Why insist that the US being authoritarian and exploitative of the global South is an unreasonable position? The way I see it, you’re just trying really hard to make this artificial separation between “authoritarian” countries that aren’t even defined in any coherent way, and democratic Western countries. What is it about the US, with the highest prison population in the world, a rampant surveillance state, and police violence every single day that is better than a country like Iran?
In this comment you give the reason “it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world.” I’m not going to deny that.[1] But that has nothing to do with “authoritarianism.” The US could be the wealthiest country in the world where 70% of the population lives much better lives than the vast majority of the rest of the world. That still wouldn’t make the US a country that isn’t authoritarian, so really when you attack countries like Iran or Turkey for being authoritarian but defend the US, you are using a double standard. If you’re authoritarian and rich, that’s fine, but authoritarian and poor is a cautionary tale?
Furthermore, in the case of Europe, you’re failing to appreciate the long arc here. You’re talking about the neo-fascist parties (I assume you mean parties like AfD and Orban’s party in Hungary) as if they were uniquely the problem. But we can all plainly observe that the liberal, so-called “democratic” European parties have no problem at all committing genocide. They have no problem at all beating up protesters who call for an end to military aid to Israel. The ease with which they arrived at this position, of using violence to shut down popular support for ending genocide, should make you question whether one really has to be “blinded by ideology” to say that authoritarianism is just as present in Western “democratic” countries as it is in the developing world. Are you really confident that as climate change gets worse and worse, European “democracies” aren’t going to go fascist and start putting climate refugees in concentration camps, instead of drowning them in the Mediterranean?
Some people in my instance have been trying to argue against that point, but I honestly think that there’s a contradiction many leftists are bad at confronting, where they simultaneously believe that capitalism is an absolute evil that has never done anything good for anyone except for the top 0.001%, but at the same time the reason people in the imperial core accept capitalism is because they benefit from capitalism? ↩︎
What is it about the US, with the highest prison population in the world, a rampant surveillance state, and police violence every single day that is better than a country like Iran?
You can’t be serious. Iran checks all the marks of a dictatorship: there is an unelected leader, it’s a theocracy, there’s full control on media, they arrest journalists and whoever opposes to leader, they repress the protests with violence…
I’m not a fan of the US, but it would be dishonest to put them on the same level.
Women lost the right to abortions in the US very recently because the religious ghouls in the Supreme Court, who are all unelected leaders, decided against it. This is also the reason the US has extremely weak environmental protections, and many other problems that plague US politics.
there’s full control on media, they arrest journalists and whoever opposes to leader, they repress the protests with violence…
Other than full control of media, how does this not describe the US?
The Supreme Court is appointed by the President and the Senate, both elected democratically. Also the Supreme Court is part of the Judiciary power which is rarely directly elected. Judges do not make the laws but can give binding interpretations of existing laws or sentences. I can agree with you that the Supreme Court may have a political bias, but it’s not supposed to be ideological.
There are reports about press freedom. It’s not 100% in the US, actually the score is quite low for a western country, but it’s not as bad as in authoritarian regimes.
SCOTUS is democratic because the guy who was president 30 years ago got to make a lifetime appointment of a supreme court justice that makes decisions that affect people who weren’t even alive when they were appointed? You have an extremely low bar for what counts as “democratic.” If your standards are that low, you could even argue that because most people in Iran are Twelver Shia and the Ayatollah is the leader of Twelver Shiism, that’s democracy.
Again, every single state will prosecute destabilizing behavior. Press freedom is gonna be better in wealthy western countries because a few bad news stories don’t destabilize the country the way they do in the developing world. As I pointed out, the way the US reacted to events that actually do have the potential to destabilize the country shows that it is exactly the same as the so-called “authoritarian regimes” and this is also true of liberal European countries.
I understand your objection. I hope you understand that appointing judges is a strategy to guarantee their independence. Of course that presumes a level of moral integrity that not all presidents have, which is a weak point.
The representatives that people can vote for are already selected for by the bourgeoisie. Both parties represent capital, not the worker. It’s meant to give the impression of democratic input while maintaining the same brutal system of capitalism. Same with the press, it’s only “free” so far as the wealthy can buy and use it however they like.
All states are authoritarian. What matters is which class is in control of the state, the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie. In the US, the imperialist bourgeoisie rule with an iron fist.
So every candidate of every party in every country is just a puppet of the capitalist overlords that rule the world and occasionally concede small victories to the blue collars to create the illusion that they are in charge. There is no way out through the system, because it’s all rigged.
Something like that?
Then I presume that you advocate for the proletarian revolution but are unable to carry it on because the majority of folks is too hypnotised to act.
For starters, there are several countries where the proletariat is in charge, like the PRC. It isn’t every country that is under a dictatorship of capital. Secondly, there are worker parties like PSL in the US that aren’t just the state arm of capital. All states are is the monopoly on force to be exerted to carry out the will of the ruling class, in capitalism these are going to inevitably be under the thumb of capital. The purpose of the state is to retain capitalism and crush opposition.
I do argue for revolution, yes, but “brainwashing” doesn’t exist. There isn’t this conspiracy-theory level hypnosis going on. Workers in the west share in the spoils of imperialism, as imperialism decays and disparity rises, radicalization increases. This pushes revolution to the forefront over time.
China is governed centrally by the party. It’s not the communist utopia that some left-wing imagine it is. Don’t get me wrong, they are achieving impressive results, but it’s also a regime. I know some Chinese who ran away, and their stories are horrible.
If you want my 2-cents, at least in the EU, very few care about the economic dimension of politics. Capitalism and Socialism are separated by a blurred line now, with the right and the left proposing very similar models. Nobody today would really like any of the two extremes. The battle, imho, is now more between progressivism and conservatism.
The PRC is indeed governed centrally by the CPC, the party of the proletariat. Nobody said China was a “utopia,” you seem addicted to making strawman arguments. In fact, Marxism is anti-utopian, you continue to make arguments up in order to prove your baseless points. Also, “regime” just means “government you don’t like,” it isn’t a physical thing. Some Chinese people don’t like their system, but over 95% approve of their government.
The EU is thoroughly and entirely capitalist. There is no socialism in the EU. Capitalism is a mode of production characterized by private ownership of the large firms and key industries, while socialism is characterized primarily by public ownership of the large firms and key industries. The “right” and “left” that you speak of are only that way relative to each other, when overall they are both on the right. Further, the EU relies on imperialism in order to fund their safety nets. The fact that the EU has a relatively small left and a huge right does not improve your stance.
I really think you need to take a step back and familiarize yourself more with the arguments your opponents are making. You seem to only strawman, you don’t actually know what us leftists want.
unable to carry it on because the majority of folks is too hypnotised to act.
Where I am, the problem is not that people are too “hypnotised” or propagandized to act. The problem is that every time we have tried to establish our sovereignty the US has violently suppressed us.
Most recently we had a massive protest movement that went absolutely nowhere because it wasn’t organized with anything resembling a coherent leadership; if the various previous attempts at organizing the people hadn’t been destroyed by the US or the colonial government, maybe it could’ve been productive.
Generally, our views on why revolutions haven’t been successful are a lot more nuanced than “people are just too brainwashed.” A lot of us believe that brainwashing itself is not real and it’s just a concept that serves to obscure the real sociological phenomena that prevent class consciousness and revolution.
Why insist that the US being authoritarian and exploitative of the global South is an unreasonable position? The way I see it, you’re just trying really hard to make this artificial separation between “authoritarian” countries that aren’t even defined in any coherent way, and democratic Western countries. What is it about the US, with the highest prison population in the world, a rampant surveillance state, and police violence every single day that is better than a country like Iran?
In this comment you give the reason “it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world.” I’m not going to deny that.[1] But that has nothing to do with “authoritarianism.” The US could be the wealthiest country in the world where 70% of the population lives much better lives than the vast majority of the rest of the world. That still wouldn’t make the US a country that isn’t authoritarian, so really when you attack countries like Iran or Turkey for being authoritarian but defend the US, you are using a double standard. If you’re authoritarian and rich, that’s fine, but authoritarian and poor is a cautionary tale?
Furthermore, in the case of Europe, you’re failing to appreciate the long arc here. You’re talking about the neo-fascist parties (I assume you mean parties like AfD and Orban’s party in Hungary) as if they were uniquely the problem. But we can all plainly observe that the liberal, so-called “democratic” European parties have no problem at all committing genocide. They have no problem at all beating up protesters who call for an end to military aid to Israel. The ease with which they arrived at this position, of using violence to shut down popular support for ending genocide, should make you question whether one really has to be “blinded by ideology” to say that authoritarianism is just as present in Western “democratic” countries as it is in the developing world. Are you really confident that as climate change gets worse and worse, European “democracies” aren’t going to go fascist and start putting climate refugees in concentration camps, instead of drowning them in the Mediterranean?
Some people in my instance have been trying to argue against that point, but I honestly think that there’s a contradiction many leftists are bad at confronting, where they simultaneously believe that capitalism is an absolute evil that has never done anything good for anyone except for the top 0.001%, but at the same time the reason people in the imperial core accept capitalism is because they benefit from capitalism? ↩︎
You can’t be serious. Iran checks all the marks of a dictatorship: there is an unelected leader, it’s a theocracy, there’s full control on media, they arrest journalists and whoever opposes to leader, they repress the protests with violence…
I’m not a fan of the US, but it would be dishonest to put them on the same level.
Women lost the right to abortions in the US very recently because the religious ghouls in the Supreme Court, who are all unelected leaders, decided against it. This is also the reason the US has extremely weak environmental protections, and many other problems that plague US politics.
Other than full control of media, how does this not describe the US?
The Supreme Court is appointed by the President and the Senate, both elected democratically. Also the Supreme Court is part of the Judiciary power which is rarely directly elected. Judges do not make the laws but can give binding interpretations of existing laws or sentences. I can agree with you that the Supreme Court may have a political bias, but it’s not supposed to be ideological.
There are reports about press freedom. It’s not 100% in the US, actually the score is quite low for a western country, but it’s not as bad as in authoritarian regimes.
SCOTUS is democratic because the guy who was president 30 years ago got to make a lifetime appointment of a supreme court justice that makes decisions that affect people who weren’t even alive when they were appointed? You have an extremely low bar for what counts as “democratic.” If your standards are that low, you could even argue that because most people in Iran are Twelver Shia and the Ayatollah is the leader of Twelver Shiism, that’s democracy.
Again, every single state will prosecute destabilizing behavior. Press freedom is gonna be better in wealthy western countries because a few bad news stories don’t destabilize the country the way they do in the developing world. As I pointed out, the way the US reacted to events that actually do have the potential to destabilize the country shows that it is exactly the same as the so-called “authoritarian regimes” and this is also true of liberal European countries.
I understand your objection. I hope you understand that appointing judges is a strategy to guarantee their independence. Of course that presumes a level of moral integrity that not all presidents have, which is a weak point.
The representatives that people can vote for are already selected for by the bourgeoisie. Both parties represent capital, not the worker. It’s meant to give the impression of democratic input while maintaining the same brutal system of capitalism. Same with the press, it’s only “free” so far as the wealthy can buy and use it however they like.
All states are authoritarian. What matters is which class is in control of the state, the proletariat, or the bourgeoisie. In the US, the imperialist bourgeoisie rule with an iron fist.
So every candidate of every party in every country is just a puppet of the capitalist overlords that rule the world and occasionally concede small victories to the blue collars to create the illusion that they are in charge. There is no way out through the system, because it’s all rigged.
Something like that?
Then I presume that you advocate for the proletarian revolution but are unable to carry it on because the majority of folks is too hypnotised to act.
For starters, there are several countries where the proletariat is in charge, like the PRC. It isn’t every country that is under a dictatorship of capital. Secondly, there are worker parties like PSL in the US that aren’t just the state arm of capital. All states are is the monopoly on force to be exerted to carry out the will of the ruling class, in capitalism these are going to inevitably be under the thumb of capital. The purpose of the state is to retain capitalism and crush opposition.
I do argue for revolution, yes, but “brainwashing” doesn’t exist. There isn’t this conspiracy-theory level hypnosis going on. Workers in the west share in the spoils of imperialism, as imperialism decays and disparity rises, radicalization increases. This pushes revolution to the forefront over time.
China is governed centrally by the party. It’s not the communist utopia that some left-wing imagine it is. Don’t get me wrong, they are achieving impressive results, but it’s also a regime. I know some Chinese who ran away, and their stories are horrible.
If you want my 2-cents, at least in the EU, very few care about the economic dimension of politics. Capitalism and Socialism are separated by a blurred line now, with the right and the left proposing very similar models. Nobody today would really like any of the two extremes. The battle, imho, is now more between progressivism and conservatism.
The PRC is indeed governed centrally by the CPC, the party of the proletariat. Nobody said China was a “utopia,” you seem addicted to making strawman arguments. In fact, Marxism is anti-utopian, you continue to make arguments up in order to prove your baseless points. Also, “regime” just means “government you don’t like,” it isn’t a physical thing. Some Chinese people don’t like their system, but over 95% approve of their government.
The EU is thoroughly and entirely capitalist. There is no socialism in the EU. Capitalism is a mode of production characterized by private ownership of the large firms and key industries, while socialism is characterized primarily by public ownership of the large firms and key industries. The “right” and “left” that you speak of are only that way relative to each other, when overall they are both on the right. Further, the EU relies on imperialism in order to fund their safety nets. The fact that the EU has a relatively small left and a huge right does not improve your stance.
I really think you need to take a step back and familiarize yourself more with the arguments your opponents are making. You seem to only strawman, you don’t actually know what us leftists want.
Where I am, the problem is not that people are too “hypnotised” or propagandized to act. The problem is that every time we have tried to establish our sovereignty the US has violently suppressed us.
Most recently we had a massive protest movement that went absolutely nowhere because it wasn’t organized with anything resembling a coherent leadership; if the various previous attempts at organizing the people hadn’t been destroyed by the US or the colonial government, maybe it could’ve been productive.
Generally, our views on why revolutions haven’t been successful are a lot more nuanced than “people are just too brainwashed.” A lot of us believe that brainwashing itself is not real and it’s just a concept that serves to obscure the real sociological phenomena that prevent class consciousness and revolution.