this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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Dang that Eastern government of China for having a higher home ownership rate, higher protein intake and lower homeless rate! We're totally turning into one of those guys!!!
What a fucking buffoon. "emotionally" we are laughing at you.
Well that's good for you, you will enjoy our new system then! Just watch your social score! The term eastern and western governments is more traditionally used in regards to the liberal democracies of the west, from the Greeks and Romans to the enlightenment era representative governments, as opposed to the all powerful rulers of egypt, the persians, the Ottoman empire, and russia. But don't let me teach you anything.
Slave society, slave society, slave society, and the Eastern/Western dichotomy laid out in the centuries-old political literature that you uphold in such high esteem was established by race science-touting imperialists and other chauvinists
You're not talking about what esteem we hold the government's in, or they're assorted ills. We are talking about the structure of government, being representative, or being autocratic. You can say but those representative governments were mean! No shit? That is not what is an issue here. You could discount any event from history with the logic you are trying to use here.
You're insisting on a separation that doesn't exist. You want to analyze the "structure" of government, representative vs. autocratic, in a vacuum, divorced from its outcomes and the material conditions it creates.
But a structure that consistently produces "assorted ills", genocide, exploitation, and vast inequality, is not a neutral, well-functioning machine. It is a failed structure. You dismiss these outcomes as "mean," but they are the direct result of the system you defend.
Your "representative" model is not some pure form. It is a structure that has always depended on external exploitation, slavery, colonialism, and imperial extraction, to function for its citizens. The "freedom" of the West was built on the enforced servitude of the Global South.
Meanwhile, you label systems you don't understand as "autocratic" while ignoring their material successes: ending famine, providing housing, and lifting billions from poverty, outcomes your "representative" system has failed to deliver for its own poor.
The structure is not separate from its results. The results are the proof of the structure's failure. You're defending a blueprint for a house that consistently collapses, while attacking other blueprints because you don't like the architect's title. Judge the house by who it shelters, not by the label on the door.
You cannot blame representative government for imperialism, that happened under the absolute monarchs more than any.
Imperialism is not a thing of the west either, all cultures have had these problems. If able a group will eventually subjugate others.
Look at mongals, mughals, islamists, ottomans, russia, imperial china, etc. All imperialist as far as they could as autocracies.
You're conflating pre-capitalist conquest with modern imperialism. Yes, empires have always existed. But the scale, systematization, and global totality of capitalist imperialism, pioneered by your "Western representative governments," is historically unique.
The East India Company wasn't an absolute monarch, it was a corporation chartered by the British state. The banana republics weren't overthrown by a king, but by US presidents and corporate interests. This isn't about "all cultures" doing it; it's about a specific economic system using representative government as a facade to execute resource extraction on an industrial scale.
The monarchs conquered for glory and land. The West's "representative" governments conquer for shareholder value and strategic hegemony. The structure enables it.
Correlarion is not causation. One party autocracies will lead to worse outcomes in regards to (everyone,) the global south et al, not better.
Politicians being captured by corps has led to them pursuing unpopular policies, and corporate media misleading people, people that overwhelmingly would oppose such policies in an honest discussion you better believe it.
You're right that correlation isn't causation, but you're refusing to look at the cause.
The cause isn't "one-party rule" versus "multi-party rule." It's class rule. In our system, the competing parties are still captured by capital. You get a choice between two management teams for the same corporate state.
You say people would oppose these policies in an honest discussion, but that's the point: the system is structurally designed to prevent that honest discussion. The media, the lobbying, the campaign finance, it's all part of the machine.
Meanwhile, the "autocracy" you fear has in many cases been the tool that broke the power of the feudal lords and colonialists to industrialize, educate, and lift hundreds of millions from poverty in a generation, something the "representative" systems you defend never did for their own colonies.
The primary question is: who does the state serve? Capital or the people? Our state serves capital, regardless of how many parties are at the podium.
You are associating representative government with this system that has been engineered to side with capital. When representative government has to large degrees been forced to serve people and not just capital previously. Where the system has been ripped from serving capital alone. It was just re-captured.
Without contest for leadership things will only get worse, especially here.
That's a fair point, and it's one I actually agree with. You're right, through immense struggle, through unions and mass movements, people have forced the representative system to serve them at times. The New Deal, the weekend, the forty-hour work week, those were victories wrestled from capital. That history is crucial.
But that's my point exactly. The system didn't grant those things out of its inherent virtue; they were taken by force through class struggle. And the moment that popular pressure waned, capital began a fifty-year project to re-capture it, as you said, and make that recapture permanent.
So the question becomes: is "contestation" within a system permanently rigged by capital's wealth and media power enough? Or does building a system that by its structure prioritizes people over profit, a structure built on that history of struggle rather than one that constantly fights against it, actually offer a more stable guarantee against that recapture?
You fear no contest will make things worse. But what if the most important contest isn't between two parties, but between two classes, and one class has permanently rigged the party system in its favor?
Have you checked your fucking credit score recently? It's a good thing the fucking
CREDIT SCORE
doesn't dictate
ANY FACIT OF HUMAN EXISTANCE IN AMERICA
I think this lad is too young to have a credit score, or even know what it actually is.
You do not realize.or care they are doing the same with palantir now, to be used in secret in biz and gov against us.
Since you already accept democracy such as it is still, being replaced with an eastern style autocracy ala russia it should be an easy transition for you, until you cannot pay your bills at least, after they take breakfast and dinner from you and not just lunch.
It will give you something to think about during your 6-12 work week, 6 days a week 12 hours a day for starvation wages.
hey state department, come pick up your guy he's getting tired
Dawg we literally have that in the US.
You are so hip with your dog references there buddy. But pal I must tell you, we have 5-8 work weeks, and anything over that is time and a half. Because unions.
Because your grandfather's, instead of manufacturing politically correct in fractions to attack people on, organized and fought to get a fair share of economic output for their labor.
Maybe if we had enough of them and they were powerful enough to actually take charge things would be okay for more than just the highly privileged. Maybe even without the extreme exploitation of the global south.
We could call it a union of unions. A Soviet union so to speak. Or would that be too eastern for you?
Ah you started off so well but then you ruined it with a gratuitous insult, piss off mate
How can you simultaneously say "unions fought and died for your rights and we need to keep up the fight" while also being mad at leftists on the internet? I'm starting to think you have no coherent ideology.
(Also there is way too broad a category of "exempt" worker to say amerikkka has 40 hr weeks with time and a half overtime)
Maybe that is part of the problem, do not look left or right, look up.
Some kind of uhhhh third way
Union membership is the lowest it's ever been and minimum wage hasn't been raised in 16 years. We are not, in fact, getting a fair share of the economic output for our labor, and we never have, because capitalists have been stealing our surplus value since day 1.
No shit?
Yet in the post war years a minimum wage job would pay for a house and a cheap car and life's essentials.
They changed the way inflation is measured starting around the 70s. After the 1972 business roundtable made a long game to undo the new deal and workers gains.
Woah in the post war years anyone who was a suspected anarchist or communist got blacklisted and was unable to work, have a home or live a normal life. Hundreds of thousands of people! Some of whom I know personally in real life!
So much for that freedom in the West!
What about Indonesia murdering hundreds of thousands of suspected communists with U.S military and financial support? Where is the freedom there? How did my western freedoms end up in a pile of dead indigenous people? It always seems to happen!
Oh my God this is the dumbest logic that the rich sponsor to derail any example to meet from the great generation. Because everything was not perfect nothing from that era counts.
You could not use a single example from history with that logic. You could discredit anything anyone has done ever if there was injustice.
Give me one example, one historical example that could be used while not being discounted because their society was not perfect?
And regardless a minimum wage job paid for life, the factory job paid for a downright prosperous life, antitrust laws were enforced, we paid a reasonable amount of money for goods, and so forth.
Are you serious
Yet this is no longer the case in America. So, what, are the Asians responsible for this, too?
Wait, I think I remember you talking about freedom of expression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
Despite being ruled "unconstitutional" these were just more of the flagrant attempts at legislating anti-communism legally. Taft-Hartley was active for a while as well. We all know how "strong" the Supreme Court is these days anyways :)
It had a lot to do with tens of millions of union members and their Associates standing up and fighting together. Without that the United States would still be sending kids down in Coal Mines, the old thrown out in the street to die, etc.
Obviously we have been going back to that place for a long time, half a century, that is the problem.
Common ground found! Time to put bullets in bosses again.
You have a resounding agreement from the rest of us on here on that.
Migrants think about providing a better life like this for their family as the U.S intervenes, destroys and annihilates any nascent leftist movement or anti-imperialist movement in Latin America. With over 100 interventions to boot, there's plenty of migrants to fulfill that role in the governance of the west while a comfortable, captured proletariat and their ruling class suck up the wages and resources from the global south.
Well, funny enough, I had that in glorious America. I didn't have a washing machine, hot water, a microwave or oven, proper housing and grew up inside of a demunincipalized slum. You think I got regular breakfast and dinner? Haha. Sorta, until they cut food stamps and social services further and my family didn't apply anymore.
People in "horrible eastern-style autocracies" had more than me and hundreds of other people in the neighborhood I grew up in. Weird how that works, huh?
What does that have to do with the West having their representative governments replaced with autocracies?
In case you are unaware by the way, plenty of people go without here. We have been getting squeezed for 50 years and we are now at the point where a full-time job does not pay for life for a larger number of people.
And I bet if you need to see a doctor you would not be forced to pay 10 times what everybody else in the world pays and a hundred times for a drug.
The victims of the United States government includes United States citizens.
The war on poverty of Linden B Johnson turned into a war against those in poverty. Their own undesirables. A rank that will grow and grow in numbers in time.
To reiterate, I did not originally say anything wrong, and to refer to Eastern governments principally refers to the near East and Middle East. But it also does apply to China.
Because most of us believe that they are already autocracies; not of divine might or of stereotypical dictator-fashion but of a dictatorship of capital. Where your worth is determined by how much value you can generate for a middleman that controls the means of productions. Where constant warfare is waged against the poor on the basis of race, nation or creed by the ruling capitalist class that puts the majority of the world in abysmal poverty while the West gets to live out it's façade of elections held together by imperial extraction and exploitation of the global south. I mean an actual façade of electoral districts state-side and local politics completely marred by racial divide, segregation, gerrymandering and religious dogma.
The original constitution of the United States existed to serve and protect landowners, slaveholders and the merchant-class that was the foundation of the republics at the time. Your ability to vote was based on how much land you own, to which moved onto racial strife as a dominating factor as the transition from agrarian to plantation-industrialized economy. There was never the workers, the industrial revolution in mind. The workers are what exists these days and the representative governments of the west have never existed to protect them or their right of speech but their right to exploit and create capital.
The government structure of your imagined "East" no matter how repressive in your imagination, is still a vast improvement over racially stratified free market economies that depend on vast plunder AND exploitation of the global south. That's really the honest cut of it.
When the Constitution was written if you had land you could vote, it did not matter if it was a million Acres or a half an acre. You each got one vote. Also there really were very few manufacturing workers, like 90% was in agriculture.
Now you want to talk about the failings of the western governments go ahead, I am the first to bring those up. But it would be a whole lot worse with a one-party state. A lot worse. We have different groups of people and deep divisions within our groups and the worst people in the country in charge. At least some of these other large autocracies have a smart person in charge evil and ruthless though they may be. We have evil ruthless and utterly malicious. Nihilistic. We are not starting with Octavian caesar, but with caracalla.
Now if you think Western governments are worse towards their citizens than Eastern ones I would straight up disagree. Due to honest elections we have extracted more from lawmakers than an autocrat who's only fear would be a bloody Revolution.
That was my point.
Ah yes, fuck my anecdote and the epidemic of failed urban housing in ghettoes around America. "Fucking stupid liberal commie. You totally are lying about how poor you were." Everyone in America is rich, right?
I thought you guys were particularly aggressive politically correct libs in the us here when arguing until someone enlightened me.
Yes america is fucked and has been. Npt ever.perfect but was better for a few decades from post war years to the 70s, when the business round table made a long game to cooperatively take away all of the gains of the new deal and labor movement.
Lol!
I have to watch my credit score to own a house, have an apartment, get a decent rate on car insurance and live a normal life. Already have to do that, chucklefuck.
"from the Greeks and Romans to the enlightenment era representative governments"
Whom were savages and equally capable of violence on those deemed "barbarians" or lesser. The Romans and Greeks taught up some important things; but they show us nothing to take from example in a socialist governance. Drop the "TRVTH WEST" bullshit because most of here want to see the West completely destroyed!
At least the Ottoman and Persian shahdoms during the 800s-1400s provided us the Golden Age of Islam which propelled and powered the renaissance. Oh, and most of the European renaissance came from Byzantine scholars whom had preserved and kept the classics of the Greeks fleeing the fall of Constantinople towards Italy. Can you guess what these glorious, enlightened and catholic nations did to the Byzantines during the siege?
You do know history, you say. Why is that history paints such a dark, grim picture of Europe?
aw shucks, I was so eager to learn from a literal toddler's understanding of the world