Socialism and authoritarianism are very linked. They're not the same, and you can have a socialist society that isn't authoritarian, but many socialist countries are centrally authoritarian and that's held true historically.

Socialism and authoritarianism are linked -- in the default North American political education. That is not the case worldwide, or for all of us.

Before there was ever a socialist political party or government there were regimes all through the 19th century with capitalist market economies and highly highly authoritarian governments. But that link is not made by many.

Corporate structures are highly controlling in ways that governments could never get away with -- controlling their employees time and expression as well as their access to basic services such as health care. But, again, in the default (small-l) liberal concensus in North America, this is not identified as authoritarian because the classical liberal concept of individual agents participating in a free market is assumed and enshrined.

If one makes broad and reductionist statements about people who don't agree with you philosophically, and do so with the tone the commenter had, I don't see why one should be expecting not to be downvoted.

Tell that to all of the people locked up because of the “War on Drugs”, civil forfeiture without a trial, and government using eminent domain to take property and give it to a corporation.

A corporation doesn’t have the force of law - and military weapons (SWAT) - to enforce compliance.

This is one of the fundamental philosophical points of confusion in discussion between radical socialists and libertarians or classical liberals: we, too, have a problem with the state and its control. _But_ we consider the state to be the _creation_ of the market economy. It exists to enforce property rights, to negotiate between different corporate entities, to use its diplomatic or military power to expand markets and market influence abroad, and in extremis it uses its coercive powers to subdue labour disruptions and political dissent that hurts the market.

This is why we bristle when we see comments like the one here that associate directly the concept of socialism with one of government/state control. Because for us the government _is_ capitalism. Without its intervention the market could never exist. And it's why we see right wing libertarianism as either naive or authoritarian itself: because it ignores the coercive nature of the origin of the market: in the historical destruction of the feudal commons, the removal of the very minor security that the peasantry had, its privatzation of agricultural land, and then the establishment of the industrial economy on the basis of those so disposessed.

The state which right wing "anti-statists" so despise is an agent of the market which they glorify. That market couldn't exist without it and its coercive power.

You even touch on it above: eminent domain to take property and give it to a corporation. This doesn't surprise us at all. Such actions are intrinsic, from our point of view, to _capitalism_.

Marxism, and even Leninism -- before the word became marred with its association with authoritarian Stalinist regimes -- wants to destroy the existing capitalist state, and replace it with a system controlled by the majority of the population, the working class. Marx's term for this is very 19th century, and very unfortunate because it is easily misinterpreted: "dictatorship of the working class"; what he meant was not dictatorship in the form of a Stalinist, single, Communist Party, cult. He meant majority control. To some, "mob rule." It's just... we like this "mob"

Anyways, this is all very much a tangent. But I'm trying here to point to some of the fundamental points of confusion in these discussions. To most North Americans, "socialist" has become synonymous in their language with "government control", to the point where things like the 2008 bailout were called by many "socialist" interventions. In my mind this is an absurd misinterpration of the concept caused by 100 years of propaganda in political education and language.

The “majority” being in control is fine if you are part of the majority. The majority wouldn’t have a problem with laws that suppressed the minority.

Anytime we discuss systems of government, we have to deal with the reality of those systems. You can design a utopia on paper, but it doesn't usually play out that way. Governments also take some time to have observable effects, and so often times our discussion of forms of government have to rely on history as an element of that.

> In my mind this is an absurd misinterpration of the concept caused by 100 years of propaganda in political education and language.

But it's historically perfectly holistic in frame of the Stalinist regimes you mention. Supporters of full socialism and communism both like to reject every historical example and claim they don't count.

The reality is the whole notion of talking about "government systems" like they're replaceable components that we can evaluate like scientific experiments is delusional. Societies and especially economic systems develop their characteristics organically over hundreds of years. Bolsheviks slapping a "socialist" label on their society after their revolution has little bearing on the fact that in many ways Stalin's Russia was contiguous with Tsarist practice [and in fact many top members of his bureauracy were ex-Tsarist bureaucrats, and by the 30s pretty much every leading Bolshevik from 1917 was murdered or exiled...]. Minus the drastic influence of the orthodox church, of course

Holodomor is a clear example that genocides belong to socialists and communists too.

You're right that we can't talk about government systems strictly in the abstract which is why we use history, and while history has different context in each instance it consistently shows us that pure socialism ends at authoritarianism, whether that's the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, or the PCV.

True, and I generally try to avoid it. But sometimes pique gets the better of us.

> who don't agree with you philosophically

That's a pretty big leap you made. I tried (and continue to try) to keep my philosophy from being the focus of my comments. Perhaps you might be surprised to find yourself to my right, you never know.

As to whether the comment was broad and reductionist, who knows, it was a short comment on a huge topic on a niche web site. I wasn't trying to have a formal debate :). It also sounds like you took the comment a lot more personally than I ever intended.

Yes there was a small period in the 19th century where we had kings who had market economies but they typically had senates which contained most of the power and were generally just figureheads.

A corporation can't keep you from voting. It doesn't prevent you from donating money to your favorite political candidate, or telling your neighbors about it.

On the other hand as an example of authoritarianism, Xi Jinping has literally removed the ability for Chinese people to select someone else as their leader. Even their ability to elect non-CCP parties depends on his approval.

Socialism depends on cohesion. You can't have 40% of the country riot because you won't be able to maintain services, whereas capitalist economies tend to survive such upsets quite well. You don't usually see mass political actions shut towns down in the US. That's part of why authoriarianism is attractive to socialist countries because it's one way of maintaining cohesion. Unfortuntely, it works because you remove the rights of people.