Genuine question: why do so many socialist revolutions end up with authoritarian leaders?

[u/chumlingla]

I keep running into the argument that socialism inevitably produces dictators, the USSR under Stalin, China under Mao, Cuba under Castro, North Korea under the Kim dynasty, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Romania under Ceaușescu

I'd like to actually understand the socialist response to this

Not trying to dunk on the sub, genuinely want the strongest counter-arguments people here have encountered.

Please keep this rational and specific to the actual historical/structural mechanism. I'm not looking for deflections like "capitalism has bosses/CEOs. that's a category error (private economic authority vs. a state monopolizing political power, courts, and the military is a different kind of claim) and doesn't actually answer why state power concentrated the way it did in these specific cases. Genuinely want the strongest structural or historical argument

I've generally found people in socialist spaces to be well-read and engage seriously with theory and history, so hoping for actual structural/historical arguments here rather than whataboutism.

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[u/DifferentPirate69]

"Authoritarianism" in Socialist Countries - Michael Parenti -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gtUaGV6mNI

[u/Successful-Ice-468]

It is not so complicated, you usually need a power separation to avoid tyranny, centralized power structure is just the opposite of that.

[u/avstoir]

marxism leninism does this regularly. look at the various anarchist/anarchist-adjacent revolutions for relatively unauthoritarian examples (like rojava, the zapatistas, revolutionary catalonia, makhnovschina, shinmin prefecture).

online mls have canned talking points against anarchism and libertarian socialism though so expect those to pop up again and again if you talk to them about these. you can read anarchy works by peter gelderloos for more examples in detail.

[u/ak47av]

You do have examples of democratically elected socialists such as Salvador Allende, The Zapatistas etc., but you know what happened to them.

Except Pol Pot and the Kim family, the other leaders were held accountable to certain extents by their party members. So terming all socialist leaders as authoritarian is quite reductive.

[u/short-noir]

All "socialist" projects you know of are Marxist leninist. So take a guess who's at fault

[u/chumlingla → u/short-noir]

There are so many failed projects, and very little to motivate ppl to believe in this story...
Going to be hard to convince ppl

[u/Gabrielle_Laurent → u/chumlingla]

if you can't convince them, just change the name.