Memes

It’s not because we have a boner for authority, it’s because history has shown us that, under the current conditions of global capitalist/imperialist hegemony, such a state is a necessary step in the process of reaching a classless society. It’s simply not possible to go directly from where we are right now to where all socialists want to end up. That’s why anarchism has never had a win that’s lasted more than few months before capitalist forces crush it.

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds:

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

There's an ideological ocean between utopian socialism and actually-existing socialism, yes. There's a reason why there's not been a successful historical instance of socialism in which workers collectivised without taking the power of the state in their hands.

Calling it "authoritarian state" kinda portrays lack of knowledge at democratic power structures and mechanisms in former socialist countries. Examples for the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly "authoritarian leaders" benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women's rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language... Please tell me one country that does that better nowadays

I mean this with all sympathy, after all, I used to share views similar to your own before I started taking Marxism seriously, and to dismiss you would be to dismiss myself, and thus the capacity for change. When you simplify Marxism to "workers should collectively own the Means of Production," you remove the entirety of Marxism, as such a thought was common even pre-Marx. When you simplify AES to "authoritarian states with a monopoly on violence to enforce Communism," you assume greater knowledge of the practice of building Socialism than the billions of people who have worked tirelessly to bring it into existance for the last century from the inside, not criticizing from afar.

With all due respect, and no "I've read more than you so my power level is higher" nonsense, have you read Marx?