Many people on lemmy.ml deeply respect and admire authoritarian governments and organizations.
Iran, China, North Korea, Soviet Union…
The West has many flaws. But our flaws are nothing compared to these guys.
Iran hangs homosexuals. Iran shot 30,000 people in less than than 2 weeks. The Soviet Union had to build a fucking Iron wall to prevent people from escaping. The Soviets lied about the Chernobyl nuclear explosion. China censors the internet. China wants to eliminate Islam. North Korea is a totalitarian hellscape. Watching anime is a crime.
Why is lemmy.ml so fascinated with authoritarians?
I love communism and I think all these countries’ systems are trash.
I don’t think you can have communism with a hierarchical, centralized government or authoritarianism.
I also think the US has systematically undermined or simply overthrown every legitimate attempt to work socialism into communism, leaving only examples that morons can point at as proof that it wouldn’t work.
So if you see someone defending communism and you think they’re defending those authoritarian regimes, then your problem is you. If you honestly see people saying those regimes are great then they’re probably tankies and you can safely ignore them and disregard this entire comment.
See, that’s where I’m super skeptical. The right system shouldn’t be so fragile that it’s easily undermined by outsiders. The right system should be like a cockroach: so resistant that it’s impossible to get rid of once it’s taken hold.
We’re talking about human beings here, not angels. No workable system should assume angelic levels of cooperation from its participants.
Even from that perspective, don’t you see how having “illegitimate” socialist countries makes it easier for “legitimate” attempts to survive?
The US can’t effectively sanction countries if those countries have the option of just taking their business to China. A multipolar world allows smaller countries a greater degree of freedom to experiment with different systems because they have options of who to turn to for trade and security, while in a unipolar world the US could just impose whatever conditions they want because they’re the only option.
It is possible to oppose unipolarity and criticize China at the same time.
Certainly. I criticize China for some things. But I also critically support it and refute misinformation about it. That’s what makes people call me a “tankie.” Having a single kind word to say about anything China does tends to be enough to earn that label. The way I see it, to not be a tankie, you have to be completely and uncritically opposed to everything they do.
Well to me that’s not being a tankie - it’s just being willing to deal in nuance. But I was responding to your comment, in which you seemed to conflate criticising China with supporting US unipolarity. If that’s not what you meant then we have no disagreement.
Communism, at least in the Marxist understanding, is essentially a fully collectivized mode of production and distribution. It will necessarily have administration as is required for mass production, and this entails hierarchy and centralization. Socialism is “authoritarian” in that the working classes use the state against capitalists and fascists, but this is a requirement for building communism, which is stateless, classless, and moneyless. It’s no coincidence that the overwhelming majority of communists support the PRC, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, Cuba, and former USSR, as these are all states where socialism has been established.
It’s less that the US Empire has successfully overthrown 100% of legitimate attempts, and more that it has tried to overthrow every attempt and has succeeded in some cases and failed in others. Communists are not “morons” for supporting the success stories of socialism.
I absolutely was not calling Communists morons. I was calling Westerners who point at authoritarianism as ‘an example of communism and why it’s evil’ morons.
As to the rest, we’re all different, and though I support some attempts, I support no regimes that use harsh, unending authoritarianism as a pretext to utopian communism. In my view it spits in the face of what Marx stood for.
If you had read Marx and Engels, you’d know that they explicitly criticized Utopian socialism in favour of scientific socialism. Socialism is not supposed to be Utopian because utopias don’t exist, it’s supposed to be real, and hence unavoidably flawed.
Socialist countries do exist, and are alleged by liberals to be “authoritarian,” but this is meaningless without acknowledging the class character of state authority. All states are “authoritarian,” what differentiates them is which class is in control. In socialist states, that class is the proletariat, in capitalist states it’s the capitalists. Communism is not utopian, it’s scientific, and Marx railed against the utopian socialists like Robert Owen.
I think Marx would be more upset with those who refuse to support socialist states for being “too heavy-handed” with capitalists, landlords, fascists, etc, as he spoke this of the proletarian revolution:
Hence why all discussion of authority needs to be grounded primarily in class analysis to be Marxist.