Uploaded February 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This video is an examination of the questions whether socialism is authoritarian. I go into the definition of socialism, explain what I count as socialist country and different theories on why these countries turned out the way they did. I also examine what authoritarianism even means and question whether this label accurately describes the socialist nations of the past.
Patreon: patreon.com/viki1999
Subreddit: reddit.com/r/viki1999
Twitter: twitter.com/Viki1999Yt
E-Mail Address: viki1999mail@gmail.com
The song in the outro was produced by 08 (who gave me no way to credit them), you can listen to the whole remix on my second channel: youtu.be/jZOrMsIOZh0
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:05 Historical socialism
4:31 Why so much authoritarianism?
7:15 Survivorship Bias
12:29 Are we doomed to repeat it?
15:39 What even is authoritarianism?
17:29 Outro
Transcript:
Is socialism inherently authoritarian? That’s a very common question/argument against socialism. Among rightists like Libertarians, small government conservatives or even Anarcho-capitalists you will very often hear that socialism is bad because socialism is authoritarian which inherently makes it less free than…. whatever their political goal happens to be.
So, let’s examine this. This is the definition of socialism. “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole” As you can see it says nothing about authoritarianism, matter of fact you can have an economy which completely follows this definition without even having a government at all.
That’s something anarcho-communists could have told you before. So there, the answer to the title is no. You can have socialism without any authority therefore it’s not inherently authoritarian. Thanks for watching make sure to…. wait.
If socialism isn’t inherently authoritarian, then why is it that every single historical example of socialism featured an authoritarian government? Is there something about socialist ideas that made these governments be that way? And how can we be sure that it won’t turn out this way again if we attempt socialism one more time?
The rightist argument goes that every time socialism was tried it turned authoritarian, which is a bad thing. And because of this precedent we shouldn’t even try to achieve a better society because if it happened then it could happened again. So, in this video we’ll analyse why those countries turned out that way and whether it is really the inevitable result of socialist ideas.
In order to make this video make sense I need to complete the impossible task and define what I mean by “socialist country”. This definition allows a lot of room for interpretation. For example in the soviet union the state owned the industry, does that follow this definition or not? Does the state represent the community or not? And what about Yugoslavia which had socialist businesses in a market environment.
What about modern-day china? Is that socialist? The answer is, that it depends on who you ask. Often times socialists will include or exclude different countries based on their personal opinions about those countries. For example many anarchists consider the USSR bad so their definitions of socialism don’t include that country. Matter of fact some anarcho-communists say that true socialism cannot exist with a government, so they flat out deny that there has ever been a socialist country or that there can ever be one.
It would be really easy to argue that “real socialism hasn’t been tried yet” but the 5% of my audience who are rightists hate this argument because it dodges all of the things they have to say against past attempts of socialism. And I don’t want to dodge anything here, I want to engage with the argument to the best of my ability.
For that I am adopting the opposite view. For the purposes of this video every country that ever called itself socialist will be counted as a socialist nation. Yes, I am aware that by that definition Bernie Sanders is a socialist which…my leftist audience knows why this may not be the most accurate assertion but whatever. This is our definition.
This means for this video I will count the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, the entirety of eastern Europe as well as much of Africa and south America as socialist. Depending on the time period of course, there is no socialism in modern day eastern Europe.
Looking at those countries we see a lot of authoritarianism, secret police, one party states, centralized bureaucracy, dictators and gulags. Truly Orwell’s nightmares. Except Orwell frequently reported people to the secret police, so….Orwell’s dreams!
This video is an examination of the questions whether socialism is authoritarian. I go into the definition of socialism, explain what I count as socialist country and different theories on why these countries turned out the way they did. I also examine what authoritarianism even means and question whether this label accurately describes the socialist nations of the past.
Patreon: patreon.com/viki1999
Subreddit: reddit.com/r/viki1999
Twitter: twitter.com/Viki1999Yt
E-Mail Address: viki1999mail@gmail.com
The song in the outro was produced by 08 (who gave me no way to credit them), you can listen to the whole remix on my second channel: youtu.be/jZOrMsIOZh0
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:05 Historical socialism
4:31 Why so much authoritarianism?
7:15 Survivorship Bias
12:29 Are we doomed to repeat it?
15:39 What even is authoritarianism?
17:29 Outro
Transcript:
Is socialism inherently authoritarian? That’s a very common question/argument against socialism. Among rightists like Libertarians, small government conservatives or even Anarcho-capitalists you will very often hear that socialism is bad because socialism is authoritarian which inherently makes it less free than…. whatever their political goal happens to be.
So, let’s examine this. This is the definition of socialism. “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole” As you can see it says nothing about authoritarianism, matter of fact you can have an economy which completely follows this definition without even having a government at all.
That’s something anarcho-communists could have told you before. So there, the answer to the title is no. You can have socialism without any authority therefore it’s not inherently authoritarian. Thanks for watching make sure to…. wait.
If socialism isn’t inherently authoritarian, then why is it that every single historical example of socialism featured an authoritarian government? Is there something about socialist ideas that made these governments be that way? And how can we be sure that it won’t turn out this way again if we attempt socialism one more time?
The rightist argument goes that every time socialism was tried it turned authoritarian, which is a bad thing. And because of this precedent we shouldn’t even try to achieve a better society because if it happened then it could happened again. So, in this video we’ll analyse why those countries turned out that way and whether it is really the inevitable result of socialist ideas.
In order to make this video make sense I need to complete the impossible task and define what I mean by “socialist country”. This definition allows a lot of room for interpretation. For example in the soviet union the state owned the industry, does that follow this definition or not? Does the state represent the community or not? And what about Yugoslavia which had socialist businesses in a market environment.
What about modern-day china? Is that socialist? The answer is, that it depends on who you ask. Often times socialists will include or exclude different countries based on their personal opinions about those countries. For example many anarchists consider the USSR bad so their definitions of socialism don’t include that country. Matter of fact some anarcho-communists say that true socialism cannot exist with a government, so they flat out deny that there has ever been a socialist country or that there can ever be one.
It would be really easy to argue that “real socialism hasn’t been tried yet” but the 5% of my audience who are rightists hate this argument because it dodges all of the things they have to say against past attempts of socialism. And I don’t want to dodge anything here, I want to engage with the argument to the best of my ability.
For that I am adopting the opposite view. For the purposes of this video every country that ever called itself socialist will be counted as a socialist nation. Yes, I am aware that by that definition Bernie Sanders is a socialist which…my leftist audience knows why this may not be the most accurate assertion but whatever. This is our definition.
This means for this video I will count the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, the entirety of eastern Europe as well as much of Africa and south America as socialist. Depending on the time period of course, there is no socialism in modern day eastern Europe.
Looking at those countries we see a lot of authoritarianism, secret police, one party states, centralized bureaucracy, dictators and gulags. Truly Orwell’s nightmares. Except Orwell frequently reported people to the secret police, so….Orwell’s dreams!
