All states are inherently “authoritarian” and enforce certain principles over others. What matters is if those principles materially prioritize workers over capitalists, which socialist states do.
You can’t create a stateless, classless communist society from capitalism without a transitional socialist state that breaks the monopoly on force and propaganda that capitalist states have — specially in a world ruled by capitalist superpowers like the US which constantly coups and invades non-capitalist states. Thinking otherwise is just delusional and utopian.
No non-capitalist state will survive in the modern world if they don’t sufficiently get rid of propaganda and deal with capitalist funded insurgencies, which capitalist states will label as “authoritarian”; they’d immediately be coup’d and overthrown by imperial core countries otherwise, as many socialist states have (Chile, Libya, etc).
And regardless, socialist states are a massive improvement over capitalist states when it comes to “authoritarianism” anyway, same as most other metrics. The US has 0.8% of its population in prison for example, while China has 0.1%. Similar stats on most metrics for the USSR vs USA; socialist Russia’s human rights were also far better than capitalist Russia’s, obviously.
Used to mean someone who would support sending in tanks to crush capitalist rallies like in Hungary (which most people who get labelled “tankies” these days obviously don’t), but nowadays it’s just an anti-communist term for anyone that supports any socialist revolution that has successfully built a socialist nation.
That was the same with black liberation and apartheid South Africa in MLK and Mandela’s time: they support it only in theory. How many of them supported direct action and use of violent force to actually materially change those? How many of them support Hamas, PFLP, etc in our current time now?
The answer is “not many”, because MLK, Malcolm X and Mandela were all right about liberals being the same as conservatives in practice.
Not at all. We’ve seen this our whole lives, and are currently seeing it with the liberal response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine too. They only support emancipatory movements in theory, but in practice are the same as conservatives: they stop when those people are taking direct action for emancipation, specially when it threatens their own positions.
"…who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” - MLK
Liberals didn’t like Mandela’s use of force to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, and they wouldn’t approve of it if it happened now either. The same way they aren’t approving of Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas in their war against the apartheid colony “israel”.
Instead of individual, centralized websites there will be an interconnected network of encyclopedias. This means the same topic can be treated in completely different ways. For example geology.wiki/article/Mountain may be completely different different from poetry.wiki/article/Mountain. There can be Ibis instances strictly focused on a particular topic with a high quality standard, and others covering many areas in layman’s terms.
I don’t think something like this exists yet(?), so it’ll be cool to see how this will be like.
Rojava is a decentralized capitalist region with no plans of being socialist/anarchist/etc whose leadership allows the US to use it as a imperialist proxy and military base in the region. Of course the US likes that lmao; the US National Security Council calls it another “israel” in the region.
The Zapatistas are cool comrades who fought off the US and other capitalist forces as all socialist projects have to. Different from most successful socialist revolutions in that it didn’t establish a state (though it was managed centrally by the EZLN), but it has since succumbed to pressure from the government and cartels and has dissolved its municipalities last year — so it’s not quite as successful of a revolution as those that establish a state, some of which have already managed to become nations of millions or global superpowers.
“Social democracy” back then just meant socialism. The Bolsheviks who established the USSR were also “social democrats”
And your fantasies of the US ever letting a US-backed military dictatorship be overthrown and develop are funny, specially when it’s currently committing a genocide in Palestine and not even letting them get rid of a western colony.