Totalitarianism

[Sinister Intents]

Anarchy equating full communism, and communism is where the totality of the populace exerts hegemony. Everyone granted power because of their relationship to the mode of production being socialized. Freedom of association is necessarily totalitarian because it's the whole of humanity exerting power, it is where governance and the means of production are socialized allowing for true direct democracy which contradicts the totality of the minority exerting hegemony over the majority. In communism we embrace everyone as our family, our equals. Communism is necessarily totalitarian in favor of everyone having power over their own lives with their associations.

Current capitalist society is ruled a minority that exploits the majority, and coerces the majority into wage slavery. It has been described that we live under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The owning class controls the means of production i.e. land, productive facilities, natural resources, and so on. They utilize their private property to control society for their own benefit, and the majority below get to compete within this system as they're robbed by a minority of owners that legalize and justify their existence and justify the suffering below through laws which only attack the symptoms to blame the victims for their plight.

Couldn't it be said that all systems are naturally coercive, and authoritarian/totalitarian?

Edit: The title was a placeholder

[Tim Cornelis]

Totalitarianism =/= Totality. This etymological fallacy is used by the Bordigists to claim that they advocate "revolutionary totalitarianism".

You don't begin with how you define totalitarianism but you seem to have redefined it to mean something entirely vague, it having something to do with "totality". But if you want to use the term how it's used and defined, then no, there's no scenario in which communism or capitalism can be described as totalitarian.

There's a number of characteristics and features of totalitarianism. It seeks to control 'all' aspects of social and private life. What does this mean practically? Everything is made subservient to serving the state and the official state ideology which always involves some project of transformation (e.g. national revival as in the case of Nazi-Germany; re-Islamisation and establishing of the Caliphate as in the case of ISIS; or socialist transformation and creating New Soviet Man as in the Soviet Union). The type of art that is permitted is highly restricted, schools are transformed into vehicles of public transformation through indoctrination of the official state ideology, youth clubs are founded to indoctrinate the youth, sports, entertainment, politics, economics, all aspects of life are under the control of the state and are directly subservient to it and its ideology. Popular legitimacy of the system of government is carefully engineered through systematic dissemination of propaganda, all political pluralism is repressed, and there is controlled (that is, no plurality or criticism is allowed) popular mobilisation through various organisations. And so forth.

On this basis we can say that communism is not totalitarian. There is no state that says whether or not you can make abstract art or impressionist art, there is no state that drafts children into a militaristic-esque Jugend-organisation of some kind, there is no state that dictates the goals of the economy through economic coercion, there is no state period. Etc. etc.

Neither is, say, Lukashenko's Belarus totalitarian. Some opposition groups are formally allowed as long as they keep relatively silent, artists are allowed to make the art they want as long as it doesn't openly criticise the regime. Basically, if you are not politically active you can pretty much evade state interference in your everyday life for the most part. This is not the case in totalitarian regimes.

Capitalism or capital is also not totalitarian because it refers to a system of government.

[RedWorker]

Capitalism or capital is also not totalitarian because it refers to a system of government.

I agree, but couldn't capitalism and bourgeois society be said to always require some degree of authoritarianism, at least in practice? Especially as revolutionary actions become more common.

[Sinister Intents]

I agree, but couldn't capitalism and bourgeois society be said to always require some degree of authoritarianism, at least in practice? Especially as revolutionary actions become more common.

Capital accumulates into fewer and fewer hands, thus more people become impoverished in time. Fascism would be capitalism in decay with imperialism being an extension of capital into foreign markets. Coercive tactics will certainly become more necessary because the pyramid must funnel to the top because more and more money needs to be put into the system from peoples' labor and from natural use values to be converted to surplus value to be extracted. The falling rate of profit will lead to the necessity of the capitalists joining the capitalist system further with the state where a minority exerts the totality of its rule. With increasing antagonisms from the minority onto the majority, which keeps growing, so will cone more individuals reacting against the coercive system.

[G4b3n]

The language of liberty vs authority mostly amounts to liberal nonsense to begin with. There is no liberty in a class dictatorship. The term "totalitarian" is an invention of bourgeois academia in the 1950s made to equate Stalinism with Fascism. In does not care to take into account that the force and violence inherent to capital can dominate one's life to the very same if not greater degree than a so called "authoritarian" state can, it only cares to serve its purpose, to delegitimize what it it sees an ideological threat to the current social order, so the notion of "totalitarian" is inherently reactionary.

[Sinister Intents]

The language of liberty vs authority mostly amounts to liberal nonsense to begin with. There is no liberty in a class dictatorship. The term "totalitarian" is an invention of bourgeois academia in the 1950s made to equate Stalinism with Fascism. In does not care to take into account that the force and violence inherent to capital can dominate one's life to the very same if not greater degree than a so called "authoritarian" state can, it only cares to serve its purpose, to delegitimize what it it sees an ideological threat to the current social order, so the notion of "totalitarian" is inherently reactionary.

Wouldn't then, anti-authoritarianism be liberal, and tied to petit bourgeois ideology like pacifism is?

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

The concept of totalitarianism actually originates with fascism itself. In fact the word itself was coined in the infamous fraud Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was given its modern connotation by Giovanni Gentile, the self-described 'philosopher of fascism' as a good thing in his view.

"Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.", as Mussolini famously said.

Totalitarianism is a very real phenomenon. It is when the State itself becomes the sole ruler of everyone and everything. It need not even have a central ideology. Totalitarianism itself is a phenomenon that can happen regardless of ideology. It is fundamentally anti-Marxist.

[JayBro47]

"Soviet leader Stalin put forth a proposal for a reunification and neutralization of Germany, with no conditions on economic policies and with guarantees for "the rights of man and basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, press, religious persuasion, political conviction, and assembly" and free activity of democratic parties and organizations."

[JayBro47]

Let's actually discuss this G4b3n. The elements of Fascism that are considered similar to Stalinism (big statist, "radical," expansive) have to be sifted from the fact that Fascists were racists and ultra-nationalists and anti-semites, while Stalinism was not really antisemitic except for perhaps 1952 (which was considered "anti-Zionist" but had antisemitic elements maybe.) Even Italian Fascism wasn't racist like Nazism. One could say with Stalinism it fought Nazism, it voted for Israel in 1947 (not discussing whether this was because they thought Israel would "turn out different" or for geopolitics, or because they thought Zionism at the time was progressive, or to gain sympathy of Jewry) which isn't itself "anti-Jewish" obviously, that Stalin himself criticized the Romanians in 1947 for antisemitism in the Communist Party and it participated in the Nuremberg Trials. Stalinism internationalized in 1947 with the Cominform, while Socialism-In-One-Country was also multi-ethnic/multi-national/multi-racial, although there could have been elements of Russian Nationalism.

Zizek said this: which could apply before 1952 I think.


"Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear. Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews."

"Is the minimal difference in politics not the one between Nazism and Stalinism? In a letter to Herbert Marcuse from 20 January 1948, Heidegger wrote: "To the serious legitimate charges that you express 'about a regime that murdered millions of Jews...' I can merely add that if instead of 'Jews' you had written 'East Germans,' then the same holds true for one of the allies, with the difference that everything that has occurred since 1945 has become public knowledge, while the bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from the German people." [5] Marcuse was fully justified in replying that the thin difference between brutally ex-patriating people and burning them in a concentration camp is the line that, at that moment, separated civilization from barbarism. One should not shirk from going even a step further: the thin difference between the Stalinist gulag and the Nazi annihilation camp also was, at that historical moment, the difference between civilization and barbarism."

[Guardia Rossa]

Problem is not whether stalinism or nazism are the same: totalitarianism can be used a reactionary weapon but it is correct (Not right, only correct) one, as long as it keeps itself only in the sense of "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

This is what Marxists.org says about totalitarianism in its encyclopedia:


Totalitarianism is the form of government in which the ruling party (https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/o.htm#political-party) penetrates the entire population and uncompromisingly enforces conformity to the party line in every aspect of life without exception.
The term was coined by Mussolini (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mussolini/works/fascism.htm) in the early 1920s to describe his own fascist state in Italy: “All within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.” Victor Serge (https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/s/e.htm#serge-victor) was the first to use the term to describe Stalin’s Soviet Union, in a letter written in 1933 before his arrest by Stalin (https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/s/t.htm#stalin-josef). Stalin’s regime is probably the most effective totalitarian regime in history, and this arises from the fact that it grew inside the party of the most irreconcilable opposition. For this reason Stalinism (https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/s/t.htm#stalinism) lasted longer and was more total than fascism. But fascism and Stalinism shared in common (i) that they rested on absolute terror, and (ii) that they based themselves on mass movements which were able to extend into the heart of every household.

[RedMaterialist]

Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism that it derives from capitalist imperialism and modern anti-semitism. She was wrong about the anti-semitism, but she was exactly right, in Marxist terms, that world, global, i.e., total capitalism leads inevitably to the totalitarian society. Her basic point about Hitler and Stalin was that they intended to conquer the entire world, therefore they were total-itarian.

Hitler, however, wanted to conquer the world for the German, nationalist middle class, which meant he wanted to destroy big capital and the working class, leaving the petit-bourgeois in power; whereas Stalin wanted, as he said many times, to bring socialism to one state. (Interesting about Arendt, she did not mention Stalin, I think, in her original edition. It was only in the later editions that she tried to equate Stalin with Hitler. My view is that McCarthyism frightened her into making an anti-communism argument.)

Arendt never said what would happen if unobstructed capitalism took over the entire planet. I would say we are watching it happen right now. She would probably be a neo-liberal today.

The proletarian dictatorship will also be totalitarian because it too must conquer the entire planet in order to destroy the capitalist classes. However, the difference is that once classes are destroyed there won't be a need or basis for the existence of any state, dictatorial, authoritarian, totalitarian, democratic republic, or otherwise. Including anarchy, also a type of state.

And the liberals complain about the "total" state controlling every part of a person's life? The US government collects more information about more people than any dictator in history ever dreamed was remotely possible.

Every keystroke entered everywhere on every kind of electronic device on the planet is now stored in a gigantic complex in Utah. And if you showed up one day to protest outside the fences of that complex what would happen to you? You would be disappeared into the belly of the US prison system.

[RedMaterialist]

T
Totalitarianism is a very real phenomenon. It is when the State itself becomes the sole ruler of everyone and everything. It need not even have a central ideology. Totalitarianism itself is a phenomenon that can happen regardless of ideology. It is fundamentally anti-Marxist.

What, then, is the difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the totalitarian proletariat state?

It would be nice if the proletariat could destroy the capitalist state by imposing the pretense of a democratic republic. Somehow I don't think Hillary Clinton and the Pentagon are going to agree to that.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

What, then, is the difference between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the totalitarian proletariat state?

It would be nice if the proletariat could destroy the capitalist state by imposing the pretense of a democratic republic. Somehow I don't think Hillary Clinton and the Pentagon are going to agree to that.

Other than the fact that the DOTP is inherently democratic, whereas a totalitarian state is fundamentally undemocratic, the biggest difference is that a totalitarian state is ruled from above by a small elite, through universal terror and strict control of both personal and public opinion.

[RedMaterialist]

.... the biggest difference is that a totalitarian state is ruled from above by a small elite,, i.e., through the party ...
through universal terror i.e., "We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror..."
and strict control of both personal and public opinion...", control of the personal and public opinion of the bourgeoisie.

The real issue is, can the modern capitalist class be destroyed without the repressive force of the proletarian state? I don't see any evidence that it can.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

I'm not a Marxist-Leninist, RM. If you're attempting to make your argument on that pretense, I'm afraid you're going to fail.