The piece I struggle with, is how do you deal with power? I'm a commie, but I'm the kind who actually believes in an endless struggle against oppression. As long as there is injustice, there will always be struggle, so I'm not looking to create a socialist state and then my job is done. My job is to create the party, then criticize it and develop it through struggle. After that, the goal is internationalism, not a socialist state. The state can only be transitional, a socialist state is at best, a way to keep power out of the hands of rulers and build power for the masses, a historical phase of society committed to liberation.

But power is material, tangible, and objective. It always centralizes. Leninists have a strategy of Democratic Centralism, where the natural tendency of centralizing power is balanced by democratic mass participation. This takes different forms based on historical necessity, sometimes more authoritarian measures, still beholden to the democratic authority of the masses, are necessary, such as the dreaded "war communism," but communists should always fight for more internal democracy, while preserving the centralized nature of organization. In fact what makes war communism such a blight is that it creates unwinnable dilemmas, such as the unmitigated tragedy at Kronstadt.

But without centralization, a more powerfully centralized force can easily break up our democratic movement and destroy the historic potential to liberate the masses, taking the power away from the masses to centralize in the hands of a new ruling class. This is exactly what happened with the Stalinist bureaucracy that formed after the Russian civil war, state bureaucrats filled the positions of power in the revolutionary government, and the power centralized in the hands of the state bureaucrats replacing the soviets who empowered the first popular revolution in Feb 1917. The civil war created the conditions for the basis, as it destroyed the entire productive capacity of the country, decimating the working class as a class, leaving only the peasantry, the bureaucracy, and only a few genuine revolutionaries.

But what caused the failure of the revolution wasnt ideology it was the loss of democracy that disappeared when the basis for worker power, and hence worker democracy, was smashed by the invaders and white armies, and replaced with a more centralized, more oppressive and authoritarian basis for power.

The other side of this, is that even when power is not formally centralized, such as within a state or government, it is still informally centralized, so that a group or individual can claim that power is being distributed, and maybe it is to a certain degree, but it is being distributed in a way that further centralizes that power. In this instance the tyranny takes the form of de-centralization but its substance is still centralized. In these instances a formal democratic centralized structure is much less authoritarian, because it reveals to the masses the true form of its authority, allowing itself to be properly reckoned with, shaped and improved, rather than the informal authoritarianism that claims to be decentralized but is in fact the opposite.

Please don't read this as a sweeping dismissal of anarchism, I am very fond of anarchism and anarchists, but the discourse between our traditions is bad for reasons that are completely outside of our control. While I cringe violently watching commies quote "On Authority" at anarchists as if it means a damn thing in this day and age, I think that the democratic centralist model of organizing, while fraught and vulnerable, is much more transparent and practical than decentralization. I acknowledge that anarchists are not a singularity, as you've already mentioned ITT, and I'm aware of different anarchist approaches to these issues thanks to my libsoc comrades, even if I don't fully understand them.

I think the difference is somewhere in the way that the anarchist truly concretizes and celebrates the individual, which unfortunately somehow gets disappeared in much Marxist analysis. I study Malatesta to try and compensate for this shortcoming of our tradition, but the big practical structural questions still nags me.