totalitarian?

[DoCt SPARTAN]

I hear this word a lot about Karl Marx, Che, & V for vendetta, Etc....
I'm not really sure what it means ...thx.

[Questionable]

It is used to describe a type of society where the state controls every aspect of a person's life, right down to their private thoughts.

A totalitarian society has never existed.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Totalitarianism is when a government controls absolutely everything both public and private. Think of Nineteen-Eighty-Four or The Hunger Games. Also, Marx, Che, etc were not totalitarian. People who say that are just spewing anti-left propaganda. People like Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Hitler, etc are examples of totalitarianism.

[Fourth Internationalist]

right down to their private thoughts.

I don't think it goes that far. Just as long as they obey and all that sort of stuff.

[Questionable]

I don't think it goes that far. Just as long as they obey and all that sort of stuff.

...which extends to their private thoughts, since thoughts become actions. Not that totalitarianism has ever existed in real life, but all the fictional examples you listed included societies that sought to control thought as well.

[Blake's Baby]

It was a word coined by supporters of Italian Fascism (as a complement) to describe their system. It more or less means that the state, as the highest expression of 'the nation', controls everything.

After WWII, it was applied by Western sources to both the Nazis and the Soviet Union, in an attempt to bundle them together and to demonstrate that 'communism' was the same as 'fascism'.

[Art Vandelay]

Totalitarianism doesn't exist. While varying levels of 'authoritarianism' may exist in a society, 'totalitarianism' is used by those who suffer from intellectual laziness and who are incapable of expending the proper amount of energy to properly engage with a system of governance and the material conditions which gave rise to it.

[Zostrianos]

The term is still accurate if you take into account its main descriptive characteristics, regardless of the specifics of its political system: a 1 party system; an all-pervasive ideology imposed on society into private life; use of propaganda and terror to enforce obedience. These points are common to a variety of political systems (different as they may be in other aspects): e.g. Nazism, imperial Japan, Stalinism, the Khmer Rouge system, Juche and various forms of theocracy (e.g. the Church in the middle ages and Renaissance, modern Saudi Arabia and Iran). Now whether it's correct to lump these different systems on the basis of those common traits is certainly up for debate, but if you choose to do so the term is definitely valid.

[Astarte]

"Totalitarianism" would simply mean the centralized, total and complete authority of a class in state power over the economic base and all political and cultural apparatuses and mechanisms of said society. Essentially, "complete total power" or "Totalitarianism" would demand a highly centralized superstructure which is proactive about making sure alternative pockets of power do not begin to form outside of the political center, or at the base level as an alternative mode of economic production. I believe "totalitarian" societies have existed and can exist, but I take issue with loosely throwing the word "totalitarianism" around, since, for example in the USA, capital clearly has total power over the economic base, but at the political level of the superstructure, there are two alternative bourgeois factions which vie for power over the state apparatus (democrats and republicans). Even in modern China, applying the word "totalitarianism" would be even more vague as different factions with competing interests rise and fall all the time in the CPC, and even still, at the economic base a good minority chunk of the means of production are still (officially at least) collective property - so in China total power does not even exist at the level of the economic base (although the hegemony of capital over collective property is abundantly apparent). So, I would agree the term "Totalitarianism" when used as a descriptive term of a society is largely a chimera, but that is not to say the term "total power" which it is often convoluted with does not have its proper uses and applications.

[Astarte]

(e.g. the Church in the middle ages and Renaissance,

I do not think the Church during the Middle Ages and Renaissance could be properly categorized as "totalitarian" as the places where it had jurisdiction over were actually highly decentralized economically and politically, and the power the Church had to enforce it's will over them was actually quite limited, as is evident with the case of England and the anti-Popes. The Church's power required for the rulers of large landed tracts to enforce its will - if they chose not to, all they could do is to request for other feudal lords to smite them. The Church during the Middle Ages really just acted as more of an arch-cultural/theological suzerain than a "totalitarian" state.

[DoCt SPARTAN]

Yeah now i understand the idea of totalitarianism. I don't know why but i heard it used in a negative way toward leftist heroes. Thanks

[Blake's Baby]

Probably because as far as it goes as a description of anything, it applies to Stalinist Russia and the DPRK as much as to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. If you idolise mass-murderers and praise repressive systems of government, then you're going to find other people criticising your 'heroes'.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

Probably because as far as it goes as a description of anything, it applies to Stalinist Russia and the DPRK as much as to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. If you idolise mass-murderers and praise repressive systems of government, then you're going to find other people criticising your 'heroes'.

Even if you don't, people will hurl this insult at you and your heroes if you/they advocate to plan the economy in any way. The book The Road to Serfdom by arch-capitalist theorist F.A. Hayek has become something of neoliberal orthodoxy, where he argued that totalitarianism in general is rooted in attempts to control the market.

[Blake's Baby]

True, the linking of the concepts of 'communism' and 'repression and mass-murder' is one of the worst consequences of the failure of the world revolution in the early 20th century.

[Red Commissar]

True, the linking of the concepts of 'communism' and 'repression and mass-murder' is one of the worst consequences of the failure of the world revolution in the early 20th century.

Yeah, it's the biggest mess we have to deal with. The phrase "command economy" that is often associated with totalitarian states is lumped in with socialism in general. It doesn't help when these right-wingers fall back on fallacies and start attacking examples of oppression in the Soviet Union, China, and the other self-declared socialist states (and not just in police state tactics but the socially conservative views common in those states) and hold them up as representative of all socialists.

It's almost impossible to go through any discussion of socialism in media, uni, what ever without some mention of "totalitarianism", "Command economy", and "police state".

The neoliberal conception of tying freedom of people to freedom of markets is beyond ridiculous and is an idealistic way of looking at how the world works.

[Blake's Baby]

...
The neoliberal conception of tying freedom of people to freedom of markets is beyond ridiculous and is an idealistic way of looking at how the world works.

I'd say it's ideological rather than idealistic in that it isn't just a non-materialist way of looking at the world, it's actively part of a set of beliefs that exist in order to justify and legitimise bourgeois domination.

[Astarte]

I'd say it's ideological rather than idealistic in that it isn't just a non-materialist way of looking at the world, it's actively part of a set of beliefs that exist in order to justify and legitimise bourgeois domination.

I would agree - it certainly has nothing to do with a class analysis of society - it is just a foundering buzzword of liberal sociology, which is highly charged with ideological urges to legitimize specifically bourgeois democracy over both Stalinism and fascism while conveniently convoluting the two to make them seem similar and or the same...