Thread by @BlackSocialists

Anyone who accepts or supports top-down, hierarchical social relations is authoritarian.

Both Liberals and Conservatives are authoritarian by this metric, since they support Capitalism.

Forces Libs and Conservatives typically label “authoritarian” are usually authoritarian too.

What most Liberals, Conservatives, and authoritarian “Leftists” don’t grasp is that anything truly “Left” is where direct democracy begins, and exploitation + domination ends.

Hierarchy and extraction, whether upheld by private corporations or a state, can only be authoritarian.

Look past surface aesthetics and rhetoric and ask yourself these questions when evaluating whether or not political orgs and/or tendencies are authoritarian:

Are they okay with hierarchy and individual leaders giving orders from the top? Are these “leaders” instantly recallable?

Worth noting that there are both formal and informal hierarchies, and different forms of authority.

The key question is whether or not these hierarchies or authorities have been consented to and are recallable, or if they have been imposed.

Hierarchies, however, beget problems.

The paradigm we are currently suffering under is a paradigm of authoritarianism.

Whether you’re in the U.S. or China, you most likely have someone ordering you around and monitoring your every move each day.

What happens to most if they refuse these orders?

They starve or die.

Our education systems are authoritarian too. No matter where you’re born on this planet, odds are that you’ll spend your developmental years being primed for authoritarian working conditions in service to profit (capital) and the wider capitalist system of domination via schools.

For many of us, our “teachers” were our first “bosses.”

We were raised to accept and respect top-down authority.

This top-down authority ultimately serves the wider system of domination that we live under.

Anything “Left” has to break from these authoritarian social relations.

There is something to be said about authoritarianism within the home (the reality/truth is that parents/guardians can tend to be the first “bosses” that we have), but perhaps that’s a conversation for another day. 😏

BONUS:

A beautiful statement all of the way back from 1898 (signed by Kropotkin, Reclus, and others) about our authoritarian education systems, and the need for a holistic, liberatory alternative in service to freedom.

libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-transl…

“Is that teacher a guide, a counselor, a man with a calling, a friend? — No. He is a tradesman, a servant executing instructions...

School, in the present society, is on the antechamber of the barracks, where the training for enslavement will ultimately be polished.”