I’m taking issue with your narrow definition of authoritarian. I don’t support the premise that authoritarian governments can exist only through the dictatorship of capital.
If freedom of press, freedom of movement, etc are impeded, then there is no democracy. You’re an anarchist. You should agree with this
‘Democracy’ can mean liberal freedoms such as those, or it can mean participatory decision-making.
My plot isn’t defining democracy as ‘free press’, it’s defining democracy structurally as distributed authority among many actors.
A system can restrict certain freedoms and still be structurally decentralized, just as a system can guarantee civil liberties while keeping power concentrated. The point was more to clearly identify where authority resides, not evaluating whether a system meets liberal-democratic standards.
The question of who is subject to authority is something obfuscated in the original meme template that I was aiming to correct.
the original two axis map i think shows things on a vertical axis of how tolerant you are of state violence and the horizontal axis of how tolerant you are of proxy violence (but this is rooted in my view that money is representative of theft and is a tool of oppression). this new version kind of presumes that both kinds of violence are tightly coupled which is… hard to argue against, but it still flattens rather than complicates the chart when the problem with the original chart is it is a right-wing biased over simplification
I’m taking issue with your narrow definition of authoritarian. I don’t support the premise that authoritarian governments can exist only through the dictatorship of capital.
If freedom of press, freedom of movement, etc are impeded, then there is no democracy. You’re an anarchist. You should agree with this
‘Democracy’ can mean liberal freedoms such as those, or it can mean participatory decision-making.
My plot isn’t defining democracy as ‘free press’, it’s defining democracy structurally as distributed authority among many actors.
A system can restrict certain freedoms and still be structurally decentralized, just as a system can guarantee civil liberties while keeping power concentrated. The point was more to clearly identify where authority resides, not evaluating whether a system meets liberal-democratic standards.
The question of who is subject to authority is something obfuscated in the original meme template that I was aiming to correct.
the original two axis map i think shows things on a vertical axis of how tolerant you are of state violence and the horizontal axis of how tolerant you are of proxy violence (but this is rooted in my view that money is representative of theft and is a tool of oppression). this new version kind of presumes that both kinds of violence are tightly coupled which is… hard to argue against, but it still flattens rather than complicates the chart when the problem with the original chart is it is a right-wing biased over simplification