why do dictatorships of the bourgeoise allow free access to information (for the right price, unless its about state crimes) but no dictatorship of the proletariat (not here to debate vanguardism) has ever survived glasnost? genuine question not trolling. call me a liberal or even a libertarian (I'm not but okay) but open access to information is extremely important to me...

@georgia because it's the more successful way to control people. natural selection of controlling ideology

@georgia you just need to neuter people and make them afraid to lose the baselines they have

@georgia the western state pretends to be all for free speech but whenever free speech threatens its existence or the corporations that rule it, it suddenly isn't free anymore. snowden, assange. also, corporations are more decentralized so as long as public opinion does not turn against all of them, they don't mind people singling out specific corporations (as nothing happens to them anyway)

also, in any successful dystopian society, the people are happy. they believe they have what they need and is their right. societies of obvious state oppression never last, but those where people become cattle and seemingly happy I feel would succeed, and only now has the West gotten to a point where they can do that.

@meso @georgia

Because there's never been such thing as a "dictatorship of proletariat", the ones pulling threads always were a privileged class of bureaucrats that support hierarchies because it personally benefits them to control over masses, that's why information and censorship prevail regardless of whether a government labels itself as commie or capitalist.

Capitalism enforces censorship throughout class as well, because paywalling everything is a direct method to block away certain parts of society (poorfags) of having access to whatever, specially those that suffer the most and want to change the status-quo, and specially with information or knowledge as it's the bare minimum to push for a change or replacement, not even talking about spooks like intellectual property or copyright which are used for the same thing.

@georgia it doesn't have to be a totalitarian regime censoring the press to be dystopian. we live in a surveillance state. people do not actually have mobility or liberty

@sally @georgia yeah, everyone's a little bitch and complains and whines, if the state saw there was any real danger of change they'd act up. like they successfully censored activists and commies in the 60s. or like they made a mass media frenzy and societal change after occupy, because they got afraid.

@sally @georgia the soviets were paranoid and extremely obsessed with remaining in power. capitalists sit back and watch as their power remains unchallenged. but in the end the same people will control society from the top, nothing changes between those ideologies.

@meso @sally @georgia
What if there was vanguard party but with drawing lots for the central committee? You would have all the benefits of democratic centralism without bureauKKKratic and intellectualiSSt degeneration

@EmoIsDeadAndSoAmI @meso @sally I generally favor sortition.

@georgia I don't read enough history books to understand what you're saying.

@sally @georgia @meso
I would disagree with categorizing party officials as a class, it's more of a problem of division of labor.
At least as far the GDR goes the "party bourgeois" lie was always a completely baseless western psyop. The productive means was always in service of the centralized production for popular consumption, there was indeed progress in de-commodification of goods and few options for bureaucrats to use common productive means for personal gain. Even higher party officials had a quality of life that would be just middle class in bourgeois societies, while there was no objective poverty at all with general working people.
In orthodox interpretations of marx division of labor is a bourgeois phenomenon, in further progressions of socialism common factory workers and agricultural workers are required to have a sufficient intellectual foundation to engage with higher theory, literature and art. Even there the GDR somewhat succeeded, working class authors and musicians meaningfully shaping general literature and art basically don't exist anymore in germany, it's all middle class circlejerk.
So you can say historical socialism had insufficient progress in abolishing labor division, but a collective class of bureaucrats still didn't really exist (maybe in the later revisionist soviet union, but that was leaning more into autocratic social democracy anyway).

@EmoIsDeadAndSoAmI @sally @meso @nyx what do you think