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the qualitative difference

The inability of people to recognize the qualitative difference between executive authority vested in democratically-empowered centralized structures and rootless tyranny of self-aggrandizing opportunists is one of the deliberate goals of hegemonic bourgeois propaganda. It leads to a number of disempowering outcomes, forestalling movement-building:

  1. Distrust of the very concept of "authority," since no leadership can be trusted to not be the opportunist type.

  2. Overeagerness to follow opportunists, believing they are the democratic type. 3. Credulous acceptance of any and all anticommunist propaganda, no matter how baseless or ridiculous, because it has been drilled into your head since birth that all of these movements were necessarily led by the opportunist type. 4. Unwavering investment in bourgeois "democracy," out of the naive misconception that tepid assent on a ballot imbues "representatives" with democratic authority. In reality, a system in which capital governs social life has no room for any but the MOST opportunistic actors. Every major "communist party" or "socialist organization" in the west is rife with opportunism, because they do not fulfill the (admittedly very stringent) requirements to build a constituency capable of flexing their democratic will. This is due to a number of factors, but the primary one is a lack of political development of the membership.

Most are also organizationally structured to preclude the ousting of opportunists, even while maintaining the same guise of "democracy" that governs capitalist states. In some cases, this structural anti-democracy runs so deep that it would be quite literally impossible to reform the organization. In others, the rampant liberalism almost acts as a blank slate on which communists could theoretically paint their democratic centralist vision. In all scenarios, politically naive revolutionaries-in-waiting will continue to be led astray by all manner of opportunists unless and until we build an organization that can demonstrate what real democracy looks like.