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?
On paper, Karl Marx is correct, but greedy leaders abused it and communism failed. Similar problems are occurring under capitalism leading which will eventually lead to it’s demise.
Socialism hasn’t failed. The soviet union may no longer be here, but socialism still is a working mode of production. The problems of capitalism are entirely different from those found in socialist countries.
I think categorically different but not entirely different problems. Power players a.k.a. bad actors could in theory infiltrate any hierarchy over long enough time (dependent on their level of duplicity, awareness, steps ahead, or dedication possessed by a given individual/group)
The profit motive as the driving force of capitalism selects for those best able to seek it, creating corruption. Administration isn’t a problem inherently, and people aren’t supernaturally good or evil. It’s perfectly possible to create a system that includes recall elections and other measures to help combat corruption in socialism (and these features exist in socialist states already).
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I mean he was stil right. Any plan or system is subject to good faith execution. If political leaders lie and steal, it doesn’t matter how sound the poltical framework is.
Capitalism isn’t failing because of corrupt leaders. Capitalism is failing because it’s operating as it is designed. Corruption isn’t antithetical to capitalism, it’s a key component.
There are many paths towards communism. China and Russia went with an authoritarian regime “to move towards Communism”. This actually makes sense on paper because it requires quite a lot of power to actually change the whole system into communism. The tankies still believe this, but in reality their leaders are perfectly happy with all the power they now have.
All states are “authoritarian,” as all states are a product of class struggle and exist to put one class on top. In capitalist states, that class is the capitalist class, in the PRC and former USSR, that class is the proletariat. That’s why they both have high approval rates (when Russia was still socialist), as they implemented proletarian democracy and authority against capitalists. There are no paths to communism that do not require authority against capitalists.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about.
The form of democracy and the mode of production in China ensures that there is a connection between the people and the state. Policies like the mass line are in place to ensure this direct connection remains. This is why over 90% of the Chinese population supports the government, and why they have such strong perceptions around democracy:
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.