undefined | Better HN

0 pointshvs10y ago0 comments

It's a communist gov't. The people "letting the gov't decide" has little do with it.

0 comments

11 comments · 2 top-level

bigfudge10y ago· 7 in thread

No matter the history, using communist as a synonym for totalitarian is lazy.

No matter the history, using terms as they are applied in real life is generally accepted. The definition of communism means one thing, the real world applications of it are something else. How many communist governments have there been that weren't totalitarian?

bigfudge10y ago

As I implicitly recognised in my initial comment, the number of non totalitarian communist governments is small. Nonetheless there are plenty of people who self-identify as communist (e.g. in Greece) who don't advocate policies that require or imply totalitarianism. That's why the precision matters.

hackerboos10y ago

Well since Communism advocates a stateless (and classless) society there will probably never be one.

fineman10y ago

Well there aren't any actual communist governments, so there haven't been any totalitarian ones. :P

I agree, somewhat, about using vernacular, but that misses the point.

The USSR was no-more a communism because they said so than they'd have been a capitalism by saying so... You are as you do, not as you wish to be seen doing.

hodwik10y ago

In this case they're not totalitarian though. China is a Republic, it's just a Republic with a taller pyramid than our own.

You elect district leaders, who elect state leaders and the congress, and they elect the president and prime minister.

Technically, that's roughly the same system we have here with the electoral congress and faithless electors. The difference is that in the US, faithless electors are much less common than in China.

But you can look here and see that there is a history of faithless electors in the US too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector#List_of_fait...

China's system is actually not so different from ours was 150 years ago, so they're not that far off all-told. Or, actually, in a sense even more recently when the congress decided between Bush and Gore.

1 more reply

hguant10y ago

Communist governments, in order to function, pretty much have to be totalitarian - unless you can think of another way to have a one party system with complete control over the economy.

cosarara9710y ago

But not all totalitarian governments are communist. Can China actually be called a communist country?

fsloth10y ago· 2 in thread

I think you are trivializing thousands of years of history with this. China is ... china. They use the same alphabet they used when egyptians used hieroglyphs. The sensibilities of the chinese population are not about a people being dominated by a marxist tyranny. It's china being ruled as it has always been ruled - the dynasties have come and gone but the dynamics of government - and the cultural sensibilities which coexist with these - have co-existed longer than most western countries have a written history.

The communist party is just another dynasty in the long succession of dynasties. That they have a specific brand of ideology should not fool you - the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy than an ideological communist state.

humanrebar10y ago

> the current china is more of a pragmatic autocracy

Has there ever been a nominally communist state that wasn't a pragmatic autocracy? That seems to be the main criticism of communism... that it's impossible without immoral coercion of some sort.

fsloth10y ago

'Immoral coercion' makes it sound like a quick graft. I suggest it's more fruitful to compare countrys policies with the histories of government within the same region rather than other countries in different cultural regions. If you want to moralize this method makes it far easier to pinpoint the really bad apples.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse