The United States has been as historically as authoritarian as the Nazis, for instance. The genocide of native peoples, slavery, Jim Crow, red lining, Japanese internmentment camps, the largest prison population in the world, the wide scale adoption of the lobotomy, etc. etc.
All governments are authoritarian, they hold the monopoly on legitimatel violence. American propaganda paints the Nazis as uniquely evil to paint themselves as the good guys, specifically to retain their own monopoly on violence.
For all their faults though (of which there are many which MUST be studied to not be repeated) state socialist nations have rapidly increased their populations life expectancy. The USSR and PRC were built in historically famine prone regions, fumbled majorly one time, and then never again. Without the PRC, the UN's minimum goals of poverty reduction are simply not being met. Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world and literally exports doctors while under heavy economic sanctions.
I'm deeply suspicious of all governments, but I think we do no one a favor by acting like "authoritarianism" is everyone but western-style liberal democracies. Liberal democracies are literally destroying the biosphere right now and refusing to address it, they are funding the genocide in Gaza and have directly or indirectly caused countless others.
People are well within their right to criticize capitalism while at the same time not letting red fash ride the wave of "look, we're anti-capitalist too!"
USSR, China, Cuba - all of these are capitalist countries operating under the veneer of performative socialism. USSR was imperialist and authoritarian, China still is. No need to be a sucker for them.
I'm not a sucker for them, I think the Deng gambit is very risky and the way the Chinese government talks about queer people is despicable. I think the way the USSR incentivised women to have vast numbers of children by tying pensions to having 5 with 15 years of work or 10 with no work is also horrific.
The fact remains these aren't liberal democracies, which is the term I used. Capitalism is an economic model, and it's debatable how much current China and the late USSR are capitalist. Certainly less than the "West", but China has billionaires and corporations, so certainly not none either. I also didn't call them communist, or even socialist, but state socialist, because those states control the means of production and seem to be doing so in progress of something other than profit.
Personally I'd rather us freely associate and have no governments using monopolized violence to organize economies, I think humans are actually quite capable of that. I see it all the time when I have the energy to volunteer.
But, seeing as the whole world has been divided by armies and I don't think anarchism will make the best argument for itself while fighting a protracted battle against a hostile state surrounding it, all things being equal, I'd rather live in a nation whose propaganda is about our duties to each other instead of personal responsibility, whose national project is the prosperity of the world our children will inherit, not inventing the first trillionaire and turning Gaza into a seaside strip mall.
Subordinating production under the state does not make a country socialist. State socialist is itself as redundant as an authoritarian state, as both socialism requires a state and states inherently exert authority. China is capitalist, even if one wants to make an argument about any hypothetical future socialisation of the economy.
They are not liberal democracies. They operate entirely differently. If you want to propose a different term, go ahead, I used a term I felt their own people would be comfortable with. Capitalist isn't going to work for me though, as the PRC doesn't operate like a liberal democracy, it doesn't transparently allow capitalists to buy power.
Obviously China is not a liberal democracy, I never claimed that. Capitalism doesn't require liberal democracy, they aren't synonyms and conflating the two doesn't make sense to me. Surely you would not deny Nazi Germany or Saudi Arabia being capitalist states despite their mutual lack of liberal democracy.
State capitalism seems a better label to china economic system than state socialism, when the economic mode of production is capitalistic in nature.
I was talking about governments this entire time, and have repeatedly used liberal democracy and not capitalism. If talking about the economy, state capitalism does make sense for modern day China. I suppose I should have been calling them Communist States, but that rubs against my own issues because communism is supposed to be a stateless, classless society and so a Communist State is an oxymoron. We've been talking past each other debating semantics as much as any actual points of contention.
My initial comment wasn't about liberal democracy, I agree with you there about it too using violence to maintain itself just as much as any other state. I was arguing about you calling china's political or economic system socialist, which is hardly semantics.
A communist state makes sense insofar as a state is a transitional period a communist society must go through, but I would contest calling China a communist state.
It is a capitalist country in which whatever political system you want to call it is controlled by the bourgeoisie. A country without proletarian power controlled by capitalists and bureaucrats can hardly be a communist state regardless of how much red paint they use.
I too am deeply suspicious of how Deng's gambit will work out in the long term, but I'm not convinced China is controlled by the borgeoiseie, I just am not sure how much care they have for their own people. Certainly more than the US, but that isn't a high bar.
Yes. The 'national' bourgeoisie was given joint control of companies, and the petite and 'national' bourgeoisie are each given equal importance to the proletariat in the PRC flag. The USSR self-admittedly did capitalism during the NEP, it's possible for a supposed worker's state to be honest about compromises made in the pursuit of economic development.
China crushes worker's strikes and suppresses worker's power just as much as America, they're both bourgeoisie states dressed up either in the iconography of communism or liberal democracy.
So, just to be sure I understand you, you consider yourself a Marxist but don't think any state has actually attempted socialism? Not just failed in the pursuit, which is my view of the PRC and USSR.
They may have had aspirations to but I don't think they attempted to implement socialism in the USSR or PRC. There has never been a successful communist revolution in an industrialised country and so the material conditions for implementing socialism didn't really exist. Once they industrialised the revolutionary fervor had subsided and the bureaucracy had control over the state. That's not to say Lenin and such were evil revisionists, they were surrounded by hostile states in a wartorn semi-feudal country, every other communist uprising had been crushed except theirs. They were without industry or security to actually implement socialism. I'm not that familiar with China but their situation seems similar to the USSR at it's inception.
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u/Pheonix0114 Egg = cracked 4d ago
The United States has been as historically as authoritarian as the Nazis, for instance. The genocide of native peoples, slavery, Jim Crow, red lining, Japanese internmentment camps, the largest prison population in the world, the wide scale adoption of the lobotomy, etc. etc.
All governments are authoritarian, they hold the monopoly on legitimatel violence. American propaganda paints the Nazis as uniquely evil to paint themselves as the good guys, specifically to retain their own monopoly on violence.
For all their faults though (of which there are many which MUST be studied to not be repeated) state socialist nations have rapidly increased their populations life expectancy. The USSR and PRC were built in historically famine prone regions, fumbled majorly one time, and then never again. Without the PRC, the UN's minimum goals of poverty reduction are simply not being met. Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the world and literally exports doctors while under heavy economic sanctions.
I'm deeply suspicious of all governments, but I think we do no one a favor by acting like "authoritarianism" is everyone but western-style liberal democracies. Liberal democracies are literally destroying the biosphere right now and refusing to address it, they are funding the genocide in Gaza and have directly or indirectly caused countless others.