Funnily enough both authoritarian communism and capitalism end up producing very similar societies - Vaclav Havel has a good insight to this in The Power of the Powerless
Comment on Depart, men of education.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 5 days agoThis isn’t capitalist doing capitalism.
It is fascist capitalist doing a dictatorship, which is eerily similar to some forms of communism
ZhprbE@lemm.ee 5 days ago
normal_user@lemmygrad.ml 5 days ago
Your conflation of fascist capitalism with communist governance reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of both systems.
Fascism emerges as capitalism’s most violent and repressive form, which is needed in a country where there is an opposition between different classes of people, when bourgeois power has to preserve and stabilize it’s rule over the people. In a capitalist state, the police is a repressive apparatus, ICE raids and deportations under Trump terrorize migrant workers, creating a climate of fear that discourage labor organizing and reduces to zero the migrant’s ability to fight against wage theft and unsafe conditions when they are already the most exploited. Also by giving power to white supremacist groups the state fragments class solidarity and such a divided people can’t possibly create any strong opposition to the government. Communism, by contrast, seeks to abolish classes entirely. The Berlin Wall and the GDR’s policies cannot be equated to capitalist authoritarianism without reckoning with the material conditions that necessitated them, which was not that of a class trying to force another into submission, but that of trying to resist against western sabotage. As you can find in this article by William Blum, the CIA and NATO actively destabilized East Germany for decades by poisoning food supplies, bombing infrastructure, and recruiting skilled workers educated at socialist expense. These acts of economic warfare forced the GDR to defend its sovereignty. These acts of economic warfare, forced the GDR’s government to increase it’s border security. The wall was a defensive measure that even stabilized the Cold War preventing a hot war between the two Germanies. it likely helped prevent a nuclear conflict. Meanwhile, the claim that socialist states resemble fascist dictatorships ignores historical reality. East Germany dismantled Nazism in it’s borders, while the FRG recycled Hitler’s bureaucrats and generals. You can find more about this in the book “Stasi State or Socialist Paradise?: The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It”, written after the reunification by someone who lived in East Germany. Socialist states like East Germany have historically restrict movement only insofar as imperialism really threatens their existence, not the vague “cultural” excuses Republicans use for stuff like the one OP posted about.