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.
A five minute primer on Herman & Chomsky’s propaganda model:
Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machinesocialist 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.
- Show
Show
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.
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, and quickly.
In 1917, the people of Russia cast off their feudal monarch. In 1918, America and nine other countries invaded Russia to fight for the czar, to crush the worker's uprising and restore the monarch to the throne. They don't teach us about it in school.
Here's a 2 minute bop set to a Parenti lecture that covers this. The basic fact is that a capitalist empire will never willingly surrender control of an exploitable land where labor and resources can be had for cheap or free, not without a fight. 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 against economic imperialism, and against colonialism.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Literal swastika-ass Nazis in Ukraine doing terrorism for a decade: we must arm these precious smol boys who are defending western civilization against the Russian orcs!
Literal fascists in Palestine doing a genocide against brown people: fuck your terrorist baby hospitals, there are no innocents in Gaza, bleed em dry and stack em high
Dipshits: Wow how could anyone think there's a racial component to this
Yanks have this one-size-fits-all thing with no knowledge of the world.
First guy was saying Hitler/Stalin/Milosevic/Putin aren't white, this guy is saying Palestinians are brown
Really leaning into the "no knowledge of the world" thing
Back when we had kings prior to colonisation, they were elected, could be recalled, and were not hereditary.
Don't know what you're on about with the shit reference.
Your make-believe country
This is an old imperialist chestnut. We've heard it all before. As I said here, it is one reason we sympathise with our Palestinian friends: we both have imperialist fucks like you telling us our country is make-believe.
This is like a new level of playing victim. Britain's economy is three arms conglomerates in a trench coat and your slapdash schools and hospitals are currently in the process of falling over. The suicide rate is through the roof, people are freezing to death in the winters and the immigration gestapo are snatching people into vans to be deported to concentration camps in Rwanda. Your rivers are full of cocaine runoff and everyone's depressed. You people have been thoroughly immiserated by authoritrian capitalism, and now you're acting like Cybertruck guys, lashing out at anyone pointing out that you've been lied to.
Spare me this sanctimonious "Me and the Palestinians are as brothers against the imperialists" canard, Paul Ma'ud Dipshit. You fuckers caused this whole situation with your dumb shit "British mandate of Palestine", and now you want to extremely caucasianly hop in and claim the good guys. Your country still worships Winston "I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes" Churchill, the miserable drunken fuck who created the Bengal Famine, killed a hundred million people, and said of it "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. They will breed like rabbits, famine or no." Toad Hitler is your national icon, you depressed cryptocurrency peddling royalty-sniffers have negative business lecturing anyone about anything.
You fuckers caused this whole situation
How do youfigure that? It was the Brits and the U.N.
Your country still worships Winston
Again, showing your ignorance. Churchill hated us. He ordered the Black & Tans in here, who murdered three of my own relatives. He is a deeply reviled person here and in India.
The arrogance of Yanks is infinite. They think they can lecture people about Palestine/Ukraine/Tigray, when they can't even find countries on a map.
The one hammer in their thick minds is they black/white hammer, which makes no sense for interpreting 90% of things, e.g. authoritarianism in this case.
Russians got kicked out of whiteness a couple years back
Show
When I was born in China, the spirit of Genghis Khan himself came to me and told me to be authoritarian
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.
I already covered the origins of this propagandistic Western conceptualization of “authoritarianism”/“totalitarianism” in another comment in this post
This is off topic, but I want to mention for the sake of other hexbears that I'm glad you linked to this other comment you made. It's a good comment but no one on hexbear can see it or anything else in that reply chain. Since you were replying to someone from an instance not federated with us, it's just not visible. A reminder that the exact same thread can look completely different depending on what instance you're reading it from.
Equivocating Stalin and Hitler is some crypto Nazi shit.
It is standard in Westoid discourse, e.g. the Wikipedia page on "authoritarianism" probably does it idk didn't read it.
People who use words like "authoritarianism" equate the two.
Only one of those four is white, and it's a classic reactionary tactic to downplay him compared to the Georgian and the older Han Chinese example
Joe Biden and the US military industrial complex are currently helping Isreal commit a genocide out in the open, and that's your pick for 21st century Hitler? Tell me you don't think Palestinans matter without using the words, jesus.
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.
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.
I was slagging the people who said it's about being black, not about Hitler, Stalin, the USSR, Putin, etc.
This is holocaust denialism.
Saying Hitler is white is holocaust denial?
This thread became gibberish a while back
one of my favorite takes on this subject is from This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong:
Show
Show
Most Americans shrink from the word “dictatorship.” “I don’t want to be dictated to,” they say. Neither, in fact, does anyone. But why do they instinctively take the word in its passive meaning, and see themselves as the recipients of orders? Why do they never think that they might be the dictators? Is that such an impossible idea? Is it because they have been so long hammered by the subtly misleading propaganda about personal dictatorships, or is it because they have been so long accustomed to seek the right to life through a boss who hires them, that the word dictatorship arouses for them the utterly incredible picture of one man giving everybody orders?
No country is ruled by one man. This assumption is a favorite red herring to disguise the real rule. Power resides in ownership of the means of production—by private capitalists in Italy, Germany and also in America, by all workers jointly in the USSR. This is the real difference which today divides the world into two systems, in respect to the ultimate location of power. When a Marxist uses the word “dictatorship,” he is not alluding to personal rulers or to methods of voting; he is contrasting rule by property with rule by workers.
The heads of government in America are not the real rulers. I have talked with many of them from the President down. Some of them would really like to use power for the people. They feel baffled by their inability to do so; they blame other branches of government, legislatures, courts. But they haven’t analyzed the real reason. The difficulty is that they haven’t power to use. Neither the President nor Congress nor the common people, under any form of organization whatever, can legally dispose of the oil of Rockefeller or the gold in the vaults of Morgan. If they try, they will be checked by other branches of government, which was designed as a system of checks and balances precisely to prevent such “usurpation of power.” Private capitalists own the means of production and thus rule the lives of millions. Government, however chosen, is limited to the function of making regulations which will help capitalism run more easily by adjusting relations between property and protecting it against the “lawless” demands of non-owners. This constitutes what Marxists call the dictatorship of property. “The talk about pure democracy is but a bourgeois screen,” says Stalin, “to conceal the fact that equality between exploiters and exploited is impossible. . . . It was invented to hide the sores of capitalism . . . and lend it moral strength.”
Power over the means of production—that gives rule. Men who have it are dictators. This is the power the workers of the Soviet Union seized in the October Revolution. They abolished the previously sacred right of men to live by ownership of private property. They substituted the rule: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.” -
because capitalists have to lie about reality to preserve their ill gotten gains.
Yeah this question is always incomplete; considered by who?
Isn't that generally said by countries that oppose them?
The land of the less authoritarian had race discrimination until half a century ago, right? Seeing the BLM, it seems to have a prominent role even now. So are they any better?
Because authority carried out under the pretenses of private property is whitewashed in liberal states, who are the ones in your question doing the "considering".
From Losurdo - A critique of the category of totalitarianism:
Nowadays we constantly hear denunciations, directed toward Islam, of ‘religious totalitarianism’ or of the ‘new totalitarian enemy that is terrorism’. The language of the Cold War has reappeared with renewed vitality, as confirmed by the warning that American Senator Joseph Lieberman has issued to Saudi Arabia: beware the seduction of Islamic totalitarianism, and do not let a ‘theological iron curtain’ separate you from the Western world.
Even though the target has changed, the denunciation of totalitarianism continues to function with perfect efficiency as an ideology of war against the enemies of the Western world. And this ideology justifies the violation of the Geneva Convention, the inhuman treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, the embargo and collective punishment inflicted upon the Iraqis and other peoples, and the further torment perpetrated against the Palestinians. The struggle against totalitarianism serves to legitimate and transfigure the total war against the ‘barbarians’ who are alien to the Western world.
It's simple to label a government as "authoritarian" just because they have things called "laws" that prevent you from exploiting their people. Likewise, it's convenient to repeatedly tell your citizens that distant, non-English-speaking countries are "authoritarian." The truth is, for every Westerner who can afford to travel and verify these claims, a million others will just accept what the media tells them. They'll even go on to reinforce these narratives, despite having no firsthand experience or direct connection to these places.
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.
Exclusively based on vibes and lies/media presentation. It's just manufactured concensus, we teach 9 year Olds that it's freedom VS authoritarian capitalism VS communism
It's just bullshit, capitalist countries are authoritarian as fuck
-
bc crackers got lucky 500 years ago by finding an entire hemisphere of free money, thus any "free commerce" after this date necessarily advantages crackers, and "authoritarian" (AKA anti-freecommerce) measures are necessary to avoid a horde of crackers (and one Iranian cuck) owning the entire oil deposits of Iran
-
bc crackers lie about everything including the 1st definition, and most people regardless of race only watch and listen to cracker media and learn cracker languages and spend their time in cracker echo-chambers, and also most people are just stoopid (way too stupid to be cognizant of this), so even when point #1 ceases to be true and commerce starts to benefit some Asian country who pulled themselves up against all titanic odds, you will still have billions of people agreeing with the worldwide cracker circlejerk
-
moment
