifying bad metrics as unavoidable while claiming responsibility for windfalls, shaping their domain to play better within these social dynamics, and sabotaging rivals who don’t fit in their narrative.
Unlike feudal lords, administrators don’t own a personal demesne, but for the most powerful feudal lords that demesne was miniscule compared to their power base that came from vassalage. A feudal lord conquering a rival kingdom would distribute it to loyal vassals like an administrator cannibalizing a rival ministry would distribute it to loyal managers.
In this game, administrators want to increase authority over their domain of responsibility to better weaponize it. Modes of production are turned towards political usefulness for the administrator rather than towards the benefit of workers, alienating workers in the process.
Simply put, authority becomes a form of control over the means of production which shapes an administrator’s class incentives differently from workers. It isn’t ownership but it doesn’t need to be.
And yes, administrator roles do tend to be leveraged into nepotistic inheritance of authority, with family being appointed to higher roles in exchange for favors.
No straw man. You said mode of production is a “choice” and solidarity comes down to “interpretation.” That’s putting ideas in the driver’s seat. If you want to soften that now, fine. But don’t rewrite what you said and call it misreading. Degrees of freedom exist, but they exist inside hard limits. Movements don’t invent new material conditions by thinking hard enough, they work through contradictions they actually inherit.
On feudalism, you’re stripping out the core of what made it feudal. Lords didn’t just maneuver socially. Their power rested on land, and on peasants being tied to that land. That’s how surplus was extracted. Vassalage was a political expression of that underlying relation, not a substitute for it. If you take away control over land and surplus, you’re not describing feudalism anymore, you’re just using the aesthetic of it.
With administrators you’re doing the same thing, collapsing authority into ownership. They’re not the same. Authority that can’t be turned into private property, sold off, or passed down as a right is conditional. A feudal lord could hand land to his heir. An administrator can’t hand a factory to their kid. If they start acting like they can, that’s not proof that authority magically equals a class. It’s a sign something in the system is breaking down, and the question becomes why, materially.
You’re right that bureaucrats can game systems, build networks, sideline rivals. None of that is controversial. But describing behaviour isn’t the same as identifying a class. You keep jumping from “they consolidate influence” to “therefore they are a class,” without showing the property relation that would actually make that true.
Even the well documented idea of a “new bourgeoisie” emerging isn’t a blank cheque for your argument. It’s a warning about a process, not a claim that any layer with authority already is one. There’s a difference between a contradiction that has to be managed and a fully formed class that reproduces itself through ownership. If every exercise of coordination produced a new ruling class, then no collective project would ever be possible and we should all just give up and kill ourselves now.
On nepotism, same issue. Favouritism exists in almost every system ever. That alone doesn’t define a class. For it to do that, those positions have to become something like property, stable, transferable, independently reproducible. If that happens, then yes, you’re looking at a real shift. If not, you’re still dealing with a deviation inside a different structure.
You’re not wrong to be wary of authority. Nobody serious ignores that problem. But right now you’re treating suspicion as if it’s analysis, and it isn’t. Analysis asks what the underlying relations are, who actually controls production, how surplus is allocated, whether positions can turn into property. Without that, you’re just pointing at hierarchy and filling in the rest by analogy and vibes.
I love your writing comrade, and excellent points
Thank you 🫡