A Viadescioisc treatise on authoritarian socialism, technological abundance, and the liberatory society

By Vaarla Ona

1. Party Rule Has No Claim to Socialism

We refuse to concede socialism to Marxist-Leninist rule. Socialism requires the people to possess effective control over the productive resources and public institutions through which they live. A party that reserves the final authority for itself has withheld that control. Its claim to represent workers cannot replace their ability to govern, organize independently, and remove those exercising power. We reject authoritarian socialism as a contradiction in the emancipatory meaning of socialism. The concentration of society’s wealth in an unanswerable state gives the governing apparatus command over social life. Calling that command socialist does not make the people its authors.

Imagine a factory transferred from private ownership to the state while its workers remain excluded from governing it. No improvement in wages, safety, hours, or security follows automatically. Officials can continue imposing production demands, controlling the surplus, and suppressing independent organization. The workers remain subject to decisions made above them. The decisive issue is who possesses the power to determine purposes, challenge administration, and replace those in charge. Where those powers belong to a bureaucracy insulated from the population, nationalization has established state control without establishing social ownership. A private proprietor’s removal does not emancipate workers whose subordination continues under official management.

The vanguard doctrine attempts to justify this exclusion by claiming that the party knows the people’s interests better than the people can express them. Agreement confirms the leadership’s legitimacy. Disagreement becomes evidence of ignorance, manipulation, or betrayal. The party then decides which members of the working class count as politically authentic. That reasoning makes the people’s judgment subordinate to the organization claiming to embody it. We reject this claim at its root. Knowledge can strengthen an argument. It cannot confer ownership of somebody else’s political agency. A leadership that cannot be displaced independently of its permission has made popular sovereignty conditional on its own approval.

The promise of eventual freedom does not redeem this arrangement. A ruling apparatus that monopolizes the power to decide when freedom may begin can postpone it indefinitely. Secrecy, compulsory obedience, and punishment for independent initiative cultivate the capacities of dictatorship. Victory expands those capacities. We demand that means be judged through the relationships they are already building. A movement that destroys democratic independence in the struggle cannot ask us to treat that destruction as evidence of its commitment to democracy. The burden rests on those concentrating power to demonstrate an enforceable transfer of it, rather than demand trust in their future generosity.

We also reject the conversion of emergency into a permanent title to rule. An independent union is not an invading army. Peaceful criticism is not sabotage. When the leadership treats political opposition as an attack upon society, its own survival becomes the purpose of public power. People are expected to defend the institution that denies them authority over it. Necessary protection against actual violence must remain bounded by evidence, proportionality, due process, and civilian control. The state’s demand to silence a critic cannot establish that the critic threatens the people. It can reveal that the critic threatens the state’s monopoly.

Soviet political repression and Cuba’s punishment of peaceful dissent expose the injury at the center of this model. People claiming to act for workers have used public authority against people’s freedom to challenge them. Cuba’s national independence and revolutionary identity cannot substitute for its population’s independent political power. No literacy rate, hospital, or production figure can authorize imprisonment for peaceful disagreement. Public services belong to the people whose lives and labor sustain society. They create no debt of obedience to the party administering them. We reject the use of material provision as an alibi for political dispossession.

Campism extends this surrender of judgment into international politics. Soviet military domination in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan cannot become emancipatory through revolutionary vocabulary. A powerful state does not acquire the right to determine another people’s future because it opposes Western capitalism. We oppose Western imperialism with the same refusal to excuse domination. A population can face foreign aggression and domestic repression simultaneously. Neither harm cancels the other. A government earns no moral immunity by being Washington’s enemy, and Washington gains no right to dominate a country by condemning its rulers. Our allegiance belongs to people’s freedom rather than the strategic success of a camp.

Marxist-Leninist programs that subordinate popular power to party supremacy are antagonistic to the liberatory society. We will not call them our natural allies, excuse their repression for movement unity, or surrender socialism’s democratic content to their preferred vocabulary. A party’s declaration cannot settle whether society governs itself. Where the people are denied the independent power to direct their common life, the essential promise of socialism has been violated. Our responsibility is to oppose that violation.

2. The Star Trek Future Leaves Power Above the People:

We reject the Star Trek future as an adequate model of liberation. Its promise of abundance is repeatedly treated as though comfortable lives, sophisticated machines, and enlightened institutions answer the political question. They do not establish the direct popular control we demand. A future must explain how ordinary people govern economic life, determine public purposes, challenge authority, and prevent administration from becoming a separate ruling power. A replicator supplies goods. It supplies no democratic mandate. The absence of hunger cannot establish the presence of self-government.

Imagine a city where machines provide food, medicine, clothing, and shelter without charge. A governing council controls the infrastructure, determines public priorities, and reserves consequential decisions to itself. Residents receive provision while remaining unable to direct the system on which they depend. Even if its administrators are generous, their generosity leaves the population subordinate. Their successors may withdraw access, impose surveillance, or redefine acceptable conduct. People need enforceable rights and governing authority that do not depend on official goodwill. A well-provided population can still be politically dispossessed.

Star Trek’s familiar political imagination centers ranked officers, expert administration, and consequential decisions made by exceptional people in command. We reject that as the organizing ideal of a free society. The judgment of an admirable captain cannot stand in for the authority of those affected by a decision. Formal representation and distant civilian institutions likewise do not, by themselves, establish direct economic democracy. Our objection concerns the power that remains to be placed in ordinary hands. A society’s moral reputation cannot answer whether its residents control investment, infrastructure, work, and the conditions of provision.

This is why the recurring spectacle of a wise commander reaching the right decision is politically insufficient. It trains attention on the character of authority while leaving the distribution of authority less examined. We demand institutions that people can use when those in command are wrong, frightened, arrogant, or determined to protect themselves. An order upheld by exceptional benevolence leaves everyone vulnerable to its failure. Operational responsibilities aboard a vessel do not justify organizing civilian life around the habits of a command structure. The right to govern shared life cannot be reduced to confidence in whoever occupies the highest office.

Post-scarcity also leaves real conflicts unresolved. Land occupies particular places. Ecological systems require protection. Care and participation take time. Communities disagree about acceptable risks and the purposes of public resources. Machines cannot determine which decisions are legitimate or who should make them. Their energy systems, maintenance, and patterns of access must themselves be governed. A population dependent on infrastructure it cannot inspect, control, or replace remains exposed to those administering it. Abundance can strengthen freedom when it supports popular capacity. Concentrated control over abundance can strengthen domination.

We therefore refuse the invitation to treat Star Trek’s technological setting as the destination of emancipation. Its familiar hopes leave the decisive work of democratizing power unfinished. We want people to possess the institutions and resources through which they can govern, rather than live as recipients of a sophisticated order whose direction remains elsewhere. No improvement in technology can erase that distinction. We reject a future in which the provision of everything becomes an excuse for the people’s authority over nothing.

3. The Liberatory Society Places Power in Common Hands

Our communalism gives a communist commitment to common wealth a democratic political form. We seek a society in which neither an owning class nor a governing caste monopolizes the conditions of survival. Productive resources serve shared needs under effective public control. People retain secure homes, personal possessions, privacy, and freedom over their intimate lives. Common ownership concerns the resources through which power is exercised over society. Its purpose is to end the dependence that allows owners or officials to command others through control of their necessities.

This commitment begins with the worth of beings and the relationships sustaining them. We participate in Oxakna, the divine totality of existence, through lives none of us created alone. Interdependence places responsibilities upon us without giving any institution ownership of its participants. Right relation requires care, truthful understanding, and powers that remain answerable to those affected. A community cannot honor its members by consuming their freedom. Spiritual understanding gives us responsibilities toward one another and no entitlement to compel belief or obedience.

Economic democracy joins workers’ authority over their labor with residents’ and users’ authority over shared provision. Workers govern working conditions, safety, and appropriate operational matters. Communities govern public purposes, access, investment, and ecological consequences. These powers must respect one another. A workplace cannot authorize poisoning its neighbors, and a public majority cannot demand dangerous labor to obtain a cheaper service. Common stewardship makes the responsibilities visible and gives those affected routes to challenge abuse. Expertise supports decisions without acquiring a permanent right to determine society’s purposes.

Ordinary public policy proceeds through majority rule after fair deliberation, within protected individual and minority rights. Those who lose a vote retain bodily autonomy, freedom of conscience, due process, and the ability to organize for revision. Public records and independent investigation allow criticism to reach consequential decisions. Essentials remain secure when someone challenges a popular leader or rejects the governing majority’s judgment. These arrangements correct the authoritarian failure directly: people possess powers that rulers cannot suspend merely because they find opposition inconvenient. They also correct the technological fantasy by placing the systems of provision under democratic stewardship.

We build this society through organized transfers of resources and authority into popular hands. Independent unions, tenant organization, mutual aid, cooperative work, and municipal action can develop the capacities needed for deeper transformation. Immediate protections matter because people need security now, and security can enlarge their ability to act together. Our primary orientation is nonviolent mass organization. Necessary defense remains proportionate, accountable, and under civilian control. We preserve the freedom to criticize communalism itself because a movement claiming exemption from criticism is already abandoning public self-government.

Our post-leftism follows from this independent project. We give leftism no authority over our identity or allegiance. Shared vocabulary and opposition to capitalism cannot resolve a fundamental conflict between party supremacy and popular power. We organize around communalism’s actual institutions, rights, and responsibilities. We reject alliances that require silence about repression or submission to a vanguard. Our solidarity develops through the freedom and common capacity an undertaking makes possible.

The advantage of the liberatory society lies in people possessing the means to identify failure and obtain correction. They can replace those entrusted with responsibilities without surrendering an essential service. They can challenge a policy without losing their home. They can share in abundance while governing its purposes and infrastructure. Eudaimonia names the flourishing these conditions support through agency, relationships, care, worthwhile activity, and rest. Apotheosis concerns the cultivation of beings and relationships into deeper right relation. Eutopia names the good place sustained through that shared work. We seek a society whose people practice freedom through the organization of everyday life. Their liberation cannot be delegated to a party or manufactured on their behalf.