Authoritarian is a meaningless pejorative. All states/countries/political groups etc. must be authoritarian by necessity in class society
Historicially, classes have been created or destroyed in order to create more or less centralized authority-driven decision making, and societies with less centralized authority have called ones with more centralized authority “authoritarian”.
Feudalism, dictatorship and even economic subjugation are called authoritarian by less authoritarian states.
In practice, the criterion for “authoritarianism” is however far back on that scale makes your current political center have anxiety about their ability to keep their current privileges from the authority.
But in theory you can see that the social organisation with the least authority possible would be an anarchist one, designed to dissolve class hierarchy when possible (e.g. abolition of private property) and apply anti-authoritarian safeguards if not (e.g. teach children how to take class action against adults, and make it easy for them to do so).
While such a society will still accumulate authority, it is designed to process it like any other waste product.
This means “authoritarian” is as meaningful as “filthy”. We can never be fully clean, but someone who chooses not to bathe to the standards of their time can be called filthy, and those standards can improve over time.
Your framework sounds nice in the abstract, but it doesn’t hold up against the concrete reality of how the term functions today. “Authoritarian” isn’t applied based on some neutral scale of centralization. It’s very clearly deployed selectively as a moral weapon by the Euro-Amerikan ideological apparatus to delegitimize any state or movement that resists imperial integration or challenges capitalist property relations.
If the criterion were truly about concentration of coercive power, the United States (with the world’s largest incarcerated population, extrajudicial drone programs, domestic surveillance architectures like COINTELPRO and it’s successors, and an executive branch that operates beyond legislative or judicial restraint on the whims of the president) would be the paradigmatic case. Yet it rarely (never) receives the label in mainstream discourse. Why? Because the term isn’t neutral.
On the historical point: classes aren’t created or dissolved to adjust the “level” of authority. They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle. The bourgeois revolutions didn’t aim to “spread” or “centralize” authority. They smashed feudal state forms to erect new ones that secured the dictatorship of capital (parliamentary democracy, rule of law, private property enforcement) all presented as “freedom” while materially consolidating a new class rule. The question was never how much authority, but authority for whom and against whom.
Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power. In a world still structured by antagonistic classes, the relevant distinction isn’t between “more” or “less” authority, but between authority that reproduces exploitation and authority that dismantles it. The proletarian state, like any state, exercises coercion, but its historical task is to render itself obsolete by abolishing the class relations that make coercion necessary.
In it’s modern usage the term obscures more than it reveals. As it’s not meant to be a useful tool for analysing states, power or history, but a bat to beat those who don’t get in line.
Historicially, classes have been created or destroyed in order to create more or less centralized authority-driven decision making, and societies with less centralized authority have called ones with more centralized authority “authoritarian”.
Feudalism, dictatorship and even economic subjugation are called authoritarian by less authoritarian states.
In practice, the criterion for “authoritarianism” is however far back on that scale makes your current political center have anxiety about their ability to keep their current privileges from the authority.
But in theory you can see that the social organisation with the least authority possible would be an anarchist one, designed to dissolve class hierarchy when possible (e.g. abolition of private property) and apply anti-authoritarian safeguards if not (e.g. teach children how to take class action against adults, and make it easy for them to do so).
While such a society will still accumulate authority, it is designed to process it like any other waste product.
This means “authoritarian” is as meaningful as “filthy”. We can never be fully clean, but someone who chooses not to bathe to the standards of their time can be called filthy, and those standards can improve over time.
Your framework sounds nice in the abstract, but it doesn’t hold up against the concrete reality of how the term functions today. “Authoritarian” isn’t applied based on some neutral scale of centralization. It’s very clearly deployed selectively as a moral weapon by the Euro-Amerikan ideological apparatus to delegitimize any state or movement that resists imperial integration or challenges capitalist property relations.
If the criterion were truly about concentration of coercive power, the United States (with the world’s largest incarcerated population, extrajudicial drone programs, domestic surveillance architectures like COINTELPRO and it’s successors, and an executive branch that operates beyond legislative or judicial restraint on the whims of the president) would be the paradigmatic case. Yet it rarely (never) receives the label in mainstream discourse. Why? Because the term isn’t neutral.
On the historical point: classes aren’t created or dissolved to adjust the “level” of authority. They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle. The bourgeois revolutions didn’t aim to “spread” or “centralize” authority. They smashed feudal state forms to erect new ones that secured the dictatorship of capital (parliamentary democracy, rule of law, private property enforcement) all presented as “freedom” while materially consolidating a new class rule. The question was never how much authority, but authority for whom and against whom.
Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power. In a world still structured by antagonistic classes, the relevant distinction isn’t between “more” or “less” authority, but between authority that reproduces exploitation and authority that dismantles it. The proletarian state, like any state, exercises coercion, but its historical task is to render itself obsolete by abolishing the class relations that make coercion necessary.
In it’s modern usage the term obscures more than it reveals. As it’s not meant to be a useful tool for analysing states, power or history, but a bat to beat those who don’t get in line.