cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29028246
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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No need to be so cold.
I have a context of the word totalitarianism, I’m sorry it doesn’t include the person who you think came up with it. If you understand etymology you should understand that the word was, yes invented, but involves the word “totalità” and was purely meant to convey the idea of total control by the state over all aspects of life, political, social, and private. It was in fact used to describe the fascist regime by Benito Mussolini. (Link me any evidence of the contrary in case I’m wrong)
I’m saying generally, as a leftist, I wouldn’t want a state that tells me what to do and what to think (and I wouldn’t want that for you either my friend, but who am I to say that).
Edit: To loop it back to my OG comment, in most cases, and history proves this, a totalitarian state kills.
Pretty sure no such state exists or ever has existed. To borrow the phrasing of George Carlin, it's "spooky language." It conjures up an image of a society in which you can't do anything without worrying about someone or something being over your shoulder, ready to report you at a moment's notice. Probably the closest thing to this in practice is extremely repressive transitory "states" like Occupied Korea under Syngman Rhee. It's not something you'd be able to formalize, practically speaking, without also undermining the concept of having a society in the first place.
And part of the problem with this kind of framing is that it trivializes what real mundane brutality can look like. Take the US, for example. Does the state have total control over everything? No. When a cop guns down a black person over basically nothing, does this mean all black people in the US are being actively hunted and exterminated? No. But it is nevertheless a shadow cast over them, that they are not really free or safe; that whatever "liberties" they do share with "white" people, are much more conditional than the ones white people usually at least get a trial over.
Furthermore, if you focus purely on "the state", you leave out the brutality inflicted in the name of "private ownership" of land, factories, etc. For example, when a worker dies of exhaustion on an Amazon warehouse floor, it isn't a state actor murdering them, but the lack of a working class state forcing Amazon to have humane and stable working conditions, coupled with the system of capitalism enforced by the state that puts people in a position where they desperately need the money even if it risks their life, is indirectly killing them. This is one way in which capitalism shirks responsibility for what it causes, but the consequences are nevertheless real.
I appreciate this reply, honestly dude. It’s one of the more grounded responses I’ve seen to the whole “totalitarianism” conversation.
You’re right that “totalitarian” is a word with a ton of rhetorical weight. It gets tossed around too easily, especially in Western discourse, and it often ends up flattening really complex situations into moral panic. I get that. And I agree that it’s not a super useful label if we’re only using it as a Cold War cudgel.
But I don’t think that means the concept is totally useless either. Even if no state has ever been purely totalitarian, there have been systems that came pretty damn close in practice. Where surveillance, control, and political violence permeated nearly every aspect of life. East Germany’s Stasi state comes to mind. So does North Korea. Or the Khmer Rouge. These weren’t spooky metaphors, they were fucking real man, and the people living under them weren’t dealing with just vague unease. They were being watched, repressed, disappeared. The fact that no state can perfectly formalize “total control” doesn’t mean it’s not worth talking about when systems get closer and closer to that line.
You also make a strong point about how this kind of framing can sometimes obscure the more mundane, distributed violence of systems like capitalism. I don’t disagree. But I don’t think we have to pick one or the other. Talking about the violence of a centralized state doesn’t mean we’re ignoring the violence of Amazon warehouse floors, or the brutality of economic coercion. If anything, I’d argue that both state violence and capitalist exploitation feed into each other. They’re not separate systems, they’re interlocking. Anarchists (and some Marxists, too) have been making this point for a long time.
And lastly, yeah, I totally hear your critique that labeling a system “totalitarian” can risk overstating or misrepresenting the lives of people under it. That’s valid. But I’d push back gently and say: repression doesn’t need to be absolute to be real. Fear doesn’t need to be universal to shape a population. You don’t need someone literally watching your every move, just the credible threat that they could be. That’s enough to change behavior and maintain control.
So yeah. I’m not married to the term. But I also don’t think we should be afraid to critique deeply authoritarian systems just because the language has been abused. We can hold space for nuance and still call a boot a boot.
we know