I keep hearing the term in political discourse, and rather than googling it, I’m asking the people who know better than Google.

  • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
    16·
    2 days ago

    A dictatorship is a form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold absolute or near-absolute political power.

    • Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com
      5·
      2 days ago

      You’re not doing materialist analysis of reality. If the USSR had been ruled by a selfish cadre of self-selected bureaucrats, it wouldn’t have continuously reduced wealth inequality to the point of being the most equal country on earth. It wouldn’t have universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, guaranteed affordable housing or guaranteed jobs. It wouldn’t have had walkable urban planning in the mikroraion system, affordable good quality public transit, affordable and subsidized basic foodstuffs, and it wouldn’t have been the case that by the 1960s there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined.

      For an example of the results of something closer to what you call a dictatorship, you can look at the social and economic results in Saudi Arabia, where the majority of workers are immigrants whose passports are taken away and work for misery wages in what effectively is an apartheid state.

      • Meldrik@lemmy.wtf
        12·
        2 days ago

        I never mentioned the USSR and in my original comment I even said that a “tankie” isn’t a communist.

        • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
          3·
          1 day ago

          “Tankie” is just a pejorative for communists. It’s used by those who wish to protect themselves from being called an anti-communist, so you concoct this strawman (in your original comment you made it about dictatorship, sexual attraction to it, and a betrayal of communism) in order to attach that strawman to any communist that functions as a communist. The vast majority of Marxists support socialist countries like the USSR, PRC, Cuba, etc, so the only supposed “communists” that you aren’t attacking are fringe western groups that don’t seem to be able to accomplish much of anything.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      6·
      2 days ago

      The Politburo still didn’t have absolute or near-absolute power. There was lots of regional autonomy in the SSRs and SFSRs, and democratization was more thorough than in capitalist countries.