While the answers you’ve received are great and basically what I would write, I think what’s kinda fundamentally needed is a paradigm shift, and I mean that with genuine respect for you, not dunking or anything. Like, my internal development from a liberal to a leftist was initially characterized by, despite being pro-socialism and even eventually pro-communism, I still essentially had a liberal conception of the world but with socialist bits and pieces bolted on. Eventually, those pieces became so unwieldy that I essentially had to restart my ideology from scratch and reconstruct it, brick by brick. Even the extremely basic questions that you think have extremely obvious answers. In fact, most particularly the extremely basic questions. You can say “Oh, I’m pro-China because they’re building a ton of infrastructure and lifting people out of poverty” and still have mostly liberal viewpoints, but more fundamental questions need to be reconsidered and reformatted, such as:
- What is democracy? What is autocracy?
- What is authoritarianism? What is libertarianism?
- What is the essential motive force of economies - entrepreneurs or workers?
- What is the right opinion on freedom of the press, and censorship?
- What is the right opinion on the “right to self-determination”?
- What is capitalism?
- What is communism?
- What is violence?
- How are countries linked together economically?
And so on. When we, communists, discuss higher-level points with liberals, like “Was the USSR good or bad?”, what we’re really getting down to is a differing set of definitions and answers to the above questions. So it feels like we’re just going around in circles, where a liberal will say “China is bad because it’s authoritarian”, and then the answer might be “China isn’t authoritarian” or “The US is also authoritarian”, both of which just don’t make sense to a liberal because… that isn’t what that word means to them!
For the “authoritarian” example, how communists of many non-anarchist tendencies may answer the question “what does authoritarian mean” is “It is the condition of a person, people, corporation, organization, institution, or government having some degree of control over another person, people, etc.” If you think that’s a very general answer to that question, you would be right. There’s a passage by Engels who talks about the problem of authority as it’s defined by people of his time, showing how basically as soon as you have more than one person in a society, it could be described as authoritarian. If one person is responsible for gathering food, and the other is responsible for gathering firewood, then each of them is, in a sense, being authoritarian - they have control over each other’s destinies. Either could decide to stop working or handing over their resources to the other, and the other person would suffer and die. Perhaps the most famous part of the passage is:
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
How about at the nation-state level? When Biden goes out behind a podium and talks about how China and Russia are authoritarian, or autocracies, what does that mean? For liberals, this is kind of a nebulous concept, and it’s a nebulous concept on purpose, because it allows them to use the word quite freely without worrying about its precise definition. It’s kind of a vibe. Authoritarianism is when you don’t have political parties, like in China, even though there is an entire system of democracy (even if Westerners do not identify it as such because it does not resemble their democracy, even if they admit that there are serious problems with their own democracies) Okay, sure – but what about Russia, then? Many regard Russia as authoritarian, but they have political parties, and a whole system of representatives. Okay, well, authoritarianism is actually when a single party has control for a long time. Okay, then what about countries where the same party has been in power for a relatively long time, such as the 20 years that the Democrats were in power at the time of WW2? The UK Conservatives have been in power for 13 years, and the Labor Party was in power for 13 years before them too. Okay, well, the political party isn’t so much what’s important as the leader-- Angela Merkel was in power from 2005 to 2021 - was she a dictator? She received votes for her position on multiple occasions, just as Putin has since 2003. Okay, but in democratic countries, there are free and fair elections, whereas in Russ-- are there? Are there really? I remember numerous elections that were fraught with things like gerrymandering, broken down voting booths, closed voting stations, disenfranchisement of racial minorities, and so on, and those were described as free and fair elections. Where’s the cut-off point for when enough people are disenfranchised or feel coerced to vote before it isn’t a free and fair election anymore? And, by any reasonable definition, how could Israel be described as “the only democracy in the Middle East” when literal millions of people inside it are unable to vote and don’t have their own state in which they potentially could vote? “Well, maybe it’s a fuzzy concept then, but I know it when I see it!” Therein lies the problem.
When you start applying this sort of rigour and questioning to the concepts I bullet-pointed above and more, you really start to see how this whole thing is a gigantic mess. Some liberals reach this point and are advised “Oh, never you mind about it - it’s too complicated. Leave it to the political scientists to work out. Right now, we have real, IMMEDIATE problems, like how do we defeat Russia?” If a person ever tells you that an issue is “too complicated”, that means you’re on the right path and they’re trying to distract you from it. We all have the capacity to learn about even very complex political situations and make sound judgements, if we are willing to learn and read about them.
The only reason to feel bad about having a capital-L Liberal worldview and conception of politics and economics is if you are unwilling to change it. None of us are born left-wingers. Liberalism is merely the dominant political ideology that is passed down in dozens of ways. Obviously, I am no fan of liberals, but if a person goes out and reads the literature and really drills down into the ideology and still comes away as a liberal, I at least have a grudging respect for actually doing the work, even if I still loathe them. It’s when millions of redditors and twitter people who have no idea what they are really talking about, operating purely on a vibes-based political and economic system, installed with the same repetitive, infinitely-debunked talking points like “works on paper, doesn’t in practice” or “it’s just human nature to be selfish and violent” or “if only everybody wasn’t so fucking stupid! Idiocracy was a documentary!” that communists here on Hexbear just start dunking and insulting people. We’ve all seen it all literally over a hundred times, each. For liberals, this is surprising because they don’t even understand that they have an ideology that has been debunked, so they think that all of the people hurling insults their way hate their very special and smart viewpoint in particular.
