this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 12 points 23 hours ago (28 children)

You're just regurgitating nonsense here.

The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because 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.

The reality is that 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.

There's also zero evidence for the notion that there's less repression under capitalism than there is under socialism. The incarceration rate in the US is higher than in China, and it's even higher than it was in USSR under Stalin.

The claim that the rate of innovation is slower doesn't stand up to scrutiny either. USSR had plenty of technological and scientific firsts. China currently pushing ahead of the west technologically on many fronts.

Finally, the discussion isn't whether China has pure communism or not. It's whether the system in China produces better results than western ones. That is the case practically by any metric you choose. On the other hand, we can see the regression in quality of life for vast swaths of the population in Russia after capitalism being reinstated. Here we have a direct comparison showing that capitalism does in fact perform worse than socialism.

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