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.ml has got to be the only place on earth where I'd get downvoted for a comment like this
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this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
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This is a semantic argument so it's pretty much a nothingburger. I'm just gonna go ahead and apply Alder's razor and call it here
Yes, exactly, it's a purely semantic distinction that serves no useful purpose other than to decontextualize regular-ass socialist democratic policy and recast it as some kind of dark foreign despotism.
It must look strange to those who conflate authority with power. A state that has power without authority is a state that is in crisis. Calling a government authoritarian is to say it's authority comes from it's exercise of power.
I think it's pretty critical to the discussion, considering it tries to designate some communists as "authoritarian" and others presumably as not so.
It's come to my attention that you're someone who genuinely believes Russia is not an imperialist nation (where you ironically also attempt to hand-wave the definition of imperialism as forceful authority over another nation and imply that the only right one is that it's a direct and unique result of capitalism—as if a word can't have more than one definition), so I doubt you're someone I can have a rational discussion about authoritarianism with regardless.
And again, you're fixing the term based on your own perception to make it support your point, which doesn't really have any merit when it comes to using these words as they are by academics essentially ubiquitously. Until we can both accept that authoritarianism has a set definition independent of many ideologies and therefore cannot be universally applied to them, this will remain a purely rhetorical argument.
Imperialism is a stage of monopoly capitalism where domestic markets are saturated, and thus you must go outward. In this process, bank capital merges with industrial capital to form finance capital, and this dominates the economy, forcing export of capital rather than commodity. The world itself has already been entirely split up amongst the imperialist powers by World War I, as this was the primary cause behind it.
The Soviet Union was anti-imperialist and anti-colonial, and the dissolution of socialism in the USSR was devastating for all countries involved. As such, even if we were to assume Russia would be imperialist if it could, it inherited no colonies, only a broken economy, and the west had already split the world amongst themselves.
Russia is closer to something like Brazil than an imperialist country like the US, France, Germany, the UK, etc.
This isn't hand-waving anything. I am talking about a specific, observable stage capitalism inevitably results in over time. When you're trying to say that it's about trying to get your way forcefully, then this means it was imperialism when the Statesian North invaded the Statesian South and liberated the slaves. It means it was imperialism when the Soviets defeated the Nazis in World War II. In other words, it's clear that you're interested in imperialism as far as it can be used as a condemnation, and not as an actual observable system.
For the sake of argument, let's call imperialism as I described it "finance plundering." Is your point that "finance plundering" isn't a stage of capitalism, and that western countries are not "financial plunderers?* Is your argument that Russia also has the ability to stand with the west in that realm? Academics already recognize this as a real system, and it's what is understood to be imperialism as it manifests in the modern era.
As for "authoritarianism," I agree that it's broad, that's my point. It applies to anything with a state, as all states are tools by which the authority of one class is exerted over others.