• -6-6-6-@lemmygrad.ml
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    10 hours ago

    What does that have to do with the West having their representative governments replaced with autocracies?

    Because most of us believe that they are already autocracies; not of divine might or of stereotypical dictator-fashion but of a dictatorship of capital. Where your worth is determined by how much value you can generate for a middleman that controls the means of productions. Where constant warfare is waged against the poor on the basis of race, nation or creed by the ruling capitalist class that puts the majority of the world in abysmal poverty while the West gets to live out it’s façade of elections held together by imperial extraction and exploitation of the global south. I mean an actual façade of electoral districts state-side and local politics completely marred by racial divide, segregation, gerrymandering and religious dogma.

    The original constitution of the United States existed to serve and protect landowners, slaveholders and the merchant-class that was the foundation of the republics at the time. Your ability to vote was based on how much land you own, to which moved onto racial strife as a dominating factor as the transition from agrarian to plantation-industrialized economy. There was never the workers, the industrial revolution in mind. The workers are what exists these days and the representative governments of the west have never existed to protect them or their right of speech but their right to exploit and create capital.

    The government structure of your imagined “East” no matter how repressive in your imagination, is still a vast improvement over racially stratified free market economies that depend on vast plunder AND exploitation of the global south. That’s really the honest cut of it.

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      10 hours ago

      When the Constitution was written if you had land you could vote, it did not matter if it was a million Acres or a half an acre. You each got one vote. Also there really were very few manufacturing workers, like 90% was in agriculture.

      Now you want to talk about the failings of the western governments go ahead, I am the first to bring those up. But it would be a whole lot worse with a one-party state. A lot worse. We have different groups of people and deep divisions within our groups and the worst people in the country in charge. At least some of these other large autocracies have a smart person in charge evil and ruthless though they may be. We have evil ruthless and utterly malicious. Nihilistic. We are not starting with Octavian caesar, but with caracalla.

      Now if you think Western governments are worse towards their citizens than Eastern ones I would straight up disagree. Due to honest elections we have extracted more from lawmakers than an autocrat who’s only fear would be a bloody Revolution.