“Authoritarian” doesn’t refer merely to the existence of authority. It refers to a system under which, on balance, individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority - a system under which there is more likelihood that an individual will be constrained by authority than that theybwill be free to act as they choose.

And note, before you even go there, that that doesn’t mean or imply no individual liberty. Again, the issue is the balance between individual liberty and governmental authority.

Individual liberty is secondary to governmental authority in ALL states. Your liberty ends exactly where it harms the ability of the state to exert its authority. The perceived liberty you believe any state gives only exists within strict boundaries where the use of that liberty does not threaten the state, as soon as it does threaten the state you become the subject of repression. This is true of all states, socialist or liberal.

Why are we suddenly talking about democracy?

We’re talking about liberal democracy because the implication you made was that “authoritarian” states should be opposed whereas the status quo should be maintained. The implication you made was not between anarchism and socialism, it was between what currently exists and what MLs would like to replace it with. You were placing yourself in defence of liberalism when you did this, not anarchism.

Not necessarily, but as a general rule, there is, simply because it’s more difficult for oligarchs in a representative democracy to enact their will. There’s a number of hoops that they have to jump through in order to maintain at least some semblance of serving the will of the people, and that specifically because the people still retain some significant freedoms (remember - it’s about the balance between freedom and authority).

In effect, oligarchs in a representative democracy have to trick or coerce people into not exercising their freedoms or exercising them poorly.

In an authoritarian system, the balance favors the government in the first place, so they’re far more likely to be able to simply issue decrees and then enforce them, without having to muck about with all of the pretending to be serving the will of the people stuff.

What system? You’re not naming a system, you’re vaguely saying “authoritarian system” with no real definition. Describe the authoritarian system. How do their elections work? What is its structure? How do their votes work? How do their courts interact? What is their constitution? Etc etc.

This vague “authoritarian system” is the culprit here for the problems. It’s “bad country” with no real material description or understanding of how “bad country” functions. This is the very point I tried to raise in my first comment, that this wordplay is used to denote “bad country” whenever it has chosen to do something that opposes US (or generally western) interests.

Actually, I would say that it is inherently a bad thing.

That’s an awful lot of why I’m an anarchist - I believe that institutionalized authority cannot be justified and is inevitably destructive.

Sure. I was an anarchist until not too long ago so I don’t actually disagree with you. States are bad. There’s a reason we all want to achieve their eventual abolishment, whether or not we disagree on how to get there. We generally agree that states do bad things. The liberal state does bad things in service of defending the liberal state and maintaining the status quo, the socialist state does bad things in service of defending the socialist state.

This reads like classic projection.

Pointing out the capitalist state does exactly everything that the socialist state does in one way or another is not projection. Come on now you’re better than this you don’t need to go to bat for liberalism as part of your opposition to socialism.

And in fact, I just wrote another post in which I pointed to what I believe to be the fundamental flaw at the heart of the tankie position, and it was pretty much exactly what you wrote here.

My position is that if you’re going to hold that authority is legitimate, then that means that you are legitimately subject to it. You don’t get to pick and choose, just as you wouldn’t allow those who would be subject to your authority pick and choose. Just as you hold that they’re rightly subjugated if those with whom you agree are in power, you’re rightly subjugated if those with whom they agree are in power.

So do you believe in using authority to kill fascists? Do you believe in using authority to prevent liberals from rebuilding a capitalist state in your newly stateless anarchist collective? What are you going to do when one part of the population decides to start a state? Let them or fight them? As an anarchist my understanding of authority was significantly more fleshed out than this, I knew full well that as anarchists we would be exerting authority on some part of the population during and after revolution until achieving what we wanted, and that we would then violently prevent its destruction. Are you opposed to Mahkno and his army violently overthrowing and instilling their ideology on their opposition? Are you opposed to the Spanish anarchists of revolutionary Catalonia violently fighting a civil war for their ideology? Why do you not consider these actions of violence to be the violent use of authority by one part of the population upon another? You can not be a revolutionary and also be against the use of authority, they are strictly in conflict, even as an anarchist if you ever see or take part in an anarchist revolution you will be directly oppressing the opposition through use of force at some stage or another.