The act of revolution is itself an authoritarian act. A bunch of people with guns force everyone else to listen to what they have to say. It was authoritarian when the American founding fathers did it, it was authoritarian when the French did it, it was authoritarian when the Russians did it.
What happens afterward is what counts. Every socialist society that has or currently exists has a democratic process, but capitalist countries point to the methods that various socialists have used to prevent capitalist takeover of their systems and say that those methods invalidate the whole process. Socialists, in turn, point to all of the rampant corruption that is taken for granted in capitalist elections and say that those make the process into a sham.
So the question is, do you believe that bourgeois control of mass media, political action groups, and the direct sponsorship of candidates by the wealthy invalidates capitalist elections? If so, to what extent do you think society should go to prevent those things from interfering in the democratic process? Whatever answer you come to, in order to implement it you will first need to get a bunch of people with guns together to dictate what the new democracy is going to look like.
If you disagree with any of the things I said, then please do so. I would love to have my perspective broadened by more well thought out points of view. But all I get from most liberals and anticommunists is the same reheated arguments I’ve seen debunked over and over and over.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your main point.
Though the arguments you make will not work on anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
You kinda cope in there by saying that the governments that called themselves socialist in the past were democratic, which is kind of not true for a lot of them. There’s degrees to it but for the most part they weren’t.
I think it’s smarter for us to distance ourselves from those governments as they ultimately didn’t really represent our views, not mine at least.
The other problem is the Engels On Authority ass first paragraph, equating use of violence with authoritarianism.
When you do thay you kinda just come off as an authoritarian if people aren’t already familiar with your definitions (similar to using the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat.)
The argument is also just silly and I wish I could go back in time and stop it from entering the material world but I am too lazy to write about it. A lot of libertarian communists have written about it over the past century so you can probably fish something up if you look.
