For the first 30 hours, bosses kept dying to summon jellyfish roll roll heavy attack roll roll heavy attack before I got to learn any interesting mechanics. I heard a streamer say that the underground stag enemy was a beautiful fight, but when I got there I kicked its ass and hardly got to see it do anything. If anything, the game is too easy.
Ownership isn’t a preference. It’s the material anchor of class power.
Why do you think only ownership can be a “material anchor”? When someone can “own” something they’ve never been within a thousand miles of, why couldn’t another form of institutionally enforced authority over that object fulfill that same role?
But the solution isn’t to abandon proletarian authority. It’s to deepen mass line, criticism-self-criticism, recall mechanisms.
You reformist! ;)
Why would regulation offer any more resistance against the pressure of material relations between authority and worker within state communism than in liberal capitalism?
they end up adopting positions functionally close to MLs, because material conditions demand it. The “authority is inherently tyrannical” line is tyranny of bedtime idealism that collapses on contact with actual struggle
It’s natural that functions converge when pursuing the same goals, especially when the pressure is on. Pulling someone out of the way of a moving bus is going to look the same in all ideologies.
It’s also natural that when you ask someone raised in a statist society what they would do, they’re going to be primed to answer in a more centralized way. One of the nice things of anarchy is that other people can exercise their better ideas, so even if I give a bad answer they are free to give a good answer and people can go with that instead. That’s how you prevent beginner mistakes like the four pests campaign or the holodomor from killing millions of people.
You can’t dismantle the bourgeois state with decentralized cells.
You can if you want primitivism, but yeah dying of smallpox sucks. That’s why anarchists prefigure structures, as you note.
You can’t break imperial chains with sociocracy.
Why couldn’t you?
As I mentioned before, the below are just my personal guesses of what would be good options. Anarchist society is larger than me and will do better than me.
Who are “the people”?
Everyone, with those who can’t communicate effectively being assisted to have a say.
How do they coordinate at scale?
Sociocracy, federations, and whatever else they come up with and consent to.
How do they defend against counter-revolution
Shaping the material conditions towards decentralization and voluntary association, so there is nothing for the counterrevolution to seize.
imperial invasion
Shaping the material conditions to make places as hard as possible to hold with force, and the prevent the existence of strategic positions for the empire to hold. Decentralization, guerilla defense infrastructure, weapons caches. Mass solidarity. Propagandize among the invader’s population and encourage revolution and resistance there.
economic sabotage?
Decentralized local production. Long-lasting repairable goods. Living within your ecological means.
Perhaps to help make these ideas more concrete we could have drills/competitions where different communes or federations showcase the strategies they think work best so groups can share and learn empirically.
Waving away ownership because it’s a “social construct” is a dodge.
I am not waving it away, I am lowering its status to be within the same realm as concerns that are secondary in capitalism. Concerns that may become primary when capital is undone, as in state communism.
You’re using “class” as a catch-all. I’m using it in the stricter sense that actually lets you explain things, relation to production, control of surplus, reproduction of power. That’s what gives the concept teeth.
And all of these can continue to be monopolized by a specific societal subgroup without the use of “ownership”. Any group with authority over these matters that can have solidarity within the authoritative group will serve as a ruling class that gains from exploiting the working class.
So no, solidarity isn’t a matter of interpretation. It’s grounded in position. People can misread their interests, sure. They can be won to chauvinism or reformism. But those interpretations only stick because of material conditions, and they only last as long as those conditions hold. Real solidarity has to be built on shared relation to production and shared interest in ending exploitation. Anything else is temporary alignment at best.
The relation to production of different groups change over time. Serfdom, slavery, automation. Worldwide alignment of workers’ interests is temporary and shifting like intranational alignment, which is why it historically hasn’t happened yet.
If the singular working class as a concept had more teeth than nationality I would expect it to, well, take a bigger bite out of history. For French revolutionaries to abolish slavery in their natural solidarity with other workers rather than continuing exploitation because their interests did not in fact align with slaves in the colonies.
If every exercise of authority or unevenness in incentives is already the seed of a new ruling class, then organised transformation becomes impossible by definition. Any revolution complex enough to survive would already contain the embryo of its own betrayal and again we should just give up and kill ourselves now.
No, we should become anarchist. Unevenness is a vulnerability that we build social structures to prevent from turning into authority, and complex social structures with far less authority already exist from sociocracy to decentralized guerilla cells.
As with your narrative of state communism, these systems are imperfect and will develop places of authority and abuse, and we will learn from that and alter the systems to be less authoritative.
But where you expect administrators to make such improvements to their personal and (sub)class’ detriment, anarchy keeps the power to make these changes with the people so the changes are made in the people’s favor.
We are able to be anarchist (or state communist) even within capitalism; the countless seeds of authority we carry with us into the postrevolutionary society will be far easier to wrangle than the full-grown monstrosities of capitalism.
Ownership is a social construct like any other. Limiting your intepretation of class to ones defined by ownership makes the analysis pointlessly inapplicable when looking at societies where ownership plays less of a role. Feudal society didn’t just have lords and serfs, it also had peasants and free cities and church land that don’t fit the “feudalism is defined by owning the land and the serfs on it” schema. Theocracy, bureaucracy, caste systems, white supremacy, patriarchy, and anarchy all benefit from a class-based lens.
Marx focused on ownership as the primary class divide because that’s how capitalism works (especially in the 19th century before social liberalism muddied the waters through pension funds, unemployment benefits, small business loans, etc.), but any conflict of interests between groups of people seeking to achieve economic prosperity will do. For example, migrant workers are actively imported under liberalism to divide the working class, which was so succesful not just because of racism but because of genuinely different economic incentives between those with citizenship privileges and those who are floundering in a hostile legal system but for who what little they get is more than they could have gotten back in the imperial periphery. In essence, citizenship becomes the division between two distinct working classes.
And here we see how solidarity is a matter of interpretation. Right-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with capitalists by invoking their shared citizenship while left-wing citizen workers attempt solidarity with the migrants by invoking their shared worker status. These are different strategies that are both within range of what the material conditions make plausible. One hopes to reinforce imperial oppression, creating the material conditions that can be leveraged into greater citizenship privileges as traitors to the international working class; the other hopes to leverage the power of a united labor front grants either to demand more privileges at the negotiating table (socialist reformers) or to have a revolution whose reorganisation leaves them better off than before.
I wish I could say for certain that being traitors to the international working class is a foolishly bad bet. But it worked okay for western workers in the past century. I truly can’t say if a median income middle aged white male American would expect less prosperity under Trump than in the conflicting mess that would be an American leftist revolution.
Those in power have similar choices between mutually contradictory strategies, reshaping material conditions in different uncertain ways. In 2015-2024, the USAmerican capital class was divided between going full hog dictatorial fascism and trying to reform through the slow decline of their empire. Neither is objectively better for the US capital class; they both have different risk profiles, and fascism is a big enough swing that it can’t be hedged against very well. If the US collapses, billionaires may well end up being hunted down and killed, which is worse for them than becoming multi-millionaires in a world where China is the dominant nation.
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.
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?
Why? Because the term isn’t neutral.
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.
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.
I quit before it got fun.