User:RD/9k/totalitarianism (Q36,41)
Main entry
- totalitarianism -> after years and years of hearing this I honestly do not even know what this is. I can pick out the motif of a Generalized Dictator but what the
is Totalitarianism, really?
from everything I know, it seems to me like Totalitarianism is just the act of violating the principles of blue anarchism as an anarchism by creating more State and less anarchy than blue anarchism wants, and I feel like it's been specifically in response to that that Dugin and Putin have finally invented a fascism that doesn't qualify as Totalitarian because it lives in every individual rather than in the government. which would seem like exactly what you produce when you believe in blue anarchism, you put every country under natural selection to not develop monarchy and not develop Bolshevism but not develop a democratic republic because that can be subverted, and instead develop the most anarchic fascism rather than one that has any chance of being controlled or contained. if you haven't broken the rule of everything being contained in The State it must be okay!
Practical definitions
- totalitarianism / all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state (Mussolini) [1] -> see, it makes a lot more sense when you see the fascists define it. it comes across as total spaghetti when Liberal-republicans talk about it. but here I can actually begin to see the error. Mussolini talks about "the state" because that's what's familiar to him, the concept of kings or dukes being conflated with a population, so a population that is unified and 'strong' is in his mind necessarily connected with The State. but what he really wants doesn't actually require a State at all. the essence of this system is for all the individuals to be loyal to all the individuals and most importantly for all the individuals to commit to war to become 'stronger'. there doesn't have to be a State, there only have to be two countries or populations with gaps between them that hate each other and where one whole population is trying to conquer one whole population to harvest its land or people, which unfortunately will probably bring some benefit in further wars if for nothing else. the way this concept has been interpreted is almost quintessentially anarchist. it looks at two populations leaping over a gap to devour each other and assumes Government somehow did that just because there are loci of conjoined patriots. but Government doesn't cause warring states periods and it doesn't cause fascism. chunk competition causes fascism — the inability for individuals to normally grow or reproduce within a population without running into each other and the need for populations to collide and devour each other for that population to have space to expand. it's been said that society is a substance that can only be compressed so much before it rebels. at the bottom level, that also applies to human reproduction and the expansion of separated chunks to accumulate 'their own' wealth and growth. if for some reason the pieces of a country cannot grow, they simply pack into each other and then try to expand outward from the country's outer border so that the overall country can have more another way.
Lacan's model that people will all behave if you punish them enough for hurting each other and wave Freedom in their faces enough is dangerous because at a certain point it's going to generate empire because everyone is going to agree that it's morally acceptable to hurt people in other countries as long as they don't hurt anyone in their own country. the drive to hurt other people isn't an Attitude, it's a material contradiction, and it will start up again exactly outside the border inside which you have prohibited it.
so what is Totalitarianism? Totalitarianism is the status of being unable to work out internal contradictions as a population and shifting those contradictions onto other populations. I think there is quite a legitimate argument that the United States is already Totalitarian, if you specifically define Totalitarianism off Putin and Dugin as the need to grow by attacking other countries' socioeconomies or governments and the prohibition on any member of the population failing to be completely loyal to The People. how many times have you heard center-Liberals telling you you have to be loyal to Our Democracy? when center-Liberals are loyal to "Our Democracy" and right-Liberals are loyal to "America" it's the same entity. it's loyalty of all people to all people in the population with nobody allowed to leave it. which is the real definition of Totalitarianism when you clear away the anarchist. Totalitarianism has been defined such that anarchists, and ironically enough Communists, are the only people who wouldn't currently be in support of Totalitarianism because they would each actually be trying to break out of Our Democracy, while nobody else is actually trying to do that; when right-Liberals are serious about it they count as anarchists.
the use of "totalitarianism" carries the connotations that workers' states are bad because everyone is required to be loyal to the same population, that Duginism is bad because everyone is required to be loyal to the same population to carry out war, and also unintentionally that the United States is bad because in practice everyone is required to be loyal to everyone else in the United States and if you question that principle as a foundational principle there will be serious consequences. the only group of ideologies that comes out of this definition unscathed is anarchism, because anarchism specifically begins defining itself as the absence of an active authority that binds people all into loyalty to the same population, hopefully toward the end of preventing external or internal wars. - The United States was in Totalitarianism in 2015
Attempted definitions in fiction
- Totalitarianism is rule by 10 corporations / Totalitarianism is when 10 large corporations control the United States through a 1-party state (The Party) [2] -> this definition is a bit amusing because I feel like there's some chance if you look into how much power each corporation has in practice we'd already have been in Totalitarianism in 2010 even before Trump was elected.
- Totalitarianism is when the central government censors every thought and statement (1984)
- Totalitarianism is when the price of having a sovereign country and avoiding being a colony is that the government can kill people for treason (Animal Farm) -> Animal Farm is actually one of the best anticommunist fables because unlike all the others it does talk about two or three real-world problems that can actually be discussed: Pig states, warring Marxisms, and capitalist reversion. that said. it reads like one big argument that colonialism is freedom and any resistance to colonialism whether from Mao or Fanon or Abraham Lincoln against slave traders is a scourge on the earth. anarchists. you'll never ever ever ever ever stop "colonialism" if people believe Totalitarianism exists.
Totalitarianism and anarchism
- United States people are anarchists (1945-) / The United States has been an anarchist people since 1945; this is to speak of the time since 1945 and is not to imply that it either was or was not an anarchist people before that time -> 1945 was the approximate date Totalitarianism-proper died, paving the way for the United States to begin persecuting Communism under the false belief it was the same as fascism just because countries were united and not divided.
what this claim is saying is not that class rule went away but that anarchism gained control of the country anyway and in spite of the classes and specific ideologies inside it it became a "dictatorship of the anarchists"; all the ideologies in the country became subsumed into the greater aims of anarchism (blue anarchism?) similar to how all the ideologies and factions in China became subsumed into the greater aims of Deng Xiaoping Thought. center-Liberalism would be treated as an anarchism, Toryism would be treated as an anarchism, anarchism would be treated as an anarchism, Communism would be treated as a really bad anarchism, and they would all be judged and punished according to how well they functioned as anarchisms.
dictatorship of the anarchists + United States (1945-) = The United States has been an anarchist people since 1945.
dictatorship of the anarchists + United States (1991-) = The United States has been an anarchist people since 1945. - The concept of totalitarianism is harmful to anarchism -> think about it. if Totalitarianism is, in practice, the status of a population demanding complete loyalty and not allowing itself to be divided, and the true position of Marxist theorists in Third World countries is actually that nobody has much power over anyone else except Stalin or Deng that have a small amount of power from their expertise, anyone that believes in Totalitarianism is going to be predisposed to look at an anarchist "community" and decide that people are oppressed just because it's unified and anarchism appears to have an equal amount of power over everyone.
Totalitarianism is the primary definition of both freedom and usually-medieval government within anarchism and yet it should also be lethal to anarchism for anyone to believe it exists when you look at how intolerant real actual anarchists are of things that aren't anarchism, namely any form of Marxism that can't be coerced into the shape of anarchism. I don't know why it is that I haven't yet seen "black flags only" coerced into an argument that anarchists are Totalitarian. that's almost the exact logic that every First World country has used against Marxism, so why it would spare anarchism is beyond me. - The act of requiring everyone in a given population to tolerate a particular demographic identity forever is totalitarian -> people fear Marxism because when the population begins sublation and takes on new policies that the bourgeoisie will be phased out through steps like the NEP or simply not allowed any more, these transformations will be "extreme" and they will lead to Totalitarian control of people who for whatever reason are having problems with the transformations — Stalin puts everyone to work on the windmill, he kills you if you don't have loyalty to the population. in the same way, any transformation that is one-way and 'permanent' can bring on a similar panic.
Related
- Violations of a legal code have swatch colors -> if true, every person who takes the slightest step against Totalitarianism would belong to a specific ideology. there would be no way to resist Totalitarianism which would not be ideologically charged with the content of a specific sociophilosophy and specific new society.
Ideologies or fields
- (none)