Authoritarian is a meaningless word. Its just a scary-sounding descriptor that’s used to frame a designated enemy state as especially heinous. All states are authoritarian.
Your analogy does not work. Not all states are genocidal and the term has an actual clear definition that makes it distuingushable from other mass-killings.
As are all states. The important distinction between them isn’t the degree by which authority is used, which is largely decided by the conditions a state is in rather than the form of the state itself, but instead is which class controls the state. The USSR was run by the working classes, the US by capitalists.
And yet, how they wield it does fucking matter. How arbitrary are the rules, how harshly are people punished for violating them?
On a scale of Denmark to Saddam’s Iraq where would you rather your cousin be a prisoner?
When the state becomes increasingly comfortable meddling in the harmless affairs of its people and enacting crueller punishments and conditions upon its prisoners it is doing something bad even if it’s doing it as the representative of the working class.
Alan Turing invented computing and helped defeat the nazis, but Britain still chemically castrated him for being gay. This is the baseline of government interference you’ve been raised to believe is normal or at least explainable, and you are attacking a country whose human rights record is way, way better than that.
That is a level of government interference I use as a classic example of why the west isn’t fucking good enough. Alongside plenty of other abuses of power against my people by capitalist imperial states.
The USSR I have issues with a lot they did predominantly in the Stalinist era, but I consider their dissolution to be a great tragedy for the global working class.
If you’re saying I’m being too harsh in criticizing late 20th century Iraq’s government however I think we’re going to be unable to come to a meaningful place of agreement here. You see, I’ve been consistently anti torture, both for my country and others. Do love their commitment to literacy though.
I’m not defending any modern nation, but most have policies I wish more would adopt.
States do not arbitrarily enact violence, they do so to uphold the ruling class of society. Denmark is an imperialist state, the nicer conditions for the domestic working class come from the backs of exploited labor in the global south. This isn’t because Denmark is more “moral,” but instead because it can successfully use the spoils of imperial plunder to bribe its own working class. Iraq could not do the same, and was under intense pressure from the outside, hence the heightened repression.
My point isn’t that form doesn’t matter at all, that would be reductive. My point is that class is primary.
My point isn’t that class isn’t a major force, but that it’s just one of them. And that within equivalent or similar class characters there is wildly different ways in which state power is used, and that the ways it intrudes upon lives and the severity of its punishments for many are among the most important issues.
States absolutely arbitrarily enact violence. Sure they tend to have some argument as to why they do it, often religion or ideology, but sometimes the king is just mad.
Denmark is an imperial state, absolutely, but compare them to other imperial states in how they treat their population. Compare them to Georgist England where they would hang people for petty crimes and had a philosophy of no mercy. Both countries are imperialist, Christian, constitutional monarchies with a capitalist economic system. Hell, a lot of European “enlightenment” beliefs on rights and such were ideas they were given by the Iriqouian peoples.
Compare the interregium puritan rule of the UK and later putitan governments in the Americas to the monarchical rule following it. Circumstances decide who can come to power and what they can do while being tolerated, circumstances which includes the population’s philosophy on what rulers can and should do and tolerate, as well as rulers’ ability to use propaganda and violence to stop revolts from succeeding. Castro all but says this when talking about how machismo led to state repression of homosexuality.
It’s difficult for an impoverished nation that’s subject to colonial powers to have a libertine approach to civil liberty and a penal system focused on rehabilitation. Noble when attempted, but outside forces love to step in and stop that shit. But, they can always go above and beyond on it, form alliances with religious regressives (who may or may not constitute a clerical class), etc. Or they can do only what they’re pressured to do. Those in open resistance have choices too. Chiapas or ISIS, both resisted US global capitalist hegemony. There’s no reason beyond ideology why Iran can’t embrace feminist equality like Cuba did. And within the imperial cores the population and leadership alone have these conversations.
Philosophy of governance amongst the population and government have very real impact. Because sometimes the working class demands you deal with the witch problem and stop people from sinning and other times they demand you stop capital punishment and minimize state interference in the private lives of citizens.
I’m not reducing all of state implement to class, after all, I said such a view would be entirely reductive. However, when it comes to what is actionable, it’s clear that it’s most important to install the working class as the ruler of society. From then on, reforms in the socialist state, and quests for sovereignty, can help develop the society more and more.
As for “arbitrary” violence, I really don’t think this is an acceptable explanation. What can appear arbitrary is in actual fact a clear extension of the class makeup of society. Georgist England hanging peasants for no reason is an example of the class makeup of society being driven by the aristocracy. The victims and winners are decided by class makeup, the way society is treated is more based on the form of society, which tends to improve with development.
Comments like this make it painfully obvious that someone has not engaged with the actual history, because guess who agreed with you that lip service is not enough? The communists. Life expectancy, infant mortality, nutrition, medical outcomes, literacy, addiction rates, poverty, all of this shit immediately improves drastically in every time and place communists have ever seized power. Often these improvements have come despite nightmarish wartime conditions, such as during the Chinese Revolution when life expectancy shot up despite being in active combat with Imperial Japan after 20 years of civil war. The people of Cuba have created one of the most advanced medical systems on earth despite sixty years of strangulation. The people of the USSR risked their safety to send weapons to uprisings across the world despite needing every bullet themselves for the near century of fascist invasion and expansion that ultimately took thirty million of their lives.
The idea that communists are secretly only pretending to care about other people is the single biggest piece of capitalist projection, and the one most foundational to holding up other myths about communists. Every abuser in history has said the same thing: this is just how the world is, everyone else is just like me or worse, so there’s no point in looking for better. But in reality, Cuba has no Gates Foundation. Laos has no Mr Beast. Our economic system is the one set up to reward and incentivize exploiting people you pretend to care about, not theirs. To look around at the very specific, grotesque circumstances created by capitalism and attribute it to some universal axiom of human society is what having an imagination trapped by capitalist “realism” looks like.
This attitude of “well everyone is shit” is one of the last layers of refuge before you get to the truth: that we, westerners raised in a culture of advanced imperialism, are specifically and deeply sick, that we have forcibly exported this sickness across our planet and we desperately need drastic mass change and healing before it kills us all.
“Politician” is not a class. The state, in Marxist theory, is not outside of class struggle, but is within it. The CPSU did not concentrate wealth in their hands, in fact they were paid wages akin to highly skilled labor at the highest level. As such, wealth inequality went dramatically down:
This is why the Soviet administrators cared so much about the working claases, they were working class themselves. Starvation was eliminated in the Soviet Union, life expectancy doubled in the first few decades, literacy rates skyrocketed to 99.9%, unemployment and homelessness were both nearly eliminated.
Yes, it’s enormously easy to simply paint the USSR as an exact replica of capitalism and aristocracy in outcome, only different in form. It’s also enormously incorrect, and bears no resemblance to reality. As socialists, we need to actually seek truth from facts, and not coast by on vibes alone.
I don’t really get what you’re trying to do. Capitalists and slavers aren’t an ethnicity, nor were they murdered en masse by the USSR. The USSR wasn’t genocidal.
Also not sure why you are going into a socialist community and calling socialists “fascists,” this is nonsense word salad on top of your strange and baseless jab.
What hypocrisy? Your jab didn’t even leave anything to address, I had to try to fill in that gap myself. What’s your point? That socialism is secretly fascism?
The USSR was run by the communist party, who were most definitely not working class. The working class suffered as much as in the US if not more. The elections were more fixed than the upcoming 2026 US midterms lol
The party elites had pretty much every luxury they could want. They just didn’t have to pay for any of it so they weren’t nominally billionaires.
The communist party consisted of workers. Working class is not a level of income, but a relation to ownership of the means of production and distribution. Further, the USSR saw incredibly high rates of democratic participation, both having some of the highest voting percentages and the actual highest rates of measures to vote on.
Wealth inequality in the USSR existed, but was nowhere even fathomably close to wealth inequality in modern Russia, let alone the US Empire.
You also cant make one. Any actual government will be “authoritarian” because any government (by whatever name you choose) will wield state power. A good explanation is @Cowbee@lemmy.mls example of enforcing health standards during a pandemic
Authoritarianism is a meaningless term used by edgy children whose brains haven’t fully developed yet. The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
Every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.
What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.
Authoritarianism is a meaningless term used by edgy children whose brains haven’t fully developed yet.
Authoritarian AF. lmao
The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance… Every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence.
This is called authoritarianism, silly.
The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
Nobody is saying this except you. Infantile strawman.
Yes, the working classes run both Cuba and China. Their economies are dominated by a working class-owned public sector, and society is oriented in a way that values the people over profit. Private enterprise exists, but only insofar as it is contributing to that overall pro-social aim, and not as a permanent fixture of society but a temporary measure.
you’re also wrong on china but i get that one at least because there’s endless anti-china slop, but with cuba you have to be watching wildly reactionary shit to believe it’s like the us
Yes, Cuba and China are very obviously serving the working class. Maybe spend a bit of time educating yourself instead of smoking whatever it is you smoke.
The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority.
Yeah, and isn’t that a problem? Like, why just take for granted that all governments we’ve tried so far are coercive, instead of trying to build one that isn’t?
What you might want to think real hard about is why hierarchies form in the first place, and what problem they solve. Then you might start to understand why every society converges on this model at a certain point or it dies out.
I’d genuinely like to hear your answer on this, because it’s something I think a lot about as an anarchist. Specifically, do you think the problem power hierarchies solve can only be solved by power hierarchies? Do you think that problem necessarily exists and needs solving in all contexts, perhaps because of some innate human nature? Who is it that has told you this is the case–that the fact that history is filled with hierarchies should be interpreted as “hierarchies are inevitable”–instead of, say, “power over others is an unhealthy coping mechanism humans have consistently turned to in the face of the unknown and maybe we should try to build a society that Doesn’t Do That before we give up and resign ourselves to benevolent kings again”?
This author seems to be confused about what hierarchies are. Hierarchies have nothing to do with division of labor or expertise–you can easily have/recognize both of those things in a horizontal power structure. A hierarchy is about who can coerce whom.
In the factory example the article gives, the presence of a central organizer/administrator/delegator does not necessarily mean the factory operates hierarchically. To determine if it does, you’d need to ask, “does the organizational structure allow the administrator to have their decisions enforced via actual or threatened violence against people who dissent?” In our capitalist reality, this would be things like firing the dissenter (depriving them of basic survival resources) or calling the cops. In authoritarian “communist” regimes, this might be forced labor or re-education camps.
You can organize at scale, abstract out certain parts of the organization, etc. without this coercive element. Humans are cooperative creatures; we want to build things together, and we are fully capable of respecting each other while we do so. Why limit the bounds of our liberation by assuming we need this systemic violence to do what we already want to do?
It is you who is in fact confused about what hierarchies are because they have absolutely nothing to do with coercion, and have everything to do with division of labour and abstraction. You seem to have a personal definition of what a hierarchy is. Hierarchies do not require any violence whatsoever, and it’s a concept that applies to large range of domains outside politics such as writing computer programs. Next, you’ll be telling me that class hierarchies require threat of violence.
Not all vertical organization is equivalent. Participating in any worker organization can help explain the importance of administration, and this becomes more and more critical at scale. The question isn’t “top-down” or “bottom-up,” but how to make the two united.
If a pandemic happens and you have to mandate masks or would like to ask people to maintain social distancing, how would you do it? If you mandate and enforce it, you’ll form/expose the hierarchy, right?
Even if it is a majority vs minority decision, if you enforce it, it’ll show a hierarchy by means of medical expertise or ability of enforcement, right? Or is it seen as natural or justified hierarchies?
Even if you elect a rep and even if you have options for recall, for your rep to take decisions, you would be giving them power, right?
Or is it whole organisation voting on each topic?
do you think the problem power hierarchies solve can only be solved by power hierarchies?
What are the other alternatives that are used, which do not have hierarchies to better solve the problems?
resign ourselves to benevolent kings again"
Not benevolent kings but recallable representatives would be the goal, right?
In case of socialist experiments, when they are under imperialist threat and fear of sabotage, they may not be able to fully do that, but not benevolent kings.
If you mandate and enforce it, you’ll form/expose the hierarchy, right?
Well, depends on who “you” is and how you “enforce” it. Do you, the person given the systemic authority to do so, throw people in jail/gulags/whatever if they refuse to mask? Then yeah, that’s hierarchical. Do you, a community member, organize with other community members to exclude the non-masker from social events and community spaces until they decide to mask? OR do you, a doctor designated via the community as an expert and thus given narrow, organic, retractable social authority to do so, say “you need to wear a mask”? Then no.
Do you, a community member, organize with other community members to exclude the non-masker from social events and community spaces until they decide to mask?
Is that not hierarchical too?
And what do you do if they do not allow themselves to be excluded from community spaces?
Are you not bringing in hierarchy when you give yourself and your group the power to choose whether the person or group who disagrees should be excluded from community spaces?
And what do you do when they do not agree? Do you jail them? Do you harm them or threaten violence?
Are you not creating/exposing the hierarchy by choosing to exclude those parts of your community from community spaces for disagreeing with you?
a doctor designated via the community as an expert and thus given narrow, organic, retractable social authority to do so, say “you need to wear a mask”?
So, again a power hierarchy in the matter of medicine, where you a lay person has lesser power?
And the people opposing the masking, will not be agreeing with that doctor, right? So not designated by the all of the community as a expert in that specific topic then.
If the person acknowledged the expertise, then the issue would not persist, right?
Do you threaten or propagandise someone that they would not oppose that position and obey it then? Power hierarchy again, right?
So are we assuming the non-masker is trying to be somewhere they’ve been told they’re not welcome like, as a statement of rebellion? Do they not understand that they’re not welcome or what they need to change to be welcome? Are they trying to be provocative, or are they trying to gain access to the community for some specific purpose?
“Enforcing this exclusion” is really broad. It has the underlying assumption that the situation is already violent, that there is a thing to enforce against someone who is “disobeying” the thing. Which I’d argue comes from the fact that we’ve really only lived in police states in modern history. Again, humans are social creatures–we want community and we want to feel included. And we don’t consciously do things to each other for no reason. I urge you to think deeply about where the need for “enforcement” comes from, and what we mean by it.
Authoritarianism is a meaningless term used by edgy children whose brains haven’t fully developed yet
You tend to lose a bit of credibility when you start your argument with this kind of sentences. After that you would need to prove that your reasoning is at least as qualitative, as, say, Hannah Arendt’s work, and unfortunately it is far off the mark.
Her definition and study of totalitarianism are still intellectually relevant, but hey, if she had a blue car instead of a red car, then of course I see your point.
Do you all go to the same school of completely missing the point and having the most ludicrous rhetorical responses?
Okay, so it was that Hannah. Seems like you don’t see the point.
I’ve read her drivel. I just dont blindly swallow propaganda merely because I am told the person serving it is very clever. Looking at any definition or practical application of the concept of “authoritarianism” (don’t get me started on your weird sidetrack of totalitarianism) makes it clear its actual purpose is to serve as a propaganda shorthand for “badguyplace.”
Every definition is either so broad as to describe every state or so narrow as to be pointless, where you might as well just say China (or the USSR back in the day)
The ridiculous concept of looking at how a state wields power, while ignoring who is in control of the state, what support they have and to what purpose they wield said power, is asinine to say the least. Not to mention, once again, that every state wields power in an authoritarian fashion.
It was developed by Hannah Arendt so she could say “actually the Nazis and the society are totally the same and not at all like us freedom-lovers, never mind all the authority we wield to suppress our own and foreign populaces.”
The users in these parts think Hannah Arendt, along with Western Marxists like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, etc. were CIA stooges. Expect people to spam Gabriel Rockhill at you.
It was more “you lose credibility when you make a grotesque thesis statement, both in substance and on the form”.
The form is sufficiently obvious I suppose. If I call you an edgy moron even before you disagree with me, you’re not exactly looking for a nice conversation.
On the merits of the existence of authoritarianism, dismissing the work of someone like Adorno - just like that - is genuinely hilarious.
Wait, now this needs some clarification. Is it anti-communists as someone who is against communists or anti-communists as people who share a hatred of communism? Because one might be downright libelous
But thanks for your reactivity, I feel like lib is a bit lazy
You still believe in the existence of propaganda or even the concept of memory? Smh, you need to break the chains of bourgeois discourse and ascend to ad hominem attacks
Thanks for providing us with an example! I almost had forgotten what it meant, being too busy with the Reddit losing and whatnot. Sorry I have to go there is this sponsored post about investing in crypto - I could lose a massive amount of money and dignity, can’t pass the opportunity.
I was being sarcastic and poking fun at people using it. Congrats on taking the bait. What the picture says is that the US which libs championed as a ‘free and enlightened society’ in the 90s was incarcerating more people than USSR did during Stalin years. Rate of incarceration in USSR dropped significantly after that while it remains as high as ever in the US today.
Correct - both are authoritarian regimes
Authoritarian is a meaningless word. Its just a scary-sounding descriptor that’s used to frame a designated enemy state as especially heinous. All states are authoritarian.
Lol ok. At least the second statement is accurate.
If the second one is true then the first one is true too
Our good law abiding society, their authoritarian regime
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Your analogy does not work. Not all states are genocidal and the term has an actual clear definition that makes it distuingushable from other mass-killings.
As are all states. The important distinction between them isn’t the degree by which authority is used, which is largely decided by the conditions a state is in rather than the form of the state itself, but instead is which class controls the state. The USSR was run by the working classes, the US by capitalists.
And yet, how they wield it does fucking matter. How arbitrary are the rules, how harshly are people punished for violating them?
On a scale of Denmark to Saddam’s Iraq where would you rather your cousin be a prisoner?
When the state becomes increasingly comfortable meddling in the harmless affairs of its people and enacting crueller punishments and conditions upon its prisoners it is doing something bad even if it’s doing it as the representative of the working class.
Alan Turing invented computing and helped defeat the nazis, but Britain still chemically castrated him for being gay. This is the baseline of government interference you’ve been raised to believe is normal or at least explainable, and you are attacking a country whose human rights record is way, way better than that.
That is a level of government interference I use as a classic example of why the west isn’t fucking good enough. Alongside plenty of other abuses of power against my people by capitalist imperial states.
The USSR I have issues with a lot they did predominantly in the Stalinist era, but I consider their dissolution to be a great tragedy for the global working class.
If you’re saying I’m being too harsh in criticizing late 20th century Iraq’s government however I think we’re going to be unable to come to a meaningful place of agreement here. You see, I’ve been consistently anti torture, both for my country and others. Do love their commitment to literacy though.
I’m not defending any modern nation, but most have policies I wish more would adopt.
States do not arbitrarily enact violence, they do so to uphold the ruling class of society. Denmark is an imperialist state, the nicer conditions for the domestic working class come from the backs of exploited labor in the global south. This isn’t because Denmark is more “moral,” but instead because it can successfully use the spoils of imperial plunder to bribe its own working class. Iraq could not do the same, and was under intense pressure from the outside, hence the heightened repression.
My point isn’t that form doesn’t matter at all, that would be reductive. My point is that class is primary.
My point isn’t that class isn’t a major force, but that it’s just one of them. And that within equivalent or similar class characters there is wildly different ways in which state power is used, and that the ways it intrudes upon lives and the severity of its punishments for many are among the most important issues.
States absolutely arbitrarily enact violence. Sure they tend to have some argument as to why they do it, often religion or ideology, but sometimes the king is just mad.
Denmark is an imperial state, absolutely, but compare them to other imperial states in how they treat their population. Compare them to Georgist England where they would hang people for petty crimes and had a philosophy of no mercy. Both countries are imperialist, Christian, constitutional monarchies with a capitalist economic system. Hell, a lot of European “enlightenment” beliefs on rights and such were ideas they were given by the Iriqouian peoples.
Compare the interregium puritan rule of the UK and later putitan governments in the Americas to the monarchical rule following it. Circumstances decide who can come to power and what they can do while being tolerated, circumstances which includes the population’s philosophy on what rulers can and should do and tolerate, as well as rulers’ ability to use propaganda and violence to stop revolts from succeeding. Castro all but says this when talking about how machismo led to state repression of homosexuality.
It’s difficult for an impoverished nation that’s subject to colonial powers to have a libertine approach to civil liberty and a penal system focused on rehabilitation. Noble when attempted, but outside forces love to step in and stop that shit. But, they can always go above and beyond on it, form alliances with religious regressives (who may or may not constitute a clerical class), etc. Or they can do only what they’re pressured to do. Those in open resistance have choices too. Chiapas or ISIS, both resisted US global capitalist hegemony. There’s no reason beyond ideology why Iran can’t embrace feminist equality like Cuba did. And within the imperial cores the population and leadership alone have these conversations.
Philosophy of governance amongst the population and government have very real impact. Because sometimes the working class demands you deal with the witch problem and stop people from sinning and other times they demand you stop capital punishment and minimize state interference in the private lives of citizens.
I’m not reducing all of state implement to class, after all, I said such a view would be entirely reductive. However, when it comes to what is actionable, it’s clear that it’s most important to install the working class as the ruler of society. From then on, reforms in the socialist state, and quests for sovereignty, can help develop the society more and more.
As for “arbitrary” violence, I really don’t think this is an acceptable explanation. What can appear arbitrary is in actual fact a clear extension of the class makeup of society. Georgist England hanging peasants for no reason is an example of the class makeup of society being driven by the aristocracy. The victims and winners are decided by class makeup, the way society is treated is more based on the form of society, which tends to improve with development.
The USSR was run by politicians. They concentrated wealth and privilege into their hands and those of their supporters in the police and military.
Capitalists, party elites, or hereditary nobility; it makes little difference to the starving.
Putting the words in your country name and paying lip service is not enough.
Comments like this make it painfully obvious that someone has not engaged with the actual history, because guess who agreed with you that lip service is not enough? The communists. Life expectancy, infant mortality, nutrition, medical outcomes, literacy, addiction rates, poverty, all of this shit immediately improves drastically in every time and place communists have ever seized power. Often these improvements have come despite nightmarish wartime conditions, such as during the Chinese Revolution when life expectancy shot up despite being in active combat with Imperial Japan after 20 years of civil war. The people of Cuba have created one of the most advanced medical systems on earth despite sixty years of strangulation. The people of the USSR risked their safety to send weapons to uprisings across the world despite needing every bullet themselves for the near century of fascist invasion and expansion that ultimately took thirty million of their lives.
The idea that communists are secretly only pretending to care about other people is the single biggest piece of capitalist projection, and the one most foundational to holding up other myths about communists. Every abuser in history has said the same thing: this is just how the world is, everyone else is just like me or worse, so there’s no point in looking for better. But in reality, Cuba has no Gates Foundation. Laos has no Mr Beast. Our economic system is the one set up to reward and incentivize exploiting people you pretend to care about, not theirs. To look around at the very specific, grotesque circumstances created by capitalism and attribute it to some universal axiom of human society is what having an imagination trapped by capitalist “realism” looks like.
This attitude of “well everyone is shit” is one of the last layers of refuge before you get to the truth: that we, westerners raised in a culture of advanced imperialism, are specifically and deeply sick, that we have forcibly exported this sickness across our planet and we desperately need drastic mass change and healing before it kills us all.
Why is this factually incorrect cold war dross being upvoted in a socialist com?
Sorry to break to you but we are all libs here.
“Politician” is not a class. The state, in Marxist theory, is not outside of class struggle, but is within it. The CPSU did not concentrate wealth in their hands, in fact they were paid wages akin to highly skilled labor at the highest level. As such, wealth inequality went dramatically down:
This is why the Soviet administrators cared so much about the working claases, they were working class themselves. Starvation was eliminated in the Soviet Union, life expectancy doubled in the first few decades, literacy rates skyrocketed to 99.9%, unemployment and homelessness were both nearly eliminated.
Yes, it’s enormously easy to simply paint the USSR as an exact replica of capitalism and aristocracy in outcome, only different in form. It’s also enormously incorrect, and bears no resemblance to reality. As socialists, we need to actually seek truth from facts, and not coast by on vibes alone.
I found an authoritarian.
I’m an “authoritarian” for affirming the Marxist theory of the state?
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I don’t really get what you’re trying to do. Capitalists and slavers aren’t an ethnicity, nor were they murdered en masse by the USSR. The USSR wasn’t genocidal.
Also not sure why you are going into a socialist community and calling socialists “fascists,” this is nonsense word salad on top of your strange and baseless jab.
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What hypocrisy? Your jab didn’t even leave anything to address, I had to try to fill in that gap myself. What’s your point? That socialism is secretly fascism?
The USSR was run by the communist party, who were most definitely not working class. The working class suffered as much as in the US if not more. The elections were more fixed than the upcoming 2026 US midterms lol
The party elites had pretty much every luxury they could want. They just didn’t have to pay for any of it so they weren’t nominally billionaires.
The communist party consisted of workers. Working class is not a level of income, but a relation to ownership of the means of production and distribution. Further, the USSR saw incredibly high rates of democratic participation, both having some of the highest voting percentages and the actual highest rates of measures to vote on.
Wealth inequality in the USSR existed, but was nowhere even fathomably close to wealth inequality in modern Russia, let alone the US Empire.
The working class in the usa empire mostly lives in the colonies. Labor aristocrats always “conveniently forget” about their overseas plundering.
Can you name a non-authoritarian government?
Welcome to anarchism.
I have much more respect for this answer, which is ideologically consistent, than what I was expecting, which was for some liberal to go “Scandinavia”
No. Next question.
The answer doesn’t matter much:
So you couldn’t actually name a government.
Oh, name, I thought you meant make.
No. Next question.
You also cant make one. Any actual government will be “authoritarian” because any government (by whatever name you choose) will wield state power. A good explanation is @Cowbee@lemmy.mls example of enforcing health standards during a pandemic
Which goes to show that “authoritarian” is just a vague, vibes based signifier with no useful purpose.
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Which just goes to show you love eating piss and shit.
Wow when I change the words without engaging with the matter, it turns out anything means everything
Authoritarianism is a meaningless term used by edgy children whose brains haven’t fully developed yet. The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
Every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.
What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.
Authoritarian AF. lmao
This is called authoritarianism, silly.
Nobody is saying this except you. Infantile strawman.
Wow that’s such an amazing rebuttal you’ve mustered there. It’s a real testament to your intellect.
Yep that’s what I would expect. Infantile.
Very obvious what word you just learnt
Cuba or China serving the working class?
I want a little bit of what you smoke, it’s strong.
They’re just color-changed-US. Nothing different at all.
There are no homeless in China. Cuba has the most progressive queer rights legislation.
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Yes, the working classes run both Cuba and China. Their economies are dominated by a working class-owned public sector, and society is oriented in a way that values the people over profit. Private enterprise exists, but only insofar as it is contributing to that overall pro-social aim, and not as a permanent fixture of society but a temporary measure.
where do you get your info on cuba lmao
you’re also wrong on china but i get that one at least because there’s endless anti-china slop, but with cuba you have to be watching wildly reactionary shit to believe it’s like the us
Cuba == usa???
Zombies would starve from just being near you.
Yes, Cuba and China are very obviously serving the working class. Maybe spend a bit of time educating yourself instead of smoking whatever it is you smoke.
It must be very interesting to know so little and just say things.
Yeah, and isn’t that a problem? Like, why just take for granted that all governments we’ve tried so far are coercive, instead of trying to build one that isn’t?
What you might want to think real hard about is why hierarchies form in the first place, and what problem they solve. Then you might start to understand why every society converges on this model at a certain point or it dies out.
I’d genuinely like to hear your answer on this, because it’s something I think a lot about as an anarchist. Specifically, do you think the problem power hierarchies solve can only be solved by power hierarchies? Do you think that problem necessarily exists and needs solving in all contexts, perhaps because of some innate human nature? Who is it that has told you this is the case–that the fact that history is filled with hierarchies should be interpreted as “hierarchies are inevitable”–instead of, say, “power over others is an unhealthy coping mechanism humans have consistently turned to in the face of the unknown and maybe we should try to build a society that Doesn’t Do That before we give up and resign ourselves to benevolent kings again”?
here is a detailed explanation for you https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/what-challenges-do-hierarchies-address
This author seems to be confused about what hierarchies are. Hierarchies have nothing to do with division of labor or expertise–you can easily have/recognize both of those things in a horizontal power structure. A hierarchy is about who can coerce whom.
In the factory example the article gives, the presence of a central organizer/administrator/delegator does not necessarily mean the factory operates hierarchically. To determine if it does, you’d need to ask, “does the organizational structure allow the administrator to have their decisions enforced via actual or threatened violence against people who dissent?” In our capitalist reality, this would be things like firing the dissenter (depriving them of basic survival resources) or calling the cops. In authoritarian “communist” regimes, this might be forced labor or re-education camps.
You can organize at scale, abstract out certain parts of the organization, etc. without this coercive element. Humans are cooperative creatures; we want to build things together, and we are fully capable of respecting each other while we do so. Why limit the bounds of our liberation by assuming we need this systemic violence to do what we already want to do?
It is you who is in fact confused about what hierarchies are because they have absolutely nothing to do with coercion, and have everything to do with division of labour and abstraction. You seem to have a personal definition of what a hierarchy is. Hierarchies do not require any violence whatsoever, and it’s a concept that applies to large range of domains outside politics such as writing computer programs. Next, you’ll be telling me that class hierarchies require threat of violence.
I’m confused by your last sentence. Can you say more?
Not all vertical organization is equivalent. Participating in any worker organization can help explain the importance of administration, and this becomes more and more critical at scale. The question isn’t “top-down” or “bottom-up,” but how to make the two united.
What is meant by power hierarchy?
Anyway, asking about a scenario:
If a pandemic happens and you have to mandate masks or would like to ask people to maintain social distancing, how would you do it? If you mandate and enforce it, you’ll form/expose the hierarchy, right?
Even if it is a majority vs minority decision, if you enforce it, it’ll show a hierarchy by means of medical expertise or ability of enforcement, right? Or is it seen as natural or justified hierarchies?
Even if you elect a rep and even if you have options for recall, for your rep to take decisions, you would be giving them power, right?
Or is it whole organisation voting on each topic?
What are the other alternatives that are used, which do not have hierarchies to better solve the problems?
Not benevolent kings but recallable representatives would be the goal, right?
In case of socialist experiments, when they are under imperialist threat and fear of sabotage, they may not be able to fully do that, but not benevolent kings.
Well, depends on who “you” is and how you “enforce” it. Do you, the person given the systemic authority to do so, throw people in jail/gulags/whatever if they refuse to mask? Then yeah, that’s hierarchical. Do you, a community member, organize with other community members to exclude the non-masker from social events and community spaces until they decide to mask? OR do you, a doctor designated via the community as an expert and thus given narrow, organic, retractable social authority to do so, say “you need to wear a mask”? Then no.
Is that not hierarchical too?
And what do you do if they do not allow themselves to be excluded from community spaces?
Are you not bringing in hierarchy when you give yourself and your group the power to choose whether the person or group who disagrees should be excluded from community spaces?
And what do you do when they do not agree? Do you jail them? Do you harm them or threaten violence?
Are you not creating/exposing the hierarchy by choosing to exclude those parts of your community from community spaces for disagreeing with you?
So, again a power hierarchy in the matter of medicine, where you a lay person has lesser power?
And the people opposing the masking, will not be agreeing with that doctor, right? So not designated by the all of the community as a expert in that specific topic then.
If the person acknowledged the expertise, then the issue would not persist, right?
Do you threaten or propagandise someone that they would not oppose that position and obey it then? Power hierarchy again, right?
How do you plan to enforce this exclusion? Putting up a sign, physical removal (violence), non physical punitive measures?
So are we assuming the non-masker is trying to be somewhere they’ve been told they’re not welcome like, as a statement of rebellion? Do they not understand that they’re not welcome or what they need to change to be welcome? Are they trying to be provocative, or are they trying to gain access to the community for some specific purpose?
“Enforcing this exclusion” is really broad. It has the underlying assumption that the situation is already violent, that there is a thing to enforce against someone who is “disobeying” the thing. Which I’d argue comes from the fact that we’ve really only lived in police states in modern history. Again, humans are social creatures–we want community and we want to feel included. And we don’t consciously do things to each other for no reason. I urge you to think deeply about where the need for “enforcement” comes from, and what we mean by it.
You tend to lose a bit of credibility when you start your argument with this kind of sentences. After that you would need to prove that your reasoning is at least as qualitative, as, say, Hannah Arendt’s work, and unfortunately it is far off the mark.
Hannah Arendt, the woman who said Jews were to blame for the holocaust because they didnt rise up?
It’s like you don’t read these things at all?
Her definition and study of totalitarianism are still intellectually relevant, but hey, if she had a blue car instead of a red car, then of course I see your point.
Do you all go to the same school of completely missing the point and having the most ludicrous rhetorical responses?
I recommend reading Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism by Domenico Losurdo.
Okay, so it was that Hannah. Seems like you don’t see the point.
I’ve read her drivel. I just dont blindly swallow propaganda merely because I am told the person serving it is very clever. Looking at any definition or practical application of the concept of “authoritarianism” (don’t get me started on your weird sidetrack of totalitarianism) makes it clear its actual purpose is to serve as a propaganda shorthand for “badguyplace.”
Every definition is either so broad as to describe every state or so narrow as to be pointless, where you might as well just say China (or the USSR back in the day)
The ridiculous concept of looking at how a state wields power, while ignoring who is in control of the state, what support they have and to what purpose they wield said power, is asinine to say the least. Not to mention, once again, that every state wields power in an authoritarian fashion.
It was developed by Hannah Arendt so she could say “actually the Nazis and the society are totally the same and not at all like us freedom-lovers, never mind all the authority we wield to suppress our own and foreign populaces.”
The users in these parts think Hannah Arendt, along with Western Marxists like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, etc. were CIA stooges. Expect people to spam Gabriel Rockhill at you.
Were they ?
Yes.
This has to be the shittiest conspiracy theory I have heard of. Amazing, thanks for bringing this to my attention.
“You lose credibility when you make a thesis statement I don’t already agree with!”
It was more “you lose credibility when you make a grotesque thesis statement, both in substance and on the form”.
The form is sufficiently obvious I suppose. If I call you an edgy moron even before you disagree with me, you’re not exactly looking for a nice conversation.
On the merits of the existence of authoritarianism, dismissing the work of someone like Adorno - just like that - is genuinely hilarious.
Aka something you disagree with.
What the fuck does that even mean? You’re just trying to sound smart now.
In that they disagree with you, yes.
So they disagree with you
Ha! They told me the odds of winning the lottery were infinitesimal and yet I have been called a lib on lemmy.ml. Nobody will believe me.
my bad, i’ll fix it
I even fixed the spelling!
Wait, now this needs some clarification. Is it anti-communists as someone who is against communists or anti-communists as people who share a hatred of communism? Because one might be downright libelous
But thanks for your reactivity, I feel like lib is a bit lazy
Just someone who is against communism. I did not intend to make it seam you hated us.
Great, because you’ve become very dear to me. xoxox
*weakest
“I, the arbiter of credibility, have decided this claim is self-evidently ridiculous for reasons I don’t need to explain”
Lol, of course
I think this comes from Giles in the novelization of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not from Arendt. But easy to confuse when you have read neither
That’s an amazing counterpoint, thank you.
No worries. Dismissing the very concept of authoritarianism right off the bat was a nice move, too.
Libs being confronted with the fact that propaganda terms they’ve memorized are meaningless never gets old.
You still believe in the existence of propaganda or even the concept of memory? Smh, you need to break the chains of bourgeois discourse and ascend to ad hominem attacks
That’s not an ad hominem dumbass. Neither is this.
Rule 2
😢
I was there to make new friends but everyone is very mean.
I wish you Reddit losers would actually learn what an ad hominem is before you spew it everywhere.
Thanks for providing us with an example! I almost had forgotten what it meant, being too busy with the Reddit losing and whatnot. Sorry I have to go there is this sponsored post about investing in crypto - I could lose a massive amount of money and dignity, can’t pass the opportunity.
Thank you for providing much needed levity in this thread.
Do you dismiss the very concept of Badguyism?
If you don’t like the word authoritarian why did you use it? And why did you get defensive when someone agreed with your image.
Even sarcastically I don’t see what you goal here was. To say the us and the soviet union are similarly inhumane? Or the us is slightly worse?
Ok, and?
I was being sarcastic and poking fun at people using it. Congrats on taking the bait. What the picture says is that the US which libs championed as a ‘free and enlightened society’ in the 90s was incarcerating more people than USSR did during Stalin years. Rate of incarceration in USSR dropped significantly after that while it remains as high as ever in the US today.
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Aww, is google banned at the troll farm?