the idea of total control by the state over all aspects of life, political, social, and private
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.
I’d think at that point, you could just say “repressive” then instead of unnecessarily all-encompassing words like “totalitarian”, but even that is getting lost in being too vague. A state that represses the capitalist class is fundamentally not the same as a state that represses working class organization, for example. Also, you mentioned “North Korea”, you may be confused about the history there due to endless western vilifying. The DPRK, aka: “North Korea” is not repressive toward regular people. It is a bulwark of attempted liberation and reunification from colonialism and imperialism, and it happens to be communist in ideology, which makes sense because communism and liberation typically go hand in hand. It is “South Korea”, the part of Korea still occupied by the US to this day, that has a history of being brutally repressive and being an extension of US imperialism there.
To reiterate, the problem is not that something is a state, inherently (this is where I would differ with some who call themselves anarchists). The problem is in whose organized interests are behind the state. And although it’s true that communists see an endpoint where the state is no longer necessary, there is still the question of how you actually get there. This is a defining point in the conversation, the question of transition, and where the concept of a socialist working class state comes from. And when we look at the historical gains in liberation, quality of life, and developing toward communism, nothing comes close to socialist state projects. Naturally, this is terrifying to the capitalists and so they would have you believing that these states are always incredibly scary places running on fear and desperation.
It is incredibly important, if you are sympathetic to communism, to be able to side with socialist state projects overall, even if you acknowledge that they don’t always do right all of the time (no entity ever does and holding them to standards of perfection is a common tactic from the capitalists). If you don’t side with them, you are effectively, whether you realize it or not, siding with the capitalists and imperialists of the world; with the narrative that is arguing better is not really possible, that gains can only be made on a small level by small groups “choosing” to be free. It is critical to understand this, or else “anarchism” becomes little more than a fear of authority, and you lose sight of who represents the best chance of liberating the people of the world. You don’t have to personally love vast bureaucratic systems, in other words, to understand that the DPRK is the main thing that kept Korea from being a neoliberal puppet state across the board. Or to understand that China is currently facing down US imperial hegemony and is capable of standing up to it, without even pulling a trigger, while pushing for a multipolar world instead of another form of hegemony. That’s a powerful force toward liberation. It’s not the whole thing of it, it’s not all said and done, but we can’t lose sight of how pivotal this kind of organized force is in the broader context of the worldwide struggle for liberation.
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.
I’d think at that point, you could just say “repressive” then instead of unnecessarily all-encompassing words like “totalitarian”, but even that is getting lost in being too vague. A state that represses the capitalist class is fundamentally not the same as a state that represses working class organization, for example. Also, you mentioned “North Korea”, you may be confused about the history there due to endless western vilifying. The DPRK, aka: “North Korea” is not repressive toward regular people. It is a bulwark of attempted liberation and reunification from colonialism and imperialism, and it happens to be communist in ideology, which makes sense because communism and liberation typically go hand in hand. It is “South Korea”, the part of Korea still occupied by the US to this day, that has a history of being brutally repressive and being an extension of US imperialism there.
To reiterate, the problem is not that something is a state, inherently (this is where I would differ with some who call themselves anarchists). The problem is in whose organized interests are behind the state. And although it’s true that communists see an endpoint where the state is no longer necessary, there is still the question of how you actually get there. This is a defining point in the conversation, the question of transition, and where the concept of a socialist working class state comes from. And when we look at the historical gains in liberation, quality of life, and developing toward communism, nothing comes close to socialist state projects. Naturally, this is terrifying to the capitalists and so they would have you believing that these states are always incredibly scary places running on fear and desperation.
It is incredibly important, if you are sympathetic to communism, to be able to side with socialist state projects overall, even if you acknowledge that they don’t always do right all of the time (no entity ever does and holding them to standards of perfection is a common tactic from the capitalists). If you don’t side with them, you are effectively, whether you realize it or not, siding with the capitalists and imperialists of the world; with the narrative that is arguing better is not really possible, that gains can only be made on a small level by small groups “choosing” to be free. It is critical to understand this, or else “anarchism” becomes little more than a fear of authority, and you lose sight of who represents the best chance of liberating the people of the world. You don’t have to personally love vast bureaucratic systems, in other words, to understand that the DPRK is the main thing that kept Korea from being a neoliberal puppet state across the board. Or to understand that China is currently facing down US imperial hegemony and is capable of standing up to it, without even pulling a trigger, while pushing for a multipolar world instead of another form of hegemony. That’s a powerful force toward liberation. It’s not the whole thing of it, it’s not all said and done, but we can’t lose sight of how pivotal this kind of organized force is in the broader context of the worldwide struggle for liberation.
we know