Granted that some number of them are undoubtedly just astroturfing for authoritarians, some significant number of them seem to be sincere, so it has to be the case that they actually believe that authority can be institutionalized for a limited time to serve limited ends, then eliminated when it’s served those ends.
How? How can anyone be so hopelessly naive or delusional to actually believe that? Particularly when history has shown the exact opposite without exception?
To me, they’re as inexplicably nuts as the flat-earthers.
I think they neither understand how authoritarean states manage to stay in power, nor how even discounting that you’d need some paragon of socialist virtue at the top to give that up.
What I mean by the first line is that even if your leader genuinely wants to dissolve the state eventually, they can’t stay in power without surrounding themselves with people that are both power hungry and stupid, so dissolving the state would fail on account of those people. I guess maybe they believe it’s realistic to also have all those people have genuine intentions, but it’s just not.
They think “Marx said it, and he knew what he was talking about!”
The issue is, when Marx suggested the socialist state would wither away, he was suggesting that a state weakened in comparison to the prior bourgeois state would wither away with the active self-ordering of society by independent workers’ organizations that were not part of the state controlling steadily-more of society’s resources than the state.
Which is pretty much the opposite of “Give MORE power to the state, and then it will someday have LESS power!”
That’s the part I can never understand.
Granted that some number of them are undoubtedly just astroturfing for authoritarians, some significant number of them seem to be sincere, so it has to be the case that they actually believe that authority can be institutionalized for a limited time to serve limited ends, then eliminated when it’s served those ends.
How? How can anyone be so hopelessly naive or delusional to actually believe that? Particularly when history has shown the exact opposite without exception?
To me, they’re as inexplicably nuts as the flat-earthers.
I think they neither understand how authoritarean states manage to stay in power, nor how even discounting that you’d need some paragon of socialist virtue at the top to give that up.
What I mean by the first line is that even if your leader genuinely wants to dissolve the state eventually, they can’t stay in power without surrounding themselves with people that are both power hungry and stupid, so dissolving the state would fail on account of those people. I guess maybe they believe it’s realistic to also have all those people have genuine intentions, but it’s just not.
They think “Marx said it, and he knew what he was talking about!”
The issue is, when Marx suggested the socialist state would wither away, he was suggesting that a state weakened in comparison to the prior bourgeois state would wither away with the active self-ordering of society by independent workers’ organizations that were not part of the state controlling steadily-more of society’s resources than the state.
Which is pretty much the opposite of “Give MORE power to the state, and then it will someday have LESS power!”
Have you considered them being very dumb?