Possibly because of the way he’s found his career. Paxton is very popular in France and was very instrumental in introducing liberal historiography into French WW2 history. For him to throw a bone to Marxists would be undermining how he earned a name for himself in the first place.
Personally I don’t believe the term authoritarianism is a useful description of anything. It’s too vague. I’ve seen one definition that’s like “a system that rejects the involvement of certain groups or interests from the political process.” Well that would be all socialist nations by default, since socialist countries by definition have denied political representation for the capitalist class in some way.
A better question is: How is a socialist country supposed to defend itself? It may not be possible for a country to achieve what Marx called upper-phase communism. It may not be possible for money, states, and all property to be abolished. That’s a question for the future. But when a country tries to curtail the power of capitalists, even attempts to create what’s known as true communism, they find themselves on the receiving end of an entire world against them. Sanctions, invasions, sabotage, spying. The shape that a socialist country will take is the result of its conditions. We’re living in a world dominated by capital and socialist countries represent a resistance against capital. If socialist movements are threatened, they either defend themselves or collapse.
You’re right that countries are dancing to the imperialists, because the imperialists hold the most power right now. That’s why an anti-imperialist movement is important, why a multi-polar world is important. Once the threat of imperialism subsides or is defeated, then I’m going to guess socialist countries will begin to express their policies differently.
I don’t think I’m comfortable with a central power having the authority to decide that certain groups don’t have rights, that power is too often abused widely.
Is there any society that isn’t this? A central authority deciding how to distribute rights is a governing body.
Socialism is a movement about denying the right of property to capitalists. That’s the entire purpose of the movement, to elevate working class people to the point of dominating society and to restrain or abolish the capitalist class. Landlords and capitalists shouldn’t be able to exercise the same rights they have in a liberal capitalist nation. Fascists, racists, transphobes, imperialists, etc shouldn’t have any civil liberties and should be subject to arrest, reeducation, or worse.
Yeah we’re still in a position where American fascism doesn’t even recognize itself in the mirror. It doesn’t realize it’s a movement that needs coherent aims. It’s still stuck in the American paradigm of politics as consumerism. A comrade the other day here said the explicit kind of American fascism is having a hard time getting off the ground because they refuse to adopt socialist rhetoric, like European fascist movements in the past.
Not sure how Cuban party dues work, but I do know there’s an application process and not everyone gets membership. Not sure how it works in regards to income level either
We don’t ignore it when a socialist country takes security measures, we say they’re an unfortunate reality of steps a country has to take in order to defend itself against external and internal aggression. Having your country go socialist earns you a lot of enemies and having a lot of enemies means you have to build up things like intelligence agencies, military apparatuses, and centralized agencies for combating sabotage and spying. These are things every country does, but western nations like to paint the security measures that socialist nations take as purely authoritarian, or needlessly tyrannical, or whatever other word gets thrown around. The nations yelling at socialist countries to change their domestic policies are usually the most imperialist and have the most to gain from socialist states being dismantled.
When your enemies are the global capitalists who operate global finance and industry, you should probably build up something to defend against it. Nukes tend to work as a deterrent, but they only go so far when you’ve also got an internal population that can present a security problem.
China’s taken the smartest strategy of all honestly. They’ve intertwined their economy with the imperial powers to the point it’s impossible to disentangle. The west can’t take violent action against China, since that’s where the industry is.
Also, so called authoritarian measures against our enemies are a good thing. It’s good when fascists, racists, and imperialists lose civil liberties like the freedom to express themselves, organize, fund politicians, or operate businesses.
We got told to cool it with the emojis on other instances, because there’s a Lemmy bug that makes our emojis look giant when we’re not on Hexbear. A lot of us think it’s funny though that our pig shit image takes up the whole screen. I want it to be larger.
Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them
I think something liberals trip on is that Hitler and Mussolini didn’t just attempt to suppress leftists. They did that after gaining power. Before gaining power they did any number of weasel-like things to convince the average person that fascists were in fact better socialists than the socialists. They appealed hard to working class interests, especially the ones with national chauvinist tendencies. They appealed to racism and scorned international cooperation. It didn’t help that the average person in this was often confused, coming out of the problems of post WW1 Europe, and mainly wanted a party that would put food on the table. The so called “beefsteak nazi” was a type of person who’d join the Nazis believing they’d put forward more genuine socialist policies. Beefsteak, red on the inside, brown on the outside. Then you had people like Ernst Röhm and Strasser, who identified publicly as socialist. Then once gaining power in 1934, they were killed.
Fascists don’t really have beliefs so much as they’re an emergency tool for capital to rid itself of its primary internal enemies.
He was a professor at Harvard most of his career, if that explains anything. He’s also on record calling the January 6th capitol thing a fascist coup attempt.
The people who hate America the most are probably Iraqis with dead children, or American indigenous people kept in poverty.
I know there are westerners who have a better conception of socialism and are more amenable to international working class efforts. I know a lot of them. I’m from Texas lol. I don’t like it when westerners, like fellow Americans, look down their nose at other countries. Calling a nation fascist because it doesn’t meet your western ideas of what socialist utopia is supposed to be? It’s bizarre to me. It always seems racist.
Westerners have a strong tendency towards national chauvinism and it’s rare to meet someone more internationally minded unless you go looking for them. You can probably agree with that.
You might be interested in Cuba’s representative system then. Politicians there aren’t allowed to propose policy or platforms, instead they act purely as representatives from community interests. Cubans can initiate votes of non-confidence in their politicians as well, at any point to have them removed from office. They don’t make great salaries either, and if they’re party members they’re required to pay regular dues. There aren’t term limits. I remember there was some kind of referendum a while ago about Cuban term limits and they were declared undemocratic, plus they didn’t make sense in regards to Cuba’s long term economic plans.
Cuba has one of the most robust democracies in the world. Their constitution was rewritten in 2019 and it was a countrywide effort, starting at things like local union halls and referendums sent to people’s homes.
Literally nowhere on earth has any substantial Trotskyites outside of maybe the UK and scattered parts of America. The closest thing to Trotskite revolutions were some contingents of the Spanish Civil War and one very odd Posadist group mentioned by Che during the Cuban Revolution. You’re allowed to like Trotsky’s writings, that’s fine, but Trostkyism itself isn’t anything of a serious movement.