The Chinese government has built up the world’s largest known online disinformation operation and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses—at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found.
The onslaught of attacks – often of a vile and deeply personal nature – is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show.
The US State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world’s information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping. On Wednesday, President Biden is due to meet Xi at a summit in San Francisco.
Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs. They say it’s all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia.
Communism weds its system of government with its economic system pretty inseparably. I’m not sure how you’d set up a communist economy without a communist government to manage it. As for the communism/dictatorship chicken-and-egg problem, I’m not sure it really matters when communism predisposes itself so readily to authoritarianism that a dictator is a foregone conclusion.
Well I ask these cause authoritarianism seems counterintuitive to the main philosophy around Marxism. Saying “the proletariat should have greater value and power in a business, since they’re doing the actual labor”, but then rolling over and accepting a dictatorship where the populace has no political say seems nonsensical.
Hence why I suspect the authoritarianism must have come first. So I can’t necessarily agree to “communism predisposing itself to authoritarianism” since it doesn’t make sense for a True-Marxist society to want to accept that sort of government.
As for how to set up the government in a communist-economy state: probably more of a Republic. People elect multiple representatives, and these representatives meet and decide on policies for the country and how to run it
A one-party system is inherently authoritarian; that’s what predisposes communism to becoming a dictatorship. Communism starts with the premise that the old regime needs to be violently overthrown. I don’t know how much clearer a line towards authoritarianism you can get.
I think maybe starting with Leninism, what youre saying may be true, but not with Marxism. I think this comment explains it a bit well:
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So the original Marxist idea would lead to withering-away of government, and thus zero parties, not one-party authoritarianism. But due to all the authoritarian implementations, people think of states like the USSR when they hear/see communism
That communist ideal has never been achieved and there are plenty of good reasons to expect it never will be. Communism in the purest sense (a government-less society) has only ever been shown to work in relatively small communities. I don’t think it could ever work on the scale of a nation state.
So, for all intents and purposes, the transitional one-party government system is the only real communist system. That’s what I criticize, and anyone who champions this fantasy of a government-less society—I’m sorry, but I just think that’s deluded.
I’m not sure how many times people have to point out that true communism is stateless for it to stick.
It’s never been achieved, and there are so many good reasons to believe it never will be, so who cares? The transitional phase of communism is actually the end one, so authoritarian rule for life. Great fucking system.