Diyaristan wrote:"A revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is." -- Friedrich Engels
Mainly to OP:
If you take the Leninist conception of the state explained in The State and Revolution, any state, it's one class organized as the ruling class, and forcibly suppressing all other classes.
If you wanted the final goal of classless communism to actually be realized, sometime or another there'd have to be a "self-acting, armed organization of the whole population" (Lenin). He mentioned in the same book that a society "ruled by... a militia of the whole people" was to be the end goal of the proletarian revolution.
Observe the present-day fight over the Second Amendment. You see one part of the population trying to impose its will upon the other, and (to take an example) the voices pushing loudest to take guns away from the workers would continue to try and do so if they were armed. What do you do with this population of gun-control supporters who are aggressively pushing to take away your weapons? That's a class struggle.
My point is, authoritarian socialism, at least within the framework of Marxism, would itself have to acknowledge the authoritarian measures strictly within the line of self-defense against an authoritarian population, and acknowledge the goal of such a state as a stage on the way to a classless, stateless society and its withering away.
While you may recall from our debates before that I'd suspect a proletarian revolution where that higher stage of communism was actually reached would simply revert back to a market society by the will of that whole-people militia's members itself, the point is that even authoritarian Marxism justifies its temporary authoritarian state on the basis that a non-authoritarian society in the future is the end it's intended to achieve.
Authoritarian socialism is completely separate from Marxian communism. Leninism is a form of Blanquism; Marxism-Leninism is a very misleading name as it has little to do with either person. Authoritarian Marxism doesn’t actually exist. Socialist states this far have not been Marxist just like they have not been communist. They wanted neither, it was probably only a label more people identified with. However, with the gun control debate, I’d argue a socialist should take neither side. The Republicans are the worst enemy of the worker, but the Democrats make guns more expensive. Arming the anti-worker groups better is inevitably the result of the partisan policies. This makes sense, as the Democrats wish to stabilize and protect capitalism in a more moderate form while the Republicans oppose reform and want arms to protect themselves from the workers.
