Greeks and Romans to the enlightenment era representative governments
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’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?
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?