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:
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Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
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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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
They aren’t?
Americans live in an authoritarian plutocracy, but refuse to believe it
one of my favorite takes on this subject is from This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong:
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.” -
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 mass media, manufactured consent, and regulatory capture are the “good” kind of coercion.
Because of who controls the presses in capitalist countries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some might call it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy
Marketing
Because our bourgeois state propaganda and corporate media tell us that they are, because it’s in their best interest that we believe it.
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