Authoritarian!
(midwest.social)
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆
SocialismI agree with your overall point, still I think there needs to be some context.
Here is the graph for USSR's prison population (I could only find it in russian on yandex, because search engines are so fucked up nowadays):
USSR really did have a relatively high imprisonment rate throughout its existence, and I think its punishment-focused penitentiary system was one of its worst sides. I'm glad that other socialist states are improving theirs, and I hope one day they can reach a point where prisons in their current form would no longer be necessary.
As an aside, I find it really interesting that there was a simultaneous increase in prison population in both USSR and the US in the 80s:
While in the US it was mainly caused by "law and order" politics popularized after the revolutionary movements of the 70s, combined with privatization of prison labor, I couldn't find any well-sourced explanations for why it happened in USSR.
Well the USSRs economy was turning to shit during the 80s, that leaves plenty of room for theft/drugs/domestic violence etc...
Correct - both are authoritarian regimes
Which goes to show that "authoritarian" is just a vague, vibes based signifier with no useful purpose.
Can you name a non-authoritarian government?
Authoritarianism is a meaningless term used by edgy children whose brains haven't fully developed yet. The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
Every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.
What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.
The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority.
Yeah, and isn't that a problem? Like, why just take for granted that all governments we've tried so far are coercive, instead of trying to build one that isn't?
What you might want to think real hard about is why hierarchies form in the first place, and what problem they solve. Then you might start to understand why every society converges on this model at a certain point or it dies out.
I'd genuinely like to hear your answer on this, because it's something I think a lot about as an anarchist. Specifically, do you think the problem power hierarchies solve can only be solved by power hierarchies? Do you think that problem necessarily exists and needs solving in all contexts, perhaps because of some innate human nature? Who is it that has told you this is the case--that the fact that history is filled with hierarchies should be interpreted as "hierarchies are inevitable"--instead of, say, "power over others is an unhealthy coping mechanism humans have consistently turned to in the face of the unknown and maybe we should try to build a society that Doesn't Do That before we give up and resign ourselves to benevolent kings again"?
Authoritarianism is a meaningless term used by edgy children whose brains haven't fully developed yet
You tend to lose a bit of credibility when you start your argument with this kind of sentences. After that you would need to prove that your reasoning is at least as qualitative, as, say, Hannah Arendt's work, and unfortunately it is far off the mark.
The users in these parts think Hannah Arendt, along with Western Marxists like Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, etc. were CIA stooges. Expect people to spam Gabriel Rockhill at you.
"You lose credibility when you make a thesis statement I don't already agree with!"
It was more "you lose credibility when you make a grotesque thesis statement, both in substance and on the form".
The form is sufficiently obvious I suppose. If I call you an edgy moron even before you disagree with me, you're not exactly looking for a nice conversation.
On the merits of the existence of authoritarianism, dismissing the work of someone like Adorno - just like that - is genuinely hilarious.
"I, the arbiter of credibility, have decided this claim is self-evidently ridiculous for reasons I don't need to explain"
Hannah Arendt
Lol, of course
I think this comes from Giles in the novelization of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not from Arendt. But easy to confuse when you have read neither
*weakest
Ha! They told me the odds of winning the lottery were infinitesimal and yet I have been called a lib on lemmy.ml. Nobody will believe me.
my bad, i'll fix it
I even fixed the spelling!
Wait, now this needs some clarification. Is it anti-communists as someone who is against communists or anti-communists as people who share a hatred of communism? Because one might be downright libelous
But thanks for your reactivity, I feel like lib is a bit lazy
Just someone who is against communism. I did not intend to make it seam you hated us.
That's an amazing counterpoint, thank you.
No worries. Dismissing the very concept of authoritarianism right off the bat was a nice move, too.
Do you dismiss the very concept of Badguyism?
Libs being confronted with the fact that propaganda terms they've memorized are meaningless never gets old.
You still believe in the existence of propaganda or even the concept of memory? Smh, you need to break the chains of bourgeois discourse and ascend to ad hominem attacks
I wish you Reddit losers would actually learn what an ad hominem is before you spew it everywhere.
Thank you for providing much needed levity in this thread.
If you don't like the word authoritarian why did you use it? And why did you get defensive when someone agreed with your image.
Even sarcastically I don't see what you goal here was. To say the us and the soviet union are similarly inhumane? Or the us is slightly worse?
Ok, and?
I was being sarcastic and poking fun at people using it. Congrats on taking the bait. What the picture says is that the US which libs championed as a 'free and enlightened society' in the 90s was incarcerating more people than USSR did during Stalin years. Rate of incarceration in USSR dropped significantly after that while it remains as high as ever in the US today.
Aww, is google banned at the troll farm?
For a year Soviet Union was executing ~1000 people per day, every day. But yeah sooooo good.
In a world that already grows enough food for 10 billion people, 10 million people starve to death every year, a situation that can only exist because the US Empire enforces that injustice with absolutely staggering violence. You literally cannot conceive of how much blood is spilled across every single day of 'peace'. There has never been a more bloodsoaked entity than the United States.
What year? It wouldn't happen to be immediately before, during or post ww2, would it? Because west Germany and the Gladoi-style nazification of capitalist Europe are the perfect counterpoint to show why you have to execute nazis.
They probably thought of Warhammer 40000 where 1000 psykers per day are sacrificed to the God Emperor, idk.
Or maybe USA where around 1000 people per day was dying from avoidable pandemic so that the line could go up and the answer from government was to stop counting the dead.
Yeah which year mfer?
You literally cannot help but call women misogynistic slurs can you.
I hope you get hit by a truck. Sincerely.
I guess that’s your method of coping with truth.
Go back to Reddit you insufferable fucking dork.
Lol you're gonna be one thousand and one if you keep being so cringe, now run along and make a post crying about how the terrorist commies threatened you
You have yet to even provide a single source for your claim you just reacted to us pointing out this is usually pulled from WWII and includes Nazis. You just immediately lashed out with a slur. Calling you "mfer" for clearly making up Nazi apologia is not at all the same as calling a woman a c*nt in anger at being asked for a source.
Thank you for providing concrete example of why gulags will indeed be necessary after a socialist revolution.
I know you bunch are blood hungry, g'wan, do your thing and defend 1000 execution a day for over a year. Цьомкі-бомкі.
ok there fash
Which year?
So Nazis, then. Good riddance.
Yeah because there totally wasn't Nazis or Nazi adjacents in 1937-1938. Don't come in here telling us to "read just minimal tiniest fraction of history" when you're quoting fucking Wikipedia.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/prisoners-1996
Only 1.1m
The meme states number of incarcerated in that year, not number of people sentenced that year. You are just a reactionary grasping at anything to absolve the US of its fascistic history.
This report combines yearend population counts from the annual published reports into a single table. [1988, page 1]
The total number of prisoners under the jurisdiction of Federal or State adult correctional authorities was 1,182,169 at yearend 1996 [1997, page 1]
It is actually the population count not people sentenced.
Yeah that is what I was saying. The number they pulled out of their ass to "refute" the total prisoner count was only the number sentenced in that year. I think if we tallied up total number of people simply jailed in that same year 5.5m would probably be right.
Introduction
In 1926 the Federal Government, in a statistical series called "National Prisoner Statistics," began keeping annual records of State and Federal prison populations. The series has been in continuous operation ever since. Published reports from the series are the source of national statistical information on prison populations in the United States.
Among the several continuously published measures of the prison population, one from the annual report is intended to provide a measure of the overall size of the prison population. This measure is the number of prisoners present in State and Federal prisons at the end of each year. Changes from one year to the next in the number of prisoners present at yearend reveal whether prison populations are Increasing, decreasing, or staying the same in the United States.
This report combines yearend population counts from the annual published reports into a single table (table 1). Table 1 shows the prison population of each State, the District of Columbia, and the Federal Government on December 31 of each year from 1925 to 1986.
Over the more than 60 years in which prisoner counts have been reported, definitions of included populations have occasionally changed, and published figures have been revised (see Methodology). Annual counts reported here are based on final revised figures and represent the most comparable data published
Table 1. Sentenced prisoners in State and Federal institutions on December 31, 1925-86 [excerpt]
| | 1950 | | :-------- | :-----: | | U.S. Total | 166,165 | | | |
Anyone placed in jail or prison is a prisoner and incarcerated. Imprisoned doesn't necessarily mean tried or sentenced, just jailed. One can be arrested and imprisoned without ever being charged with anything. It's actually super common in the US.
Reading comprehension clearly is not your strong suit either but I will give you the charity that english may not be your first language and you are not familiar with the terminology of the US carceral system.
Is one supposed to be better than the other?
One lifted millions of people out of abject poverty, provided them with food, housing, education, and healthcare, while the other has been terrorizing the world throughout its whole existence. But to an enlightened liberal these look exactly the same.
Would you say it is a good example of a communist state? Or at least, a good country that should have continued operating the way it did? More good than bad?
Having grown up in USSR, I would say that it was a good example of a socialist state. It was unarguably more good than bad, and anybody with even a minimally functioning brain can see that the collapse of USSR was a huge tragedy for humanity. But perhaps you see capitalist restoration in the eastern bloc as a positive?
meanwhile in the real world
I don't particularly care about the eastern bloc. I just usually hear people, even "communists" talk about Stalinism being a pretty bad thing.
It was correct of you to put communists in quotes there.
Why's that?
Because no actual communist would say anything of the sort.
