They aren’t?
Americans live in an authoritarian plutocracy, but refuse to believe it
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Not so much “hot” as it is nonsense.
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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.
because capitalists have to lie about reality to preserve their ill gotten gains.
Because of who controls the presses in capitalist countries.
Yeah this question is always incomplete; considered by who?
Most large-scale attempts at communism were managed in a centralized way top-down by force. One strong leader, usually with a cult of personality. Glorification of the military. Devaluation of individual life and emphasis on sacrifice for the common good. Suppression of dissent by violence.
You can see the parallels with fascism. I’d even argue that what we know as communism and fascism mainly differ in their approach to the economy.
On the other hand, capitalism exists and thrives in chaos. It doesn’t exclude authoritarianism - actually it tends to produce it when capitalists capture the government. But some capitalist countries manage not to slide all the way and have been keeping up some kind of freedom for decades, so it kinda works.
You can see the parallels with fascism.
Totalitarianism, AKA authoritarianism. Hannah Arendt came from wealth and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. This is a bourgeois liberal, intentionally anticommunist construct that lumps fascism and communism in the same bucket.
Monthly Review, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.
If fact almost all of the “Western left” (that wasn’t crushed by red scares) was captured by the imperial core’s propaganda machine: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism
Ah yes, the legendary capitalist freedom to go homeless and die of preventable diseases. And the awful authoritarian communism of providing full employment and eliminating poverty.
If you don’t think the USA is the most authoritarian country ever, your definition of authoritarianism is useless.
This. This post right here is why no one takes this place seriously.
I’m not going to stick up for the U.S. carceral system, but it does not really speak unequivocally to the matter at hand now does it?
That chart is pretty great, because it shows that only a tiny minority of US states have smaller incarceration rates than Russia.
Oh yeah, the whole blue state red state thing is just degrees of awful.
Let me guess, you’re an American who has never been outside of the USA, never read anything about other countries, and believes 'Murica is the greatest one forever and only one that matters (even in evil)
You know absolutely jack shit about how Lenin came to power, or what Stalin did to maintain it do you?
Communism sounds great on paper and if anyone ever works it out successfully irl I am in.
The problem is they always try to use power to achieve their goals and that corrupts a society from the beginning.
Grown organically it might work but for some reason people really hate communists
Lenin is great, and Stalin literally saved the world. The USSR was a great success. It was as authoritarian as any western “democracy”. Prove me wrong bozo.
How did they go about it though?
At the barrel of a gun.
The same way they kept it going.
Discuss what they achieved all you want, you can be a great man without being a good one.
Damn revolution bad? I guess we should just lie down and accept how things are then. Better the death of millions of people, billions very soon, from the system that exists; than thousands from a revolution. You are very wise.
Have all of the revolutions you want, just don’t force others to live by your choices.
If you have the support, then good.
If not, go start your own thing.
Buy some land and start a community, support each other and grow larger through shared experiences and work.
If you get enough, you can start your own town.
Yeah you kind of still have to play by other rules as far as taxes, but you could be self-sufficient and off the grid.
Residential windmills and solar panels have come a long way, recycling would be easier, and if you get the right machine, you can actually burn trash for power.
Move in more people like yourself and you can probably go big enough to take over a county by sheer weight of legitimacy.
That’s probably as big as you could go though, the Mormons have kind of got Utah, but they’ve been working on that since like the 1850’s I think, and they still only have influence, a rather large amount of influence, but not control
Yeah, the legendary communist free world, where you went to gulag, if you dared to think of your own. And the awful authoritarian capitalists of bringing up the average quality of life that much since ww2. /S
Sorry, but this view is very much too simple.
What country has the biggest prison population both by raw numbers and on a per capital basis?
By raw numbers obviously the US, followed by china with not too many less. Per capita El Salvador and Cuba are on the first two places. So what’s your point? Per Capita and in raw numbers there is a capitalist country and a country which calls itself socialist on place one and two.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
Better check your facts before next time.
Now include Guam and Puerto Rico, which are US territories.
? I really don’t know what you are hinting at. In raw numbers the US will still be number 1 followed by China and per capita adding in countries with a lower incarceration rate and less people than the USA won’t lift up the USA in the ranking.
I flubbed one stat that doesn’t really move the needle on the point I was trying to make. I was thinking of world powers and didn’t double check to make sure nations scorned by empire didn’t barely hedge the US out of the top 5 on per capital (though another of its territories made it).
America is a remarkably “authoritarian” country by all standards whether they be prisons, police spending, or military spending.
Perhaps, if NATOpedia’s raw data is to be trusted.
Incarceration rates and counts. From World Prison Brief
The World Prison Brief at PrisonStudies.org is an online database providing free access to information on prison systems around the world. It is now hosted by the Institute For Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR), Birkbeck College, University of London.
It was previously hosted by the International Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS). It was a research centre at the University of Essex. It was launched at the House of Lords on 4 April 2011. Between 1997 and 2010 ICPS was based in King’s College London and was launched formally by Home Secretary Jack Straw in October 1997. In July 2010 the International Centre for Prison Studies incorporated and registered as a charity with the Charities Commission of England and Wales. From the outset the Centre was independent of governmental and intergovernmental agencies, although it would work closely with them.
So who really knows what the quality of the data is without further investigation. But it seems to have been originally created by the UK’s military-intelligence-industrial complex.
Projection of the contradiction of capital, capitalists states only allow freedom to those that can pay and has the illusion of free choice only when it comes to consumption.
I could say that bourgeois ownership of media and academia and the state means that those institutions will represent the biases and interests of the bourgeoisie, and so people in first-world capitalist countries end up living in a sort of self-propagating anti-communist media bubble; but the thing about propaganda is that people are rarely ever truly “tricked” by it, propaganda is always most effective when it reinforces something that someone already believes on some level.
This is why the second part to building anti-communist sentiment has to do with super-exploitation, imperialism, and the labor aristocracy. This is to say, workers in first-world capitalist countries are materially invested in capitalism, through various perks and “treats” that workers of “poorer” countries are deprived of. By being materially invested in capitalism, workers of the first world are primed to take on a sort of “bourgeois mindset”, as it were.
There’s more that can be said, too, I’d strongly recommend listening to this speech by the leader of Revolutionary Grenada, Maurice Bishop, but I think that’s a good start…
“single party state”
Yes, they have a single party: the dictatorship of the proletariat, also known as proletarian democracy.
But we too have a single party: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, also known as bourgeois democracy.
A dictatorship is bad whether it carries a hammer and sickle or a wad of $100 bills
Under communism, sovereign authority is attributable. If you ask the US president, they’ll say they have little power. If you ask senators, or congresspeople, or local representatives, the media, the bourgeoisie, neither do any of they wield power. Where authoritarianism occurs under capitalism, apparently no one is responsible for it. Under communism, it’s directly attributable to communists.
Both are often authoritarian, but the argument that communists are more authoritarian is simply an easier one to make.
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 therefore 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 that is the capitalist class in the vast majority of the world right now since the USSR’s overthrow.
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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.
read the resent news of Julian Assange or John Pilger there’d be a lot more if i could think to name them
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.
You don’t know what you’re talking about
A five minute primer on Herman & Chomsky’s propaganda model:
Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media MachineHere is an alternative Piped link(s):
Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
When slaves rise up and throw the master out of the house they built, the master’s first instinct is to gather his friends and and crush the uprising before it’s example can inspire others. If the former slaves want to keep their freedom, and if they don’t want their sacrifices to have been for nothing, they need to secure the house.
Here’s a 2 minute bop set to a Micheal Parenti lecture that covers it better than me, with examples. The lecture is at least 30 years old now, but has only gotten more prescient with the genocidal crackdown in Palestine against a liberation movement that threatens America’s ability to control the region’s trade through it’s military outpost of Isreal. To make it even more relevant, there are communist groups like the PFLP fighting the IOF in Palestine at this very moment-this is all very much one struggle.
Just as an aside, we here in the capitalist west are authoritarian as fuck lol, we’ve just structured our systems of exploitation in such a way that it looks like a million separate companies fucking you over instead of an entire economic model fucking everyone over (and enforced at gunpoint), which is what it is.
To add, there is only one country on earth with > 800 external military bases, and through an incredibly effective propanda campaign, they’ve managed to convince the world that its not them, but their enemies that are “totalitarian” and “authoritarian”.
- A giant list of US atrocities.
Oh shit the man the myth the legend. Thank you for your service comrade.
Np comrade o7
On your last point, if somebody wants an example of how ordinary everyday capitalism is violent, they should imagine what will happen to them if they do not pay their debts or cannot make their rent. These things are enforced with violence.
Because countries that call themselves communist are just dictators lying about it…
I mean, you’re asking about two separate political axis: economy, and control.
Look at the Nordic countries and even most Western Europeans and you’ll see socialist countries that aren’t authoritarian.
Theres not a single communist country tho. So when you talk like there are, people assume you have no clue what you’re talking about about.
Like, what countries do you think are communist?
I mean, you’re asking about two separate political axis: economy, and control.
You may not realize that these are in no way orthogonal to each other, but the bourgeoisie certainly do, because they own the means of production, and they use the state to enforce the private ownership that perpetuates their control over the proletariat.
Like, what countries do you think are communist?
None, as any communist country will tell you. They are socialist states working toward communism, meaning a classless society, and, by their own theory of state, a stateless society.
The nordic countries are not socialist:
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What about social democracy / democratic socialism / the Nordic model? Isn’t Sweden socialist?
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Bruh…
Socialism is economic policy…
The economic policy of those countries is socialism.
They are also democracies.
Like if I asked what kind of car you had you could say “Honda” or “a red Honda”.
Their not two different answers because one included unrelated information.
If someone asks what kind of government they have, “democratic socialism” would be correct, because only giving one of the main axises wouldn’t tell the full story.
But since we’re talking economic systems, the democratic part is superfluous
Socialism requires that the workers have democratic control over the means of production. Nordic countries are not socialist, the working class isn’t in control there.
I don’t know why you’re doubling down on your confident incorrectness when you don’t even have Wikipedia-level understanding. The very first sentence from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.
And obviously the question who the state allows to own the means of production is very much political. Economics is politics.
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Socialism does not refer to welfare states, but control of the Means of Production by the Proletariat.
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 the 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.
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 have 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.
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.
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.
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 and 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 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 the China thriving under socialism. Doubt that’ll happen while Putin is in power though.
But in practice communism ends up the same. The workers had no actual power under Communism. The leaders still took it all.
Uh oh. Looks like you triggered the tankies who are nostalgic for a thing that never happened.
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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Hungarian here. There reason for being the top 1 was because the country was running on debt hell for 10-15 years.
Kádár (the ruler of that time) had promised from 1956 that he will improve the living standards. This worked until the 70s, when the oil crisis happened and Kádár realized that with those current living conditions, the country needs to get loans. So he did that until communism have ended.
Because propaganda works
