this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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This is so funny lol, what exactly is authoritarianism, then? You're just short circuiting because the most default liberal argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. You don't have to run away from the conversation just because you have a different definition of authoritarianism. As much as we may have different definitions, we live in the same reality, we can discuss the same ground truths of what "authoritarianism" means to you and how we conceptualize those things in different ways.
Yeah there's differences. In Western countries, a lot of wealthy white people can just chill while their governments enact tremendous violence against minorities to sustain their quality of life. In Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, and other peripheral or semiperipheral countries, the state has to deal with the contradictions head-on instead of exporting them elsewhere, so they have to be more repressive. That's a real difference, but it makes me think that the Western countries are worse than the "authoritarian governments" you list.
In fact, the way you choose Trump's US as the turning point that supposedly shows that authoritarianism just now appeared out of nowhere, shows how one-sided your view of history and politics is. Now the US turned authoritarian. Not when they were literally dousing Mexican immigrants in kerosene in 1916 or doing Jim Crow segregation that inspired the Nazis.
Why insist that the US being authoritarian and exploitative of the global South is an unreasonable position? The way I see it, you're just trying really hard to make this artificial separation between "authoritarian" countries that aren't even defined in any coherent way, and democratic Western countries. What is it about the US, with the highest prison population in the world, a rampant surveillance state, and police violence every single day that is better than a country like Iran?
In this comment you give the reason "it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world." I'm not going to deny that.^[Some people in my instance have been trying to argue against that point, but I honestly think that there's a contradiction many leftists are bad at confronting, where they simultaneously believe that capitalism is an absolute evil that has never done anything good for anyone except for the top 0.001%, but at the same time the reason people in the imperial core accept capitalism is because they benefit from capitalism?] But that has nothing to do with "authoritarianism." The US could be the wealthiest country in the world where 70% of the population lives much better lives than the vast majority of the rest of the world. That still wouldn't make the US a country that isn't authoritarian, so really when you attack countries like Iran or Turkey for being authoritarian but defend the US, you are using a double standard. If you're authoritarian and rich, that's fine, but authoritarian and poor is a cautionary tale?
Furthermore, in the case of Europe, you're failing to appreciate the long arc here. You're talking about the neo-fascist parties (I assume you mean parties like AfD and Orban's party in Hungary) as if they were uniquely the problem. But we can all plainly observe that the liberal, so-called "democratic" European parties have no problem at all committing genocide. They have no problem at all beating up protesters who call for an end to military aid to Israel. The ease with which they arrived at this position, of using violence to shut down popular support for ending genocide, should make you question whether one really has to be "blinded by ideology" to say that authoritarianism is just as present in Western "democratic" countries as it is in the developing world. Are you really confident that as climate change gets worse and worse, European "democracies" aren't going to go fascist and start putting climate refugees in concentration camps, instead of drowning them in the Mediterranean?
Women lost the right to abortions in the US very recently because the religious ghouls in the Supreme Court, who are all unelected leaders, decided against it. This is also the reason the US has extremely weak environmental protections, and many other problems that plague US politics.
Other than full control of media, how does this not describe the US?
Edit: just to pre-empt the obvious counterargument that in the US you can oppose the government without being arrested: yes, you can, as long as you aren't speaking out in a dangerous way. The 6 Ferguson organizers who all died under mysterious circumstances should be evidence that if you do speak out in a way that the state deems unacceptable, they'll just kill you. Hopefully you can see how in Iran, not everyone who ever says anything against their government is jailed (we even have Hexbear users from Iran that have posted things that are critical of their government). The thing that would get you jailed is if you destabilize the country with your speech. Every single state in the world will have you jailed for destabilizing it, the only difference is how hard to destabilize each state is.
SCOTUS is democratic because the guy who was president 30 years ago got to make a lifetime appointment of a supreme court justice that makes decisions that affect people who weren't even alive when they were appointed? You have an extremely low bar for what counts as "democratic." If your standards are that low, you could even argue that because most people in Iran are Twelver Shia and the Ayatollah is the leader of Twelver Shiism, that's democracy.
Again, every single state will prosecute destabilizing behavior. Press freedom is gonna be better in wealthy western countries because a few bad news stories don't destabilize the country the way they do in the developing world. As I pointed out, the way the US reacted to events that actually do have the potential to destabilize the country shows that it is exactly the same as the so-called "authoritarian regimes" and this is also true of liberal European countries.
The representatives that people can vote for are already selected for by the bourgeoisie. Both parties represent capital, not the worker. It's meant to give the impression of democratic input while maintaining the same brutal system of capitalism. Same with the press, it's only "free" so far as the wealthy can buy and use it however they like.
All states are authoritarian. What matters is which class is in control of the state, the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie. In the US, the imperialist bourgeoisie rule with an iron fist.
Where I am, the problem is not that people are too "hypnotised" or propagandized to act. The problem is that every time we have tried to establish our sovereignty the US has violently suppressed us.
Most recently we had a massive protest movement that went absolutely nowhere because it wasn't organized with anything resembling a coherent leadership; if the various previous attempts at organizing the people hadn't been destroyed by the US or the colonial government, maybe it could've been productive.
Generally, our views on why revolutions haven't been successful are a lot more nuanced than "people are just too brainwashed." A lot of us believe that brainwashing itself is not real and it's just a concept that serves to obscure the real sociological phenomena that prevent class consciousness and revolution.
For starters, there are several countries where the proletariat is in charge, like the PRC. It isn't every country that is under a dictatorship of capital. Secondly, there are worker parties like PSL in the US that aren't just the state arm of capital. All states are is the monopoly on force to be exerted to carry out the will of the ruling class, in capitalism these are going to inevitably be under the thumb of capital. The purpose of the state is to retain capitalism and crush opposition.
I do argue for revolution, yes, but "brainwashing" doesn't exist. There isn't this conspiracy-theory level hypnosis going on. Workers in the west share in the spoils of imperialism, as imperialism decays and disparity rises, radicalization increases. This pushes revolution to the forefront over time.
The PRC is indeed governed centrally by the CPC, the party of the proletariat. Nobody said China was a "utopia," you seem addicted to making strawman arguments. In fact, Marxism is anti-utopian, you continue to make arguments up in order to prove your baseless points. Also, "regime" just means "government you don't like," it isn't a physical thing. Some Chinese people don't like their system, but over 95% approve of their government.
The EU is thoroughly and entirely capitalist. There is no socialism in the EU. Capitalism is a mode of production characterized by private ownership of the large firms and key industries, while socialism is characterized primarily by public ownership of the large firms and key industries. The "right" and "left" that you speak of are only that way relative to each other, when overall they are both on the right. Further, the EU relies on imperialism in order to fund their safety nets. The fact that the EU has a relatively small left and a huge right does not improve your stance.
I really think you need to take a step back and familiarize yourself more with the arguments your opponents are making. You seem to only strawman, you don't actually know what us leftists want.
I wanted a discussion, your only interaction with it was making up my views and calling those made-up views dogmatic. If you refuse to engage genuinely, then you shut the conversation down, plug your ears, and leave.
You've been accused as such because you from the beginning weren't interested in engaging genuinely, and deliberately took the wrong answer. OP is well known for being a socialist, yet you double down and paint them as a feudalist.
You sealed him into the dang crystal and he's gone now.
Lmao, I wondered why all the comments disappeared
He didn't do anything wrong, though? You're the one that kept trying to hold China up against the standard of Utopia. You're the one that called China a "regime" (a meaningless term). You've been repeatedly leaving these comments in this thread, acting like you're gonna leave, but you continue to blather on with your liberal platitudes. If you could write just 1 or 2 substantial comments with good sources for every 5 "Bye!" that you write, maybe the conversation would have come to its natural conclusion by now.