Communism: Discussion on practicalities

[Kubra]

consumer cooperatives are very different from workers cooperatives, man.

Worker coops come in different forms. Ranging from just having partial stock for some employees to having full ownership.

sure, but they all generally involve the workers having some sort of actual stake in the enterprise, while member cooperatives don't.

[Azalfia]

On the topic of market socialism, from my understanding, it doesn't really matter; capitalist markets will always be after the profit motive, which usually exports work and exploitation to the global south, by building massively successful social democracies in the west. See: 2013 Dhaka Clothing Factory Collapse. All the goods that were being produced are based out of western social democratic states, with the exception of the US goods produced.

On the possibility of a stateless, classless, society: the small functioning mass societies that have got rid of the state as much as his possibility (most notably Rojava and Zapatistas, both of which hold special places in my heart) are no major threat to global capital. They are anomalies, and while it's fun to think about it, I doubt how functioning these ideas are on a massive scale. I'd argue that an economy, with a mix of decentralized planning that could respond to the Economic Calculation Problem manually and or a AI economy, based around human need, not profits.

[Punished UMN]

The non-authoritarian nature of modern liberal democracies is largely a fantasy tbh. The United States has mass domestic spying, has assassinated its own citizens, at least a few police departments have used black sites, the Commerce Clause is used to grant the Federal Government control over nearly every aspect of life, social credit exists except the market controls it instead of the government (which is arguably even worse) etc etc. Pretty much everything people fear from places like China is already happening in the west or has happened in the past.

This pretty much, though I would caveat by saying that China as a model has discredited the previously accepted idea that democracy is necessary to become an advanced economy, and that, as such, the global bourgeoisie are more willing to inch their way towards something more closely resembling the Chinese system. Freedom cannot be realistically conserved alongside the existence of the modern state, for it to succeed, freedom must be guaranteed by collective action of the masses.

To very slightly get into the methodology of Marxism, but I think it's fairly clear that Leninism has failed to obtain the desired results, and with no other practical models having been implemented in the wake of Marxist revolutions, I'm somewhat skeptical as to whether Marxism is capable of guiding the revolutionary masses towards a stateless society.

[Sannyamathland]

This is a highly controversial and hotly debated topic, and I'm not really anticipating any university-level intellectual debating here, but I'd like to see how those who might support communism may react and respond to my doubts about their ideology so that I can get a better perspective. Spoiler alert: I am not a communist and am what some might consider "conservative", but I am willing to listen and hear out what supporters of this ideology have to say.

What is my interpretation of communism? I know that there are many variants and sub ideologies of communism, but from what I can gather from my reading (mainly the communist manifesto by Marx and some online articles. Very insufficient, I know.) the end goal of communism to establish a classless society; this is because communism I think views history and the world through the lens of a struggle between the proletarian and bourgeoise classes (actually just class struggle but at this stage it's between those 2). And herein is my first doubt. I don't get how a classless, stateless society might look like in practice. What does it mean for the state to simply wither away? Even assuming that is possible, a) I don't get how the system of economics might look like for central planning without government, and b) won't this power vacuum simply lead to other groups simply filling in and taking over? What does the sentence "to each person according to his need" mean in practice? Who defines this need, who gets to choose which people work in which area, and who gets to be in control of the means of production (I know it's the workers, but what does this look like in practice)?

The second thing I have with communism is that I think the road to getting there, while paved with good intentions, can lead to authoritarian states like those of China or the Soviet Union. By letting the government have complete economic power in the transitioning stages, doesn't it make it easier for the state to dictate which groups of people are and are not allocated resources and therefore open up greater possibilities of totalitarianism? I know this might not be the case 100 percent of the time, but from what we can gleam from Venezuela (where I'm not saying the problem is directly with socialism, but more of the fact that socialism created the environment for the corrupt rule of Maduro), China (former Maoist stronghold turned fascist state in my eyes), and the Soviet Union (which was not as authoritarian towards the final years but still more authoritarian than liberal democracies), and other communist states like Cuba...I think the trend is not coincidental.

But these are just my 2 cents. Feel free to respond, agree, disagree, argue, praise, jeer, compliment, and insult me in any way you like. I feel like I'm an open minded person (no guarantees), and I'll try to view things from both the pro-communist and anti-communist perspective.

*sniffs* Ah! I love the smell of a new Communist thread

Now, to answer your first question, I would say that this concept of a 'stateless society' might seem weird to most of the people. It seemed weird even to me, when I was first introduced to Marxist ideals. As many have said before me, stateless society does not necessarily means an anarchist society. Many people get confused between Marxism and Anarcho-Communism, because the line between these two ideals is very thin. According to Engels, the State will wither away after a brief period of dictatorship of the proletariat because then the means of production are owned by the people, and they will directly participate in the running of their own affairs, which affects all of them. The people shall do this spontaneously as because in a Communist society, no coercion shall be required to make the individuals behave in a particular manner. In short, it is a kind of direct democracy, with the absence of a powerful bourgeois class who use state machinery to oppress the people. This idea of a stateless society is very much related and interdependent to the idea of a classes society, which I'm going to discuss now.

The concept of a classless society is much more clearer and compact. It will just be a state, without any class divisions. There shall be no big fat landowning businessmen, who control the means of production and oppress the proletariats. All the means of production shall be owned by the working class. Thus, there shall be no class conflicts, and a classless society shall come into being. I know this is a highly highly basic definition of this complex ideology, but nevertheless, it shall help you to get an idea of what Marx meant by the term 'classless society'.

If you go strictly by the definitions of Marxist ideals, you will find that a Communist society is in fact, more democratic than a Capitalist society. This is because the people shall directly participate in the decision making, and there shall be no one controlling them as they own the means of production. Why then, people ask, do most Communist countries turn authoritative? Because a strong authoritarian leader is necessary to fend of dangerous capitalist invasions. Even though capitalist countries like the USA claim to be protecting democracy, what they actually do is trying to protect the needs of a few elites, who rule the country. Whenever a Communist country tried to follow Marxist principles and practise social democracy, USA has appeared around the horizon, and led CIA-sponsored coups to overthrow that government and establish a capitalist dictatorship. So, to tackle such capitalist invasions, one need a strong figure, like Stalin or Fidel Castro. Do I agree with everything that Stalin did? No, not at all. He was power hungry to a certain extent, but it was he who singlehandedly fended off all Capitalist invasions, and atleast tried to ensure that USSR remained a Communist State to the truest sense of the term. Did he succeed? Not really, but he did make an effort.

Now, may I be so bold to ask, are countries like the USA or the UK democractic in the strictest sense of the term? No they aren't, because they have failed to reduce inequality, which is one of the biggest tests of a democracy. Both the countries are ruled by a few elite group of people, and they pretend as if poverty just doesn't exist in these countries, however both they and we know that it does, yet we keep mum about it.

[Salus Maior]

The non-authoritarian nature of modern liberal democracies is largely a fantasy tbh. The United States has mass domestic spying, has assassinated its own citizens, at least a few police departments have used black sites, the Commerce Clause is used to grant the Federal Government control over nearly every aspect of life, social credit exists except the market controls it instead of the government (which is arguably even worse) etc etc. Pretty much everything people fear from places like China is already happening in the west or has happened in the past.

I'm no liberal democrat, but I think one right that we have in liberal democracies that China certainly doesn't have is that we can talk about it without being spirited away to jail. Nor are we living in some kind of government-established perception of reality with the erasure of major historical events (like Tiananmen).

We certainly have more wiggle room to make a better and freer society.

[Punished UMN]

The non-authoritarian nature of modern liberal democracies is largely a fantasy tbh. The United States has mass domestic spying, has assassinated its own citizens, at least a few police departments have used black sites, the Commerce Clause is used to grant the Federal Government control over nearly every aspect of life, social credit exists except the market controls it instead of the government (which is arguably even worse) etc etc. Pretty much everything people fear from places like China is already happening in the west or has happened in the past.

I'm no liberal democrat, but I think one right that we have in liberal democracies that China certainly doesn't have is that we can talk about it without being spirited away to jail. Nor are we living in some kind of government-established perception of reality with the erasure of major historical events (like Tiananmen).

We certainly have more wiggle room to make a better and freer society.

The reason we still have those rights is that they don't matter. Think about the Epstein thing for example, a massive (maybe even majority of society) basically believes that Epstein, a multibillionaire banker, was likely assassinated in prison by someone or a group of someones powerful enough to not get caught who could be exposed in the course of his trial, and the response from the public was to make memes about it and then forget and stop giving a shit. They don't suppress this speech because allowing it to disseminate poses no threat to the established order, it just lets the population get it out of its system. It's understandable why they don't really care about it, the public didn't do anything about the exposure of the government trafficking drugs into the US being largely responsible for the crime spike of the 80's and 90's (though the government likely murdered the guy who exposed it -- again, without the public really caring), and when COINTELPRO was exposed (including the assassination of prominent political activists by the FBI), nobody really cared. China suppresses news of its crimes because it (probably mistakenly) believes its public cares enough to oppose said crimes. The Western Democracies have been around long enough to know that actually, the public could really care less about how much shit you get up to as long as you let them vote for the people doing it.

[Kubra]

I'm no liberal democrat, but I think one right that we have in liberal democracies that China certainly doesn't have is that we can talk about it without being spirited away to jail.

In fairness, this recalls a radio yerevan joke about shouting "down with Reagan" in red square. Perhaps you ought to rephrase?

[Salus Maior]

I'm no liberal democrat, but I think one right that we have in liberal democracies that China certainly doesn't have is that we can talk about it without being spirited away to jail. Nor are we living in some kind of government-established perception of reality with the erasure of major historical events (like Tiananmen).

We certainly have more wiggle room to make a better and freer society.

The reason we still have those rights is that they don't matter. Think about the Epstein thing for example, a massive (maybe even majority of society) basically believes that Epstein, a multibillionaire banker, was likely assassinated in prison by someone or a group of someones powerful enough to not get caught who could be exposed in the course of his trial, and the response from the public was to make memes about it and then forget and stop giving a shit. They don't suppress this speech because allowing it to disseminate poses no threat to the established order, it just lets the population get it out of its system. It's understandable why they don't really care about it, the public didn't do anything about the exposure of the government trafficking drugs into the US being largely responsible for the crime spike of the 80's and 90's (though the government likely murdered the guy who exposed it -- again, without the public really caring), and when COINTELPRO was exposed (including the assassination of prominent political activists by the FBI), nobody really cared. China suppresses news of its crimes because it (probably mistakenly) believes its public cares enough to oppose said crimes. The Western Democracies have been around long enough to know that actually, the public could really care less about how much shit you get up to as long as you let them vote for the people doing it.

People literally stormed the Capitol over Qanon, and yet the establishment isn't sending 4Chan to prison.

[Nilokeras]

The non-authoritarian nature of modern liberal democracies is largely a fantasy tbh. The United States has mass domestic spying, has assassinated its own citizens, at least a few police departments have used black sites, the Commerce Clause is used to grant the Federal Government control over nearly every aspect of life, social credit exists except the market controls it instead of the government (which is arguably even worse) etc etc. Pretty much everything people fear from places like China is already happening in the west or has happened in the past.

I'm no liberal democrat, but I think one right that we have in liberal democracies that China certainly doesn't have is that we can talk about it without being spirited away to jail. Nor are we living in some kind of government-established perception of reality with the erasure of major historical events (like Tiananmen).

We certainly have more wiggle room to make a better and freer society.

Western democracies are just as much of an authoritarian class dictatorship as China is, they just have a different philosophy of control. In China the class in control are party bureaucrats and state officials - they naturally use state apparatuses to exert control, through censorship and detention. In Western democracies, bourgeois capital is in charge, and their centre of power is outside of the state. Their means of control are therefore more indirect - they construct laws via lobbyists designed to make unionizing more difficult. They engineer court precedents through amicus briefings and the cultivation of promising jurists to allow for them to pour capital into political races and squeeze out dissidents. If you're a Muslim or a black person and you cross the street wrong or complain about American foreign policy in a mosque you can find yourself in the middle of a snare designed to justify further surveillance and control. If you talk about unions in your workplace you can find yourself mysteriously fired and blacklisted with no recourse. The organs of control exist and are as powerful as in China, it's just that capital has found a neat way to convince people that the walls aren't even there - namely through racialized differences in the application of state force and in the starvation of dissent of funds, attention and networking potential.

[Fauzjhia]

I know.) the end goal of communism to establish a classless society; this is because communism I think views history and the world through the lens of a struggle between the proletarian and bourgeoise classes (actually just class struggle but at this stage it's between those 2).

This is actually a part of communism that's called historic materials, Marx believe that conflicts between social classes force society to evolve, conflict betweem slave and slaver owners, between serfs and lords and etc.
its very hard to define communism belief without passing by opposition to capitalism, to exploitation of the workers. but to be simple, I believe a communist system would be a system that try to avoid as much as possible exploitation.

And herein is my first doubt. I don't get how a classless, stateless society might look like in practice. What does it mean for the state to simply wither away? Even assuming that is possible, a) I don't get how the system of economics might look like for central planning without government, and b) won't this power vacuum simply lead to other groups simply filling in and taking over?

I don't believe its possible to achieve a communist system without having a state, so I cannot answer these question, some say the Catalans, the anarchist once achieved such a society
I believe we need a government to prevent humans from exploiting the environment without any remorse, since the wildlife cannot vote, nor complain about us. But we need a good government, not a corrupt government.

What does the sentence "to each person according to his need" mean in practice? Who defines this need, who gets to choose which people work in which area, and who gets to be in control of the means of production (I know it's the workers, but what does this look like in practice)?

Its means that people should not get so much resources, that they don't know what to do with these resources.
as for the 2nd elements. the workers should be in collective control of the means of production. In practice, it would the patron of the communist is chosen by the workers. Some say the cooperatives are good example of this.

The second thing I have with communism is that I think the road to getting there, while paved with good intentions, can lead to authoritarian states like those of China or the Soviet Union. By letting the government have complete economic power in the transitioning stages, doesn't it make it easier for the state to dictate which groups of people are and are not allocated resources and therefore open up greater possibilities of totalitarianism? I know this might not be the case 100 percent of the time, but from what we can gleam from Venezuela (where I'm not saying the problem is directly with socialism, but more of the fact that socialism created the environment for the corrupt rule of Maduro), China (former Maoist stronghold turned fascist state in my eyes), and the Soviet Union (which was not as authoritarian towards the final years but still more authoritarian than liberal democracies), and other communist states like Cuba...I think the trend is not coincidental.

This is not an accident, but it does not comes from Marx. this idea, come from Plato. its the allegory the cavern.
Allow me to explain. the people lives in cavern watching their own shadows like those are gods, and somehow, the philosopher is able to break from the groups, get out of the cavern, and discover the shadows are not gods, but created by sun. In which case the philosopher is an illuminati and the rest of the peoples are ignorant. Plato believes it should be the philosopher roles to become king and led his people, because he know the truth, unlike the rest of the ignorant masses

Those communist are like that, they believe the commons people are ignorant and that's its their responsibility to led the ignorant masses on the (road to communism) they oppose democracy, as the believe it would give power to an ignorant masses, that would vote against their own interest.

Of course, Plato was thinking about a philosopher when he was thinking about a leader, not an ideologue. so he would approve theses regimes.

these answer comes from someone who define themselves as communist.

[Salus Maior]

I'm no liberal democrat, but I think one right that we have in liberal democracies that China certainly doesn't have is that we can talk about it without being spirited away to jail. Nor are we living in some kind of government-established perception of reality with the erasure of major historical events (like Tiananmen).

We certainly have more wiggle room to make a better and freer society.

Western democracies are just as much of an authoritarian class dictatorship as China is, they just have a different philosophy of control. In China the class in control are party bureaucrats and state officials - they naturally use state apparatuses to exert control, through censorship and detention. In Western democracies, bourgeois capital is in charge, and their centre of power is outside of the state. Their means of control are therefore more indirect - they construct laws via lobbyists designed to make unionizing more difficult. They engineer court precedents through amicus briefings and the cultivation of promising jurists to allow for them to pour capital into political races and squeeze out dissidents. If you're a Muslim or a black person and you cross the street wrong or complain about American foreign policy in a mosque you can find yourself in the middle of a snare designed to justify further surveillance and control. If you talk about unions in your workplace you can find yourself mysteriously fired and blacklisted with no recourse. The organs of control exist and are as powerful as in China, it's just that capital has found a neat way to convince people that the walls aren't even there - namely through racialized differences in the application of state force and in the starvation of dissent of funds, attention and networking potential.

I don't think there is a precise science to compare one authoritarianism to another, so I find the idea that "Western democracies are just as authoritarian as China" as being suspect. Especially when, I imagine, you're not going to be hauled off to prison for making this post.

Hell, Kowani is black (not only that, but foreign born) and he calls out issues with the US all the time. If your assertion was true, why wouldn't he be disappeared by the CIA?

For the record, I'm not saying there aren't serious issues with the US and how it operates. It's not, however, equivalent to China. That's just gross exaggeration, and frankly near offensive in how "first world" it is.

[Conservative Republic Of Huang]

The non-authoritarian nature of modern liberal democracies is largely a fantasy tbh. The United States has mass domestic spying, has assassinated its own citizens, at least a few police departments have used black sites, the Commerce Clause is used to grant the Federal Government control over nearly every aspect of life, social credit exists except the market controls it instead of the government (which is arguably even worse) etc etc. Pretty much everything people fear from places like China is already happening in the west or has happened in the past.

I'm no liberal democrat, but I think one right that we have in liberal democracies that China certainly doesn't have is that we can talk about it without being spirited away to jail. Nor are we living in some kind of government-established perception of reality with the erasure of major historical events (like Tiananmen).

We certainly have more wiggle room to make a better and freer society.

No doubt liberal democracy is better than a nakedly authoritarian state, but liberal democracy is not all roses when it comes to freedom of thought. Schools drill into the children a triumphalist, nationalist version of history and worldview that uncritically accepts the state and that makes real, genuine dissent tantamount to heresy against the cult of the nation-state. We are taught that it is the end of history; that the neoliberal world order will and ought to endure to the end of time. I don't think I need to mention the apparatus of the media as a tool that buttresses the state. There is no need for directly coercive methods when the population has already been dulled to any possibility of a world beyond neoliberalism.

But once again, I do want to avoid a equivalency. I'd much rather be indoctrinated than indoctrinated and persecuted.

[Punished UMN]

The reason we still have those rights is that they don't matter. Think about the Epstein thing for example, a massive (maybe even majority of society) basically believes that Epstein, a multibillionaire banker, was likely assassinated in prison by someone or a group of someones powerful enough to not get caught who could be exposed in the course of his trial, and the response from the public was to make memes about it and then forget and stop giving a shit. They don't suppress this speech because allowing it to disseminate poses no threat to the established order, it just lets the population get it out of its system. It's understandable why they don't really care about it, the public didn't do anything about the exposure of the government trafficking drugs into the US being largely responsible for the crime spike of the 80's and 90's (though the government likely murdered the guy who exposed it -- again, without the public really caring), and when COINTELPRO was exposed (including the assassination of prominent political activists by the FBI), nobody really cared. China suppresses news of its crimes because it (probably mistakenly) believes its public cares enough to oppose said crimes. The Western Democracies have been around long enough to know that actually, the public could really care less about how much shit you get up to as long as you let them vote for the people doing it.

People literally stormed the Capitol over Qanon, and yet the establishment isn't sending 4Chan to prison.

They're sending many of the people who were there to prison. 4Chan isn't a person and its owner is a Japanese man who lives in Paris. Qanon probably isn't even a single person as much as it is a bunch of people trolling. But either way, they are still sending people to prison over it. Moreover, Qanon is all made up, there's nothing of substance there and only loons believe it. Suppressing things that have substance to them can make people look more into it. It's worth noting that China doesn't really deny the Tiananmen incident anymore either.

[Nilokeras]

I don't think there is a precise science to compare one authoritarianism to another, so I find the idea that "Western democracies are just as authoritarian as China" as being suspect. Especially when, I imagine, you're not going to be hauled off to prison for making this post.

Hell, Kowani is black (not only that, but foreign born) and he calls out issues with the US all the time. If your assertion was true, why wouldn't he be disappeared by the CIA?

You won't be hauled off to prison in China for making posts as a random citizen either. The Chinese state doesn't have the capacity to monitor and prosecute every instance of speech it dislikes. Instead Chinese law makes ISPs and website owners liable for speech that happens on their platforms, meaning that they employ moderator staff to police and remove content that they might become liable. Repeated misbehaviour or the posting of sufficiently serious violations of those speech laws like actionable threats gets forwarded on to the state. Which is precisely the same structure as in, for example, on NationStates. Actual judicial punishment gets reserved for people that the Chinese state wants to make an example of - which again, is something Western democracies do regularly with dissidents by inventing charges, police harassment or selective prosecution.

[Cerbia]

Almost all current and past instances of "communism" were oppressive in ways incomparable to what happens in liberal democracies. It's Julian Assange goes to prison vs Xinjiang reeducation camps. One is much worse than the other.

At the same time, I think that people exaggerate how badly planned economies functioned. Plus, with today's computer technology, it seems like we could run one pretty well.

[Punished UMN]

Almost all current and past instances of "communism" were oppressive in ways incomparable to what happens in liberal democracies. It's Julian Assange goes to prison vs Xinjiang reeducation camps. One is much worse than the other.

At the same time, I think that people exaggerate how badly planned economies functioned. Plus, with today's computer technology, it seems like we could run one pretty well.

Plenty of Western democracies have used concentration camps.

[Nilokeras]

Almost all current and past instances of "communism" were oppressive in ways incomparable to what happens in liberal democracies. It's Julian Assange goes to prison vs Xinjiang reeducation camps. One is much worse than the other.

Liberal democracies invented concentration camps, re-education centres and ethnic segregation. The reason we don't have them now is because they completed their functions - like residential schools and the processes of establishing and policing reservations.

At the same time, I think that people exaggerate how badly planned economies functioned. Plus, with today's computer technology, it seems like we could run one pretty well.

We already have most of the components of a command economy - they're just run out of Amazon and Walmart.

[Cerbia]

Almost all current and past instances of "communism" were oppressive in ways incomparable to what happens in liberal democracies. It's Julian Assange goes to prison vs Xinjiang reeducation camps. One is much worse than the other.

At the same time, I think that people exaggerate how badly planned economies functioned. Plus, with today's computer technology, it seems like we could run one pretty well.

Plenty of Western democracies have used concentration camps.

Most of those occurred during times of war and not against citizens. It's harder to subjugate entire groups of people when they're fully enfranchised participants in the system. Also, I'd surmise, conditions in democracy don't as often lead to what's happening in China right now where an ethnic minority becomes a potential threat because their only option is violence.

[Azalfia]

Almost all current and past instances of "communism" were oppressive in ways incomparable to what happens in liberal democracies. It's Julian Assange goes to prison vs Xinjiang reeducation camps. One is much worse than the other.

Liberal democracies invented concentration camps, re-education centres and ethnic segregation. The reason we don't have them now is because they completed their functions - like residential schools and the processes of establishing and policing reservations.

At the same time, I think that people exaggerate how badly planned economies functioned. Plus, with today's computer technology, it seems like we could run one pretty well.

We already have most of the components of a command economy - they're just run out of Amazon and Walmart.

"The Peoples Republic of Walmart" talked alot about this in that book, and the massive internal central planning of these businesses. Arguably, we are in an age where a planned economy based off of AI is not a horrible looking idea, so long there is a mix of decentral planning too. The Economic Calculation Debate:tm: effectively ends.

[Atheris]

The idea of "statelessness" is incredibly moronic and impossible. A government can not, in any sense, be enforced without a state to back it up. The idea that a stateless society will not immediately collapse into crime, bloodshed, and civil war is wishful thinking at best and one of the most idiotic takes I can think of.

[Conservative Republic Of Huang]

The idea of "statelessness" is incredibly moronic and impossible. A government can not, in any sense, be enforced without a state to back it up. The idea that a stateless society will not immediately collapse into crime, bloodshed, and civil war is wishful thinking at best and one of the most idiotic takes I can think of.

Except it has been achieved before.

[Atheris]

The idea of "statelessness" is incredibly moronic and impossible. A government can not, in any sense, be enforced without a state to back it up. The idea that a stateless society will not immediately collapse into crime, bloodshed, and civil war is wishful thinking at best and one of the most idiotic takes I can think of.

Except it has been achieved before.

When? When, in modern human history, has a stateless society ever been successfully achieved and sustained?

[USS Monitor]

That's just Switzerland.

Are their towns literally run by the whole population?

Dunno about Switzerland, but that's a traditional practice in New England. It works OK for small towns, but larger cities have switched over to having elected officials because town meetings get unwieldy.

There are economic benefits to organizing things on a larger scale, having large cities and coordinating economic activity that is not confined to a single city or town. Unfortunately, governing things on that scale requires more structure compared to 500 people that have spent their whole life in the same small town deciding whether they want to repave a road.

[Nilokeras]

Most of those occurred during times of war and not against citizens. It's harder to subjugate entire groups of people when they're fully enfranchised participants in the system.

The lifehack of Western democracies of course is to not make their target ethnic minorities 'fully enfranchised participants'. Just like China, in fact.

Also, I'd surmise, conditions in democracy don't as often lead to what's happening in China right now where an ethnic minority becomes a potential threat because their only option is violence.

Yeah, because most Western settler colonial states successfully ethnically cleansed their ethnic minorities whose only recourse was violence. See Israel's ongoing bombardment of Gaza as an example of what Western democracies do while those ethnic groups are armed and because 'their only option is violence'.

[Kowani]

The reason we still have those rights is that they don't matter. Think about the Epstein thing for example, a massive (maybe even majority of society) basically believes that Epstein, a multibillionaire banker, was likely assassinated in prison by someone or a group of someones powerful enough to not get caught who could be exposed in the course of his trial, and the response from the public was to make memes about it and then forget and stop giving a shit. They don't suppress this speech because allowing it to disseminate poses no threat to the established order, it just lets the population get it out of its system. It's understandable why they don't really care about it, the public didn't do anything about the exposure of the government trafficking drugs into the US being largely responsible for the crime spike of the 80's and 90's (though the government likely murdered the guy who exposed it -- again, without the public really caring), and when COINTELPRO was exposed (including the assassination of prominent political activists by the FBI), nobody really cared. China suppresses news of its crimes because it (probably mistakenly) believes its public cares enough to oppose said crimes. The Western Democracies have been around long enough to know that actually, the public could really care less about how much shit you get up to as long as you let them vote for the people doing it.

People literally stormed the Capitol over Qanon,

and now 500 of those people are being charged with crimes now that they've come to the attention of the established order and being used as a rationale for yet another massive expansion of the surveillance state

and yet the establishment isn't sending 4Chan to prison.

4chan isn't a person