Their governments have more or full control
Authoritarianism has nothing to do with economic systems and everything to do with government structure. The Soviet bloc/China and other communist countries were authoritarian because the populous allowed their governments too much power. China is ultra capitalist now and they’re as authoritarian if not more so.
People remember communist countries as more authoritarian because they’re the more taught examples. Pinochet was a turbo capitalist and he was one of the most authoritarian rulers in history.
This is a good comment, I think. Authoritarianism is defeated with democracy, not economic systems.
Because we live in a capitalist society where capitalists control our media and education. Back in the fifties, you’d be jailed or even killed for being a communist (or gay) in the United States of America. Why do we view this as any less authoritarian than the USSR? Because it’s our past.
Because the USSR killed millions of its own people in concentration camps and gulags. The two are so incomparable.
While I agree that the USSR was worse, the two absolutely are comparable.
- The US had concentration camps. Arguably it still does, just not for its own citizens.
- The US currently has inhumane and deadly prison conditions, but they used to be far worse.
Comparing deaths may put USSR on top, but the US isn’t that far behind.
Comparing authoritarianism is another story. Both quieted political dissent in the same way: raiding opposing political organizations and jailing or killing their leaders. That is authoritarianism.
With the USSR overthrown, virtually all mainstream media now is capitalist propaganda. And the capitalist class obviously would not want the working class to prefer a system where workers are in power.
This graph is such bullshit. If you were being honest in your arguments there would be no need to alter the results of the study.
This is the original graph - “About the same” answers were given directly to “worse”, fabricating results.
This is the study. Despite their life “not being better” on average, they still conclude that Communism has its downsides and are in no way saying they want to go back to it.
But in practice communism ends up the same. The workers had no actual power under Communism. The leaders still took it all.
Being familiar with Bulgarian corruption, I’m going to confidently state that their percentages aren’t due to a rounding error.
I was in Hungary last year and the nostalgia for communism is high and a significant portion of the population still remembers all the bad parts - Orban has really destroyed the social safety nets there and it hurts to see.
Hungary was also the best part of the Soviet Bloc to live in for the people.
So it’s not just that modern Hungary is worse: communist Hungary is more miss-able than communist East Germany.
Nigel Swain’s two books on the subject are good:
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Collective Farms Which Work? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
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Hungary: The Rise and Fall of Feasible Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1992)
He’s writing from the perspective of a non-red English academic who’s like… “wait… this works?? how do we explain the anomaly?”
Hungary had full shelves, booming agriculture, available consumer goods.
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I’d also expect there’s more and more people propagandized by capitalist media in post-Soviet states as time has passed since capitalist bastards took it over. People who have not lived under socialism or experienced the massively decreased quality of life from the privatization forced on those countries.
Though fortunately it seems like the Russian capitalists have not managed to succeed in this, with more and more people identifying with the USSR than the capitalist Russian Federation in recent years.
Hard to do that at the heart of the revolution I guess. Maybe Russian communist parties could use that to become more revolutionary, specially with Russians able to see the stark difference between Russia under capitalism and China thriving under socialism. Doubt that’ll happen while Putin is in power though.
They even had to build a wall to keep the capitalist working class outside of east Berlin.
That Pew data is outdated. They have new data from 2019. Why did you post outdated and bad data to strengthen you belief?
The latest research literally says conditions are better now for most people. Unless you hate homosexuals and women. Every metric indicate high standards of life and rights.
I hate capitalism as much as the next person. But posting like you did is how we got Trump. Just faking everything till it happens.
“Bad data” is when you use data more representative of people who have actually lived under socialism and experienced the massive decline in quality of life, social welfare, housing, etc after capitalist bastards took it over and privatized everything for their profit
Ye sure. No communist project has ever worked out because some people are by nature evil and hungry for power. Every communist regime has gone to shit because of it. Anyone hungry for power should be imprisoned because they are a danger to society. But most people rely on direction to function. It’s a double edged blade.
Capitalism ruins everything in its path and communism eat it’s children. Welcome to the suck.
I don’t think that’s the right reason, though it does touch upon one of the biggest reasons.
Communist projects have failed in no small part because of external interference from non-communist countries. Look at the US and their infamous “bringing democracy” around the world, for example.
But they’ve also failed not because of innate human nature, but because some people’s nature is indeed what you describe. And unfortunately, violent revolutions have a tendency to make it very easy for those people take step in and fill power vacuums left in the wake of the former regime’s demise. Even if the ideals of many of the boots on the ground in the revolution was entirely well-meaning, the leadership might not be, either from the start, or as the revolution goes on. That’s why so many of the more famous communist regimes are incredibly authoritarian.
Name me one communist regime and I’ll tell you why you’re a fucking idiot and don’t know the difference between communism and socialism.
The “muh human nature” argument is a fallacy, you do realize that, yes? People are products of their environment, in Capitalism greed and selfishness are rewarded, so you think the way people act in Capitalism is natural for all economic systems, lmao.
Because our bourgeois state propaganda and corporate media tell us that they are, because it’s in their best interest that we believe it.
I see a lot of comments saying they aren’t. I’d disagree, but I agree they don’t have to be. The issue is most of the major powers in the world have opposed leftist governments anytime they show up. The ones that didn’t have a strong central power and cultural hegymony collapsed under the pressure. Any nation that had a weaker central power was either destroyed, couped, or undermined by the west.
There is nothing intrinsically authoritarian about leftism (really, I’d say it’s less authoritarian in it’s ideals), but authoritarianism is easier to hold together when outside pressures are trying to destroy you.
Just as capitalist states are “authoritarian” against working class interests, socialist states are “authoritarian” against capitalist interests.
The state is a tool for one class to oppress another. The goal of (most) communists is to transition from capitalism — where the capitalist class is in power — to a stateless, classless communist society via socialism — where the working class is in power.
Public perception of which is more “authoritarian” therefore depends on which class is currently in power and is able to manufacture consent, and that is the capitalist class in the vast majority of the world right now since the USSR’s overthrow.
socialist states are “authoritarian” against capitalist interests
The problem with this claim is that the USSR was quite authoritarian towards everyone. The Gulags were a place merely of political repression. Political jokes that are part and parcel of American late night comedy shows would get people harsh labor sentences during certain periods. The claim that this had to happen to protect the working class seems thin.
One regime’s political-dissident-by-speech is another’s dissident-by-drug-addiction. America’s “War on Drugs” was purely political disenfranchisement along racial lines, and it’s a major reason why the US continues to have higher incarceration rates than the USSR had in many of the years the Gulag system was operational.
By the way, prison rape jokes have long been a part of those late night comedy shows, to give you an idea of just how ingrained the American prison culture is.
read the resent news of Julian Assange or John Pilger there’d be a lot more if i could think to name them
Socialist countries are not, the entire Scandinavian block are super socialist, and not authoritarian.
As for Communist countries, no one has actually implemented communism, only in name. Communism means the workers, not the state, control the means of production. The state controlling them allows for bad actors to seize control.
Scandinavian countries are not “super socialist” - sure, we have robust social welfare systems, but these are funded through taxation on regulated market economies with private ownership. That is not socialism.
I know that there were some experiments with trying to transfer into a socialist system here in Sweden during the 70s (I think?), but those failed in a spectacular fashion and were rolled back. They are the reason that many famous “Swedish” brands such as IKEA aren’t actually based in Sweden.
We haven’t had a “communist” country yet. Communism is a spontaneous, free market for voluntarily donated goods and services.
Communism is basically how groups of people under about 100 behave naturally. Any group of friends on a road trip is inherently communist, as is any tribe of people, as is any family.
At larger scale, this kind of “just pay attention and do what needs doing” approach to economic distribution breaks down. Marx believed that with enough material abundance, humans would naturally behave communistically at larger scales as well. I think he’s wrong, but it remains to be seen.
So far we’ve never had communism at the scale of a county. We’ve had socialism, which is where the government forcibly redistributes wealth.
The reason that socialist countries are more authoritarian is that socialism is by definition the non-free-market version of that process.
Under capitalism, if you have an acre of farmland, that’s your acre of farmland until you decide to sell it. Under socialism, whether it’s your acre of farmland is the decision of the central economic planning committee, and in order for that committee to be able to decide whether you keep your farm or not, it needs to have the authority and power to take it from you. And the policy to do so.
Do you see why this requires a more authoritarian society?
Let’s look at it another way. Under capitalism, ie under what we call the “free market”, you own the farm. That means you have authority over it. You have authority over yourself. There’s just as much authority; it’s just that the authority is broken into little bits and distributed to people who own capital.
Under socialism, the people own the farm. Except “the people” can’t effectively operate with anything like a will, due to a lack of borg hive mind telepathy mechanics unifying their will into a single instrument, and so “the people’s” authority is wielded by the Central Committee.
When authority is centralized in this way, taken away from individuals and given instead to the state, we call this an “authoritarian” state.
Authoritarian therefore doesn’t refer to more authority; it refers to the authority being concentrated in the center.
And the authority over economic decisions being concentrated in the center is, by definition, “socialism”.
To be more accurate when talking online its better to distinguish between who is intended to be in charge (capitalism vs socialism) and what political systems are in place to implement it.
China for example has some state capitalist characteristics meaning the state is ran in part and for the owners of capital. This is where some of their strongest economic intervention its policies stem from.
Another example would be community cooperatives operating outside of the state. They clearly are not “capitalistic” by their nature but also are not a form of central planning.
Another weird breakdown of these dichotomyies are inside of a megacorps operations, which while the corp is clearly owned by, and operated by the owners of capital (as virtual representation of shares) internally it is ran as centrally planned entity with no free market between departments (though some entities do expirment with heavily regulated market like Amazon does).
Tldr
Its a complicated subject, but boiling everything down to a false dichotomy based on 50 years of evidence does it a huge disservice. A better one to separate the intended stakeholders and what is the intended ways allowed for conflict resolution and coordination.
A socialist business (exanple worker owned cooperatives) A capitalistic business (publically traded companies)
Of course most modern organizations have multiple interest groups so you can have a state that has both capitalist favored laws, and working class and small business owner and NGO and etc etc
Well, us socialists have free health care and education. Most of us socialist states have female bodily autonomy. Were not big on banning books either. Most importantly we recognise a false dichotomy. Also we actually know what socialism is. Try visiting Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Europe. You’ll notice that they’re are not authoritarian at all. You might just be an American, but that’s not your fault.
I believe it’s inherent to the system. The whole point of a communist system is a centrally planned, and controlled, economy. This gives the state immense control and as inherent to every form of government, self preservation at any cost.
As discussed in “rules for rulers” by cgp grey, there is no such thing as a benevolent or kind dictator. All politicians and leaders will use any means available to themselves to further their own ambitions.
🤣
From a Swedish standpoint, this is just nonsense. The Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Island and Denmark) are all in the top six most democratic countries in the world (according to The economist, England). These are were much socialist countries and most definitely democratic.
Then you have china, soviet and alike. Those are countries that call(ed) themself communist. I will argue that that’s however mostly used as a label to legitimate the government and to obscure what they really are, in the same manner north Korea is formaly named the democratic people’s republic of Korea (DPRK). Those countries does/did not operate as communist states the way that Marx and other political theorists imaginend them.
I’d like to add that the nordic countries are not socialist by any metric.
Also, we shouldn’t be so quick to trust western media on the DPRK, who have gotten to the point that they can literally say anything about their enemies, and have it be believed.
- Is north korea a totalitarian dictatorship? Are they all really required to get the same haircut? A short documentary.
- Are north korean defectors really paid to lie by the south? A short documentary.
- What is everyday life like? A conversation with a North Korean Citizen.
- South Korea boosts reward for defectors to $860k USD.
from my own experience observing people migrating from the soviet union, they’re considered more authoritarian for the efforts to keep the workers in the worker’s paradise, the moment you have to put up walls and border checkpoints to keep people in, it’s over. you’re an authoritarian state, no longer actually socialist imho.
How is this a controversial take? If you need a wall to keep people in or attempting to emigrate makes you a “defector”, or you’ve built up a huge surveillance network where your neighbours or even partners can report you for bullshit “crimes” , you’re an authoritarian state.
tankies, I guess.
Authoritarian is usually code for when white people don’t rule a country
Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: racismWe really ought to teach critical race theory in schools like conservative politicians and pundits claim.
lmao did someone really report me over getting their precious little white feelings hurt?
moment
The shite Americans will make about skin-colour.
This comment doesn’t stand up to 3 seconds thought. It’s their one answer to every question.
Honestly though, like our grappling with racism in the states smears our views of geopolitics so much. Like we struggle to imagine a culture not wrapped up in it.
Russia tho.
That’s why Russians aren’t “white” anymore. They’ve been downgraded to asiatic horde again, which is why NATOpedia has trotted out meat wave theory again. Like authoritarianism, whiteness is also an ever-shifting construct of imperialism/colonialism.
If you’re saying authoritarianism can be explained by non-whiteness…
But also saying that anyone opposing NATO become ipso facto non-white because it’s “an ever-shifting construct”…
Then the “construct” has no explanatory power.
Why not just say ‘authoritarianism’ is opposition to the NATO bloc?
You’re saying “authoritarianism = non-whiteness = opposition to the NATO bloc”
Why not skip the middle step?
If you’re saying authoritarianism can be explained by non-whiteness…
I’m not saying that. I’m saying that “whiteness” as a construct is a tool of capitalism/imperialism/colonialism. And that the Global North similarly tends to attribute “authoritarianism” to whichever states are acting insufficiently subservient to their imperialist interests at any given moment. And I’m saying that these two constructs have a tendency to be aligned with each other, because they’re both tools of capitalism/imperialism/colonialism.
But also saying that anyone opposing NATO become ipso facto non-white because it’s “an ever-shifting construct”…
Whiteness is as old as European colonialism, and has been baked into capitalism—which began in Europe—from the start. Whiteness has been twisted into all sorts of nonsensical logic pretzels. See for example honorary Aryans honorary whites. It has no explanatory power because it is simply a tool of power. Even the Irish, Italian, and other Catholic European immigrants have suffered it within our own country. As Josep Borrell has more-or-less said, the imperial core is the “garden”, and the rest of the world is the “jungle.” Imperialism uses race—which again is made-up bullshit—as a tool to justify their imperialism.
You’re saying “authoritarianism = non-whiteness = opposition to the NATO bloc”
I’m not saying that, but the NATO bloc often seems to imply it.
And I’m saying that these two constructs have a tendency to be aligned with each other
It’s not empiricaly right tho. Hitler and Stalin are the first type-examples. In the modern era it’s normally Putin and Xi who get the label.
I already covered the origins of this propagandistic Western conceptualization of “authoritarianism”/“totalitarianism” in another comment in this post. But I’ll add a 1955 CIA report that was declassified in 2008.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
Why not skip the middle step?
Go ask the NATO bloc and their supporters. The obvious and surface answer is that it has to do with making for an easy “us-vs-them” identifier. “Of course they’re bad, they aren’t white like us good wholesome folk are, who are inherently good and wholesome because we’re white, and being good and wholesome makes us right and correct in what we do and you can tell because we’re white. The ones who are bad clearly aren’t like us. They’re not white!” Yes, it is circular reasoning and garbage logic. But I don’t know why you’re getting pissy at us for that instead of the dipshits white people who keep moving the goalposts on the meaning of whiteness, as they always have done to suit their agenda. Take it up with them.
Sorry I have no idea what you’re talking about.
The thread was asking about authoritarianism. I was slagging the people who said it’s about being black, not about Hitler, Stalin, the USSR, Putin, etc.
You were asking about the shifting nature of the meaning of the term whiteness. Go up and read your own comment to see how you related that to authoritarianism. If you can’t follow your own train of thought, then I can’t help you because it makes it apparent you’re not asking in good faith.
You’re saying “authoritarianism = non-whiteness = opposition to the NATO bloc”
What I’m trying to explain to you is that “we” are not saying that. The people who use whiteness to justify their actions and otherize their enemies are saying that. This isn’t difficult.
Like I said, I’m here to slag Yanks and their know-nothing racist views of the world.
It’s astonishing how they’ll confidently lecture ya on things they demonstrate complete ignorance of.
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Not so much “hot” as it is nonsense.
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