One of the things we have to understand clearly is that authoritarian socialism is not the same thing as liberation, and the existence of social programs under an authoritarian state does not automatically make that state socialist in the emancipatory sense. This matters because people often point to achievements such as universal healthcare or mass education as though those things prove the success of Marxism-Leninism itself. They do not.

Universal healthcare is not uniquely Marxist-Leninist, nor is mass education. These are features that many modern states have developed because industrialized societies require educated populations, public-health infrastructure, and functioning systems of social reproduction. Liberal democracies, social democracies, welfare states, and other political systems have also constructed universal or near-universal healthcare systems. The United States is unusually market-dependent among wealthy countries, which can make ordinary welfare-state institutions appear much more ideologically radical than they actually are.

We should therefore distinguish between modernization and liberation. A state expanding schools, hospitals, vaccination programs, sanitation, transportation, or literacy can represent genuine improvements in people’s material lives, but those improvements do not tell us who actually possesses political power. An authoritarian government can modernize society while continuing to dominate the population politically. Building hospitals does not automatically democratize workplaces. Teaching people to read does not automatically give them control over their municipality. Expanding public services does not automatically create independent unions, free assemblies, accountable councils, or institutions through which ordinary people directly govern themselves.

We should also be careful about treating statistics produced by authoritarian governments as though they automatically settle political arguments. Measures such as literacy depend on definitions, methodology, testing standards, access to independent verification, and what exactly counts as functional literacy. The broader point is not that every literacy statistic from an authoritarian state must be false. The point is that a claim about literacy, healthcare access, or education should be evaluated as a social indicator, not treated as proof that a political system is liberatory. Even a completely accurate statistic showing dramatic improvement would still leave unanswered the fundamental question: who governs whom?

That question is where Marxism-Leninism repeatedly runs into its deepest problem. Marxist-Leninist political organization places enormous importance on the centralized revolutionary party and on the capture or construction of state power. Once political authority becomes concentrated in a party-state, the institutions that are supposed to act on behalf of the working class can begin acting over the working class instead. The population becomes the object of political administration rather than the direct subject of political power.

This creates a contradiction at the center of authoritarian socialism. The state claims to rule in the name of workers while workers themselves may lack meaningful independent control over the state. The party claims to represent the people while political competition, independent organization, or autonomous local institutions can be subordinated to the party. Bureaucracies claim to administer resources on behalf of society while ordinary people remain dependent on those bureaucracies for decisions that affect their lives. That is not socialism in any meaningful sense.

Socialism cannot simply mean that private capital has been replaced by state ownership. If a workplace is controlled by a private capitalist, the worker is subordinate to private power. If that same workplace is controlled by an unaccountable state bureaucracy, the worker may still be subordinate to power they do not meaningfully control. Changing the legal owner without democratizing the underlying relationship does not fully solve the problem of domination.

The same principle applies politically. Replacing a capitalist ruling class with a centralized party bureaucracy does not automatically return power to ordinary people. A society becomes more liberatory when people gain real mechanisms for self-government: assemblies, councils, democratic workplaces, municipal institutions, cooperatives, confederations, and other structures through which decisions flow upward from communities rather than downward from a centralized authority.

This is why we reject the idea that authoritarianism is a necessary transitional stage on the road to freedom. Concentrated power develops interests of its own. Bureaucracies reproduce themselves. Political institutions built around command, obedience, secrecy, hierarchy, and centralized authority do not naturally transform themselves into radically democratic institutions simply because their leaders claim that democratization will happen later.

A state that monopolizes political power has very little structural incentive to teach people how to govern without it. An authoritarian party has very little incentive to build institutions capable of replacing that party’s authority. A centralized bureaucracy has very little incentive to distribute its decision-making power downward. If liberation requires ordinary people to govern themselves, then institutions that systematically prevent ordinary people from doing so are not practicing liberation in preparation for some future moment. They are reproducing the opposite social relationship.

That is why we should judge political systems not only by what services they distribute but by how power is organized. Healthcare matters. Education matters. Housing matters. Food security matters. Public infrastructure matters. We absolutely want those things. But we also want autonomy, direct democracy, freedom of association, local decision-making, meaningful participation, workplace democracy, minority protections, accountability, and the ability of ordinary people to organize independently.

A hospital does not compensate for political subordination. A school does not compensate for the absence of democratic power. Material security and political freedom should not be presented as mutually exclusive prizes where people must choose one or the other. The liberatory society should provide both.

This is where our commitment to communalism, libertarian municipalism, and democratic confederalism becomes important. We do not want political power concentrated indefinitely in a centralized state claiming to act for everyone. We want power returned to the people themselves through democratic institutions rooted in communities.

Libertarian municipalism begins from the idea that the municipality can become a genuine arena of democratic political life. Instead of citizens being reduced to occasional voters choosing distant representatives, people can participate directly in assemblies where they deliberate and decide matters affecting their communities. Political life becomes something ordinary people actually do.

Communalism develops this further by connecting direct democracy, social equality, ecological responsibility, and opposition to hierarchy. The goal is not merely to redistribute wealth while leaving structures of domination untouched. It is to reorganize society so that people increasingly govern themselves through democratic communities and cooperative institutions.

Democratic confederalism provides a way for those communities to cooperate beyond the local level. Local democracy alone cannot solve regional or global problems. Transportation networks, ecosystems, healthcare systems, energy infrastructure, migration, disaster response, and countless other issues cross municipal boundaries. Confederation allows communities to coordinate these larger responsibilities while preserving democratic accountability from below.

When we talk about healthcare, for example, our goal is not simply that the state possesses hospitals. Our goal is that everyone can receive healthcare regardless of income and that the institutions providing that care are accountable to the communities, patients, and workers who depend on them. When we talk about education, our goal is not simply producing impressive literacy statistics. We want people to possess the knowledge necessary to participate meaningfully in democratic society, think critically, understand the world around them, and exercise genuine autonomy. That distinction between providing for people and empowering people is fundamental.

Authoritarian socialism often emphasizes the first while limiting the second. The state provides, plans, administers, directs, and represents. Ordinary people receive. A liberatory politics asks a different question: how do we create institutions where people participate directly in providing, planning, administering, and governing their own communities?

That is why we do not see Marxism-Leninism as the political destination. Our goal is not a powerful state with progressive administrators. Our goal is not a benevolent bureaucracy. Our goal is not a party that promises to exercise authority responsibly on behalf of everybody else.

Our goal is a society in which ordinary people themselves increasingly possess the power that states, corporations, landlords, bosses, and political elites currently monopolize. That is the difference between paternalism and liberation.

An authoritarian institution can do something materially beneficial. We do not need to deny that. But beneficial policies do not erase authoritarian political relationships, and they do not prove that authoritarianism was required to produce those benefits. We should be capable of saying that universal healthcare is good without concluding that political centralization is therefore good. We should be capable of supporting mass education without concluding that a one-party state is necessary for education. We should be capable of supporting social ownership without equating social ownership with bureaucratic state ownership. The mistake is allowing the existence of public goods to excuse the concentration of political power. The liberatory society demands more from us.

That is why our socialism has to be democratic all the way down. If socialism means social control over the conditions of life, then society itself has to possess that control. It cannot merely be exercised by a state that claims to embody society. The purpose of liberation is not to create better rulers. It is to overcome the social relationship between rulers and ruled as far as we reasonably can, replacing domination with democratic participation, hierarchy with accountability, dependency with mutual aid, and political spectatorship with active citizenship.

That is why Marxism-Leninism and its authoritarian descendants are not our way forward. They place too much faith in centralized political authority and too little power directly in the hands of ordinary people. The liberatory society requires the opposite movement: power moving outward and downward into democratic communities, workplaces, assemblies, councils, cooperatives, and confederations until governing society becomes something we increasingly do together rather than something done to us.

Healthcare, literacy, housing, education, and material security are parts of liberation, but they are not substitutes for liberation. The question is never merely whether people are being provided for.The deeper question is whether we are becoming capable of governing ourselves. That is the direction we are moving toward: communalism, libertarian municipalism, democratic confederalism, mutual aid, direct participation, and the steady democratization of power. Not an authoritarian state promising that one day it will give power back. The liberatory society begins by building institutions through which we take that power into our own hands.