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Authoritarian!
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2026
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As are all states. The important distinction between them isn't the degree by which authority is used, which is largely decided by the conditions a state is in rather than the form of the state itself, but instead is which class controls the state. The USSR was run by the working classes, the US by capitalists.
I don't really get what you're trying to do. Capitalists and slavers aren't an ethnicity, nor were they murdered en masse by the USSR. The USSR wasn't genocidal.
Also not sure why you are going into a socialist community and calling socialists "fascists," this is nonsense word salad on top of your strange and baseless jab.
What hypocrisy? Your jab didn't even leave anything to address, I had to try to fill in that gap myself. What's your point? That socialism is secretly fascism?
States do not arbitrarily enact violence, they do so to uphold the ruling class of society. Denmark is an imperialist state, the nicer conditions for the domestic working class come from the backs of exploited labor in the global south. This isn't because Denmark is more "moral," but instead because it can successfully use the spoils of imperial plunder to bribe its own working class. Iraq could not do the same, and was under intense pressure from the outside, hence the heightened repression.
My point isn't that form doesn't matter at all, that would be reductive. My point is that class is primary.
My point isn't that class isn't a major force, but that it's just one of them. And that within equivalent or similar class characters there is wildly different ways in which state power is used, and that the ways it intrudes upon lives and the severity of its punishments for many are among the most important issues.
States absolutely arbitrarily enact violence. Sure they tend to have some argument as to why they do it, often religion or ideology, but sometimes the king is just mad.
Denmark is an imperial state, absolutely, but compare them to other imperial states in how they treat their population. Compare them to Georgist England where they would hang people for petty crimes and had a philosophy of no mercy. Both countries are imperialist, Christian, constitutional monarchies with a capitalist economic system. Hell, a lot of European "enlightenment" beliefs on rights and such were ideas they were given by the Iriqouian peoples.
Compare the interregium puritan rule of the UK and later putitan governments in the Americas to the monarchical rule following it. Circumstances decide who can come to power and what they can do while being tolerated, circumstances which includes the population's philosophy on what rulers can and should do and tolerate, as well as rulers' ability to use propaganda and violence to stop revolts from succeeding. Castro all but says this when talking about how machismo led to state repression of homosexuality.
It's difficult for an impoverished nation that's subject to colonial powers to have a libertine approach to civil liberty and a penal system focused on rehabilitation. Noble when attempted, but outside forces love to step in and stop that shit. But, they can always go above and beyond on it, form alliances with religious regressives (who may or may not constitute a clerical class), etc. Or they can do only what they're pressured to do. Those in open resistance have choices too. Chiapas or ISIS, both resisted US global capitalist hegemony. There's no reason beyond ideology why Iran can't embrace feminist equality like Cuba did. And within the imperial cores the population and leadership alone have these conversations.
Philosophy of governance amongst the population and government have very real impact. Because sometimes the working class demands you deal with the witch problem and stop people from sinning and other times they demand you stop capital punishment and minimize state interference in the private lives of citizens.
I'm not reducing all of state implement to class, after all, I said such a view would be entirely reductive. However, when it comes to what is actionable, it's clear that it's most important to install the working class as the ruler of society. From then on, reforms in the socialist state, and quests for sovereignty, can help develop the society more and more.
As for "arbitrary" violence, I really don't think this is an acceptable explanation. What can appear arbitrary is in actual fact a clear extension of the class makeup of society. Georgist England hanging peasants for no reason is an example of the class makeup of society being driven by the aristocracy. The victims and winners are decided by class makeup, the way society is treated is more based on the form of society, which tends to improve with development.
Alan Turing invented computing and helped defeat the nazis, but Britain still chemically castrated him for being gay. This is the baseline of government interference you've been raised to believe is normal or at least explainable, and you are attacking a country whose human rights record is way, way better than that.
That is a level of government interference I use as a classic example of why the west isn't fucking good enough. Alongside plenty of other abuses of power against my people by capitalist imperial states.
The USSR I have issues with a lot they did predominantly in the Stalinist era, but I consider their dissolution to be a great tragedy for the global working class.
If you're saying I'm being too harsh in criticizing late 20th century Iraq's government however I think we're going to be unable to come to a meaningful place of agreement here. You see, I've been consistently anti torture, both for my country and others. Do love their commitment to literacy though.
I'm not defending any modern nation, but most have policies I wish more would adopt.
Because Iraq and Denmark are famously socialist, never having exploited anyone.
The USSR was run by politicians. They concentrated wealth and privilege into their hands and those of their supporters in the police and military.
Capitalists, party elites, or hereditary nobility; it makes little difference to the starving.
Putting the words in your country name and paying lip service is not enough.
Why is this factually incorrect cold war dross being upvoted in a socialist com?
Sorry to break to you but we are all libs here.
Comments like this make it painfully obvious that someone has not engaged with the actual history, because guess who agreed with you that lip service is not enough? The communists. Life expectancy, infant mortality, nutrition, medical outcomes, literacy, addiction rates, poverty, all of this shit immediately improves drastically in every time and place communists have ever seized power. Often these improvements have come despite nightmarish wartime conditions, such as during the Chinese Revolution when life expectancy shot up despite being in active combat with Imperial Japan after 20 years of civil war. The people of Cuba have created one of the most advanced medical systems on earth despite sixty years of strangulation. The people of the USSR risked their safety to send weapons to uprisings across the world despite needing every bullet themselves for the near century of fascist invasion and expansion that ultimately took thirty million of their lives.
The idea that communists are secretly only pretending to care about other people is the single biggest piece of capitalist projection, and the one most foundational to holding up other myths about communists. Every abuser in history has said all the same things the white empire drills into our heads: this is just how the world is, everyone else is just like me or worse, so there's no point in looking for better. But in reality, Cuba has no Gates Foundation. Laos has no Mr Beast. Our economic system is the one set up to reward and incentivize exploiting people you pretend to care about, not theirs. To look around at the very specific, grotesque circumstances created by capitalism and attribute it to some universal axiom of human society is what having an imagination trapped by capitalist "realism" looks like.
This attitude of "well everyone is shit" is one of the last layers of refuge before you get to the truth: that we, westerners raised in a culture of advanced imperialism, are specifically and deeply sick, that we have forcibly exported this sickness across our planet and we desperately need drastic mass change and healing before it kills us all.
Exploiting people is inherently rewarding. Blaming capitalism for that is baffling.
See what I mean? Brain trapped by capitalist game theory at all times, never more than a fiscal quarter ahead. Is exploitation more rewarding than cooperation? Not at scale. Not in the long run. Look at the diseased, collapsing western empire, this parasitic thing falling to pieces, and look at China, whose relationships with other countries (and it's own people) are mutually beneficial. They're the new world power for a reason.
Exploiting people is actually a slow and deadly poison, and our entire society is currently reaping the consequences.
"Oh but don't blame the entire system of exploitation that punishes you for not being an exploiter, that's just weird" Brother you are fully lost in the sauce. If this was 1325 you'd be telling me not to blame the king because this is just how things are, this is how God made the world.
Believing that a system that encourages and requires that exploitation is the best we can do is absolutely a capitalist idea, it's the ultimate ideological expression of capitalism: Liberalism. The belief that this is just how things are and there is no real alternative, and anything purporting to be one is just liberalism in a different hat.
You are subsumed in ideology. The function of liberal ideology is not to convince you of the virtues of capitalism, but to ensure you make no serious investigations into any alternative by pretending that everything else is just secretly also capitalism.
China tends to jail exploiters, or death sentence with reprieve.
User name checks out.
"Politician" is not a class. The state, in Marxist theory, is not outside of class struggle, but is within it. The CPSU did not concentrate wealth in their hands, in fact they were paid wages akin to highly skilled labor at the highest level. As such, wealth inequality went dramatically down:
This is why the Soviet administrators cared so much about the working claases, they were working class themselves. Starvation was eliminated in the Soviet Union, life expectancy doubled in the first few decades, literacy rates skyrocketed to 99.9%, unemployment and homelessness were both nearly eliminated.
Yes, it's enormously easy to simply paint the USSR as an exact replica of capitalism and aristocracy in outcome, only different in form. It's also enormously incorrect, and bears no resemblance to reality. As socialists, we need to actually seek truth from facts, and not coast by on vibes alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
The Soviet Union indeed had a famine in the 1930s. Is your point that it was deliberate? That's a popular theory among fascists and used to be popular among liberal historians, but opening the Soviet archives proved the socialists correct, that it was largely caused by weather disaster and some degree of mismanagement. It was also the last famine outside of World War II in the Soviet Union, because by the time of the famine's end agriculture had been successfully collectivized.
Famines were extremely common in both Tsarist Russia and feudal China. Their respective famines in the beginning were ended because they developed out of that underdeveloped form of agriculture. This is not difficult to understand. Why compare the Soviet Union and PRC to capitalist countries, when we should be comparing them to their former selves?
No, what's toxic is comparing countries with wildly different circumstances and prior levels of development without properly contextualizing. The famines were not caused by communism, nor mismanagement. The famines were caused by a combination of weather disaster and dramatic underdevelopment of agriculture, which is why both regions commonly had famine before, and why both countries had these as their last famines outside wartime, as they industrialized.
Jeez, you had me until "NGO."
You do know bigger NGOs receiver government funding, beholding them to said government?
Not all NGOs are bad; NED, HRW, AI are problematic.
Fair enough.
I found an authoritarian.
I'm an "authoritarian" for affirming the Marxist theory of the state?
The communist party consisted of workers. Working class is not a level of income, but a relation to ownership of the means of production and distribution. Further, the USSR saw incredibly high rates of democratic participation, both having some of the highest voting percentages and the actual highest rates of measures to vote on.
Wealth inequality in the USSR existed, but was nowhere even fathomably close to wealth inequality in modern Russia, let alone the US Empire.
The working class in the usa empire mostly lives in the colonies. Labor aristocrats always "conveniently forget" about their overseas plundering.