Yes, absolutely. Socialist states governed by Communist Parties are states where the Proletariat oppresses the Bourgeoisie. You can’t simply eliminate all property relations overnight, the role of a proletarian state is to sieze the large firms and key industries that are necessary to maintain that power, and gradually appropriate firms and industry until the entire economy can be publicly owned and planned.
There aren’t really degrees of authoritarian or libertarian in a state, just what circumstances the system finds itself in. At times where class struggle is sharpened, the state employs more drastic measures to maintain the class in charge, and this goes for bourgeois states or proletarian states. It isn’t a decision to be made on a sliding scale, but a reflection of circumstances.
Even comparing Anarchism with Marxism as “libertarian vs authoritarian” isn’t apt. Anarchists also employ authority in overturning class relations, just via a horizontalist approach. Marxist states also are more comprehensively democratic than Capitalist ones, as they spread democracy to the economy, for the many rather than for the few.
Just my 2 cents as a Marxist-Leninist.
Side note: a higher stage Communist society where class has been abolished and the oppressive elements of government that make up the state have thus withered away would not be authoritarian, as there’s no longer class struggle. That’s more of a future thing though, not something that has immediate relevance.
I’m not sure how you would test it, outside of looking at states through history, in different contexts. Germany is a good example. Germany in the early 20th century, after World War I, was in serious debt and had rising contradictions that led to increased worker organization. The bourgeoisie was terrified of a Communist uprising, so they employed the Nazis to purge them. After the fall of the Nazis, the system didn’t radically change, but the need for the Nazis as a sort of alter-ego to stamp out Communism was done. They remained Capitalist throughout the entire time, but each change in policy was driven by changing conditions.
Marxists posit that the Mode of Production is the base, which creates the superstructure, which is the laws, ideology, and culture, which shapes the base. This cyclical relationship shows that biggest shaper of policy is the needs of the ruling class, and the conditions they are dealing with. I am not “inventing” this stance, of course, its been here for a long while.
I think to test it you’d need to do some kind of comprehensive analysis, something like a big spreadsheet of a convincingly unbiased sampling of states (or states-at-points-in-time), evaluated for libertarianism-vs-authoritarianism. But you’d need to have a way to distinguish whether differences between states were caused by inherent per-state effects (or by more mechanistic runs-with-the-state traits, like “having a written constitution” or “being a monarchy”), or by “circumstances”. So you’d need a way to measure plausibly-causitive circumstances and then see how much of the variance they explained.
It’d be a big project and hard to do in a controlled way across a large enough sample, but if you sent enough history grad students out to rate things like “worker organization” in 1925 Germany and “protections for human rights in constitutional law” in 1975 New Zealand on 5-point scales, you might be able to get a data set that could answer this question.
The biggest thing is that, ultimately, it’s the economic forces that drive development. It wasn’t a coincidence that slavery was abolished when it was, it was driven by economic changes towards Capitalism and away from feudal and slave-driven economies, driven in turn by improvements in technology and the accumulation of the bourgeoisie. The class dynamics and economic structures at play are what makes the biggest impact on policy.
Yes, absolutely. Socialist states governed by Communist Parties are states where the Proletariat oppresses the Bourgeoisie. You can’t simply eliminate all property relations overnight, the role of a proletarian state is to sieze the large firms and key industries that are necessary to maintain that power, and gradually appropriate firms and industry until the entire economy can be publicly owned and planned.
There aren’t really degrees of authoritarian or libertarian in a state, just what circumstances the system finds itself in. At times where class struggle is sharpened, the state employs more drastic measures to maintain the class in charge, and this goes for bourgeois states or proletarian states. It isn’t a decision to be made on a sliding scale, but a reflection of circumstances.
Even comparing Anarchism with Marxism as “libertarian vs authoritarian” isn’t apt. Anarchists also employ authority in overturning class relations, just via a horizontalist approach. Marxist states also are more comprehensively democratic than Capitalist ones, as they spread democracy to the economy, for the many rather than for the few.
Just my 2 cents as a Marxist-Leninist.
Side note: a higher stage Communist society where class has been abolished and the oppressive elements of government that make up the state have thus withered away would not be authoritarian, as there’s no longer class struggle. That’s more of a future thing though, not something that has immediate relevance.
This sounds like that rare thing in political science: a falsifiable assertion. Do you happen to know if anyone has tested it?
I’m not sure how you would test it, outside of looking at states through history, in different contexts. Germany is a good example. Germany in the early 20th century, after World War I, was in serious debt and had rising contradictions that led to increased worker organization. The bourgeoisie was terrified of a Communist uprising, so they employed the Nazis to purge them. After the fall of the Nazis, the system didn’t radically change, but the need for the Nazis as a sort of alter-ego to stamp out Communism was done. They remained Capitalist throughout the entire time, but each change in policy was driven by changing conditions.
Marxists posit that the Mode of Production is the base, which creates the superstructure, which is the laws, ideology, and culture, which shapes the base. This cyclical relationship shows that biggest shaper of policy is the needs of the ruling class, and the conditions they are dealing with. I am not “inventing” this stance, of course, its been here for a long while.
I think to test it you’d need to do some kind of comprehensive analysis, something like a big spreadsheet of a convincingly unbiased sampling of states (or states-at-points-in-time), evaluated for libertarianism-vs-authoritarianism. But you’d need to have a way to distinguish whether differences between states were caused by inherent per-state effects (or by more mechanistic runs-with-the-state traits, like “having a written constitution” or “being a monarchy”), or by “circumstances”. So you’d need a way to measure plausibly-causitive circumstances and then see how much of the variance they explained.
It’d be a big project and hard to do in a controlled way across a large enough sample, but if you sent enough history grad students out to rate things like “worker organization” in 1925 Germany and “protections for human rights in constitutional law” in 1975 New Zealand on 5-point scales, you might be able to get a data set that could answer this question.
The biggest thing is that, ultimately, it’s the economic forces that drive development. It wasn’t a coincidence that slavery was abolished when it was, it was driven by economic changes towards Capitalism and away from feudal and slave-driven economies, driven in turn by improvements in technology and the accumulation of the bourgeoisie. The class dynamics and economic structures at play are what makes the biggest impact on policy.