this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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How do you differentiate yourself from them as a socialist? What is your theory of power and how it relates to authority, revolutions, and the working class that causes you to make this separation between supporting non-western communist countries and not?
I never said that I don't support communist countries. What I do not support are abuses of power by authoritarian leaders, even if they claim to be abusing their power in order to bring about a communist state.
Tankies accept most/all atrocities committed by so-called communist leaders with a "the ends justify the means" attitude that I do not share.
What atrocities in particular do tankies accept
Soviet architecture.
you know what, fair, sorry brutalist comrades
I'm more of a fan of Socialist Classicism myself
To be fair killing nazis is pretty cool. We made some movies about it.
It is neat you are a fan of doing things where the ends do not justify the means. How do bathing moral decay like that feel?
Have you never heard the phrase “the ends justify the means” before? It’s a pretty common phrase.
It means that any action, no matter how unethical or morally reprehensible, is acceptable as long as it is done to accomplish a goal that is deemed good.
This is the tankie attitude.
To reject this means that there are limitations on what actions are acceptable in pursuit of a goal. That there are some actions that are too repugnant to be justified.
That's correct. I think in the real world that doesn't come up. What is the hypothetical? would you murder an innocent little girl to save your child. That isn't a gotcha. That wouldn't work. Even if it did work, the ends of that is that everyone has to wory about their children being scrapped for spare parts. That logic works under cpaitlaism. That situation infact happens today for capitlaism. There just aren't situations where if you accurately assess the ends it justifies terrible means. Under capitlaism we do terrible means for terrible ends. We are so used to thinking of that that it us hard to think of alternatives, but your failure of imagination doesn't make you morally right.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding here. I think the delineation between authoritarian regimes and non-authoritarian governments is pretty clear - are you implying that all socialist and communist influenced governments are necessarily authoritarian?
No, I'm suggesting that authoritarian is a meaningless term unless defined specifically and was asking what theories of power and authority they had for making the delineation they are.
The derogatory term authoritarian is always leveled at socialist or communist countries, and never capitalist ones even though capitalist countries restrict rights for the majority of their populations by the very nature of the inherent power structure in capitalism. Even though communist countries usually enjoy far more decentralised authority, better voting rights, and higher political involvement in the populace, they are labeled as "authoritarian," the implication being that they need "freedom" aka capitalism
What? The term authoritarian is thrown at non-communist/capitalist nations all the time. Syria, Nazi Germany, Libya, Franco's Spain, Modern Russia, and a million other instances. Authoritarian is a clearly defined term and is in no way exclusively applied to communist nations in almost any circles. It also happens to have been applied to most "communist" countries because most of them have been authoritarian
Notice you didn't name the United States which is just as authoritarian as modern Russia by any definition we choose (voting rights? participation in political process? allowed dissent? access to clean water? basic access to healthcare? food desserts? policies meant to keep people in poverty?). That's my point. It's an ethereal term unless properly defined.
We'll have to set Libya aside since after given "freedom," there are now literal slave traders everywhere.
It's not clearly defined at all; try to give a definition of authoritarianism that applies to all of the countries frequently described as authoritarian, but not to any of the ones that aren't, and you'll see how vague a term it is.
I don't know if there is such a thing as a perfectly free, truly democratic society wherein everyone is capable of existing free of oppression lol, but I think there's definitely a spectrum of authoritarian policy and sentiment, often correlated with nationalist and fascist fervor.
I may, as a person of color, experience more oppression in a country where I do not fit the standard vision of what a citizen looks like, and less in a country wherein which I do meet that criteria. That's usually more an issue with nationalist rhetoric than systems of governance - unless that nationalism is codified and enforced by the government, which is the case in many governments that I would consider "more authoritarian." America is one that has tended towards that, historically. Certainly, though, there are others that have also instituted systems explicitly designed to oppress.
I'd say, in general, I have many rights and privileges in current-day America that a truly authoritarian government wouldn't allow. And that's not to say that I think America is the greatest, or even good lmao. We're constantly on the verge of disenfranchisement, and the fact that we're constantly fighting for things that should be just baseline isn't exactly a good look. But, in all, I'm allowed to openly state my thoughts in the court of public opinion, I'm able to vote to elect a representative, able to practice religion as I'd like, etc.
For sure, the validity of all of that is affected deeply by the corruption of capital in those arenas, but there's something to be said about the power to openly share ideas and influence fellow citizens without active censorship. Keeping in mind things like COINTELPRO and Fred Hampton, etc, I obviously can't say in good conscience that the government has never censored it's citizens, but the purported adherence to the first amendment and being "the land of the free" at least makes them work for it.
Sorry for the novel lol. It's a complicated subject and there's a lot of nuance to try and tease out
Why are you unable to explain it then?
I believe they are suggesting that, if "authoritarian" means anything, that every large state that has ever existed was "authoritarian," though some diffuse the authority through things like enclosure of the commons combined with strict property laws or other, older methods like religious law.