A lot of people are attracted to Marxism-Leninism because authoritarian systems can look effective from the outside. They can build quickly, move resources quickly, reorganize cities quickly, punish corruption quickly, and carry out enormous projects without spending years asking whether everybody affected agrees. That speed can be mistaken for liberation. But there is a huge difference between getting something done quickly and people having power over what gets done. An authoritarian government can move fast precisely because it does not need meaningful consent.

It can displace people, silence opposition, suppress workers, censor criticism, and force through decisions that a democratic society would have to argue about publicly. The absence of resistance does not mean everybody is satisfied. It means resisting has become dangerous. That is why authoritarianism becomes a substitute for liberation. Instead of giving ordinary people more power, the state becomes more powerful and promises to use that power on their behalf. People are told that centralization is necessary because development must happen, enemies must be defeated, production must increase, or the revolution must be protected.

Eventually the revolutionary government has accumulated exactly the kind of power a liberatory society is supposed to eliminate. The party commands, the bureaucracy administers, the security apparatus protects the system, and ordinary people are expected to trust that somebody above them knows what liberation requires. Marxism-Leninism cannot reach the liberatory society through that structure because it is moving in the opposite direction: away from self-government and toward concentrated authority.

This is especially seductive to Americans who have experienced capitalism mostly through the failures of the United States. American infrastructure can be embarrassing. Healthcare is expensive. Housing is brutal. Public transportation is inadequate in much of the country. Corporations possess enormous political power. Long-term planning is weak. Then somebody looks at China building high-speed rail, enormous transit systems, renewable-energy capacity, housing, factories, and entire urban districts and thinks: they figured it out. But impressive infrastructure does not tell us who possesses political power. China remains a one-party authoritarian state without an institutional mechanism for organized political opposition, and the Communist Party maintains extensive control over political and social life.

The price of that system becomes clearer when looking at people who come into conflict with it. Chinese authorities continue to restrict freedom of expression, association, assembly, religion, and independent political organization. Particularly severe repression against Uyghurs and Tibetans and the continued dismantling of political freedoms in Hong Kong.

For somebody raised inside the American system, China can therefore look like the answer because it appears to solve problems America refuses to solve. But that comparison creates a false choice: chaotic corporate liberalism on one side or efficient authoritarian development on the other. The liberatory society is neither. We do not have to choose between corporations deciding everything and a party-state deciding everything. The real alternative is to give power back to people.

A liberatory society means communities controlling the places where they live, workers controlling economic life, municipalities governing themselves through democratic assemblies, and those municipalities confederating to coordinate transportation, healthcare, energy, ecology, production, and everything else that has to operate across larger regions.

That process can appear slower because democracy contains disagreement. People have to deliberate. Minorities have to be heard. Plans have to be challenged. Communities have to negotiate with one another. But this supposed inefficiency is often the actual work of freedom. Consent takes longer than command because other human beings are not objects.

An authoritarian government can build a road through a community very quickly if it has the power to ignore the community. A democratic society has to ask where the road should go, who benefits, who is displaced, what happens to the ecosystem, whether another option is better, and whether the people living there actually want it.

That is not weakness. That is what it looks like when human beings have political standing. The mistake is measuring liberation by how quickly a government can make society obey. The measure should be how unnecessary obedience has become.

That is why modern China is not the horizon. It shows that a highly centralized state can accomplish enormous things while still withholding fundamental political power from the people. The liberatory society has to accomplish something much harder: build, plan, coordinate, provide, and develop while making ordinary people more powerful rather than making the state more powerful over them. That is the revolution Marxism-Leninism never completes.