The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.
Once labeled in this way, people were placed in psychiatric hospitals where they could be held for long periods without legal protections. Harsh treatments were often used to break their resolve. The collaboration between state security organs and compliant psychiatrists created a system where political imprisonment was disguised as medical care, letting the Soviet regime suppress opposition while pretending it was addressing illness rather than silencing critics.
what they have in common here, historically, is authoritarianism. that’s the best word to describe this, whether it dresses itself up as left or right.
The point still stands that left wing authoritarians like Marxists and right wing authoritarians like Fascists tend to mirror each other in policy because there’s so much overlap with the authoritarianism.
They absolutely do not. As I said in my other comment, authoritarianism isn’t a leading feature of communism.
We can have a conversation about when and why it happens and what the nature of the authoritarianism is within communism…but it’s not a 1:1. Many Marxist scholars frequently argue that authoritarian communist states are not, in fact, communist because having an authoritarian class is antithetical to the concept. They argue what we saw in the USSR and what we see in China are hybrid systems where socialism is prioritized over capitalism, but they use fascist teqniques to maintain power. ie a country isn’t communist because they call their party communist. The Congo called itself a Democratic Republic…why didn’t anyone buy that label?
But authoritarianism is literally part of the definition of fascism.
This is an ignorant argument because the ideology of communism is not the communist utopia. These are two distinct concepts.
Marx and Engels were both notorious authoritarians who made fun of the pacifist socialists of their time for being too weak and cowardly, and they preached violence for as long as they lived, and this reflected in their works. The communist ideology as described by them has three stages:
Since communism is a utopia, it will never, ever be achieved, and so the communist ideology will always get stuck on stage 2 forever… and that’s exactly what we’ve seen in history. Every single communist attempt in history that has resulted in a successful violent revolution ended up being tyrannical hellhole with a regime that always swore that communism was around the corner but they’re not quite there yet.
The only people who try to conflate the communist utopia with the communist ideology are Marxists who are too disingenuous to admit that their crappy ideology is in fact inherently violent and inherently authoritarian. No amount of True Scotsman fallacies about “real” communism is going to change reality. Those were real communist attempts, those were real communist policies, and those were real communist principles at work. No, it’s not fascism, it’s communism. This is what the ideology results in every single time. No amount of attempts is going to change the inevitable outcome. People forget, but Fascism and Communism are sister ideologies. They’re not opposite ideologies, but adjacent ones.
No Of course the ideology of communism is utopian. All ideologies are utopian, don’t be silly.
No, they weren’t authoritarians. Insofar as they defined the transitional state as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”…there wasn’t a blueprint for the nature of that authoritarianism, how long the transitional state would last, and most importantly: the transitional state isn’t communism.
Marx and Engels were also drunks and capitalists…not being able to separate the men from the theory just tell me you want to shoot the messenger. You’re just choosing to define the communist state as the transitional state, and cherry picking the worst words you can find from the men and not the theories.
This “hellhole” you’re describing is your hyperbolic and incomplete take…it’s not true or universal.
Yes, I get it…leftists who strive for peace and class equality are both utopian ideologists and violent. The straw men critics build are just boring at this point.
Meanwhile, here in reality, socialism/communism/Marxism have seen different forms with different results, and you can’t just ignore that these regimes don’t operate in a vacuum…they’re polluted by capitalism and fascism whether or not they have failed, just like in The Soviet Union. They also don’t always fail…we have several ongoing projects that have resisted capitalism and fascism and are not particularly violent in their present state.
You’ve learned just enough about communism to say a bunch things you think are “sick burns”…but sound vapid and propagandistic to anyone who knows what they’re talking about. The theory, you’d know if you had any idea what you’re talking about, is a remedy for the collapse of capitalism…which we haven’t seen yet - and, by many indicators, we are progressing through late stage capitalism at the moment as monopolies coalesce, wealth is concentrated, and more and more people are driven into poverty/servitude.
Finally: the theory isn’t static. Marx and Engels are far from the only theorists. Sure…you can pretend nobody else has ever written on the subject or that the attempts at communism actually followed the “blueprint”…but that’s all bullshit. Every single country in the world had adopted varying degrees of socialism…because it works. Generally, the more a capitalist society is moderated by socialism…the healthier it is - because, at the end of the day, Marx was a capitalist who was a critic of capitalism and communism/socialism can’t exist without capitalism failing spectacularly…which is why we keep seeing it pop up in Latin America…nowhere has capitalism failed so badly as in those countries. The only reason capitalism got a stay of execution after its first collapse is because of the various New Deal type systems out in place around the world - but, as we’re seeing now, it was only temporary because it didn’t go nearly far enough.
i’m already agreeing with you, and elucidating the common element…
I wasn’t arguing, I was just restating the point you made