Totalitarianism

Façade of the Palazzo Braschi (Rome, 1934) with fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's face. As the leader of Fascist Italy, Mussolini and his ideologues used the term totalitarian to characterize his government.

Totalitarianism is a form of government in which the state has total, unrestricted control over the affairs of citizens. Totalitarianism is intimately related with fascism, which represents the total merging of state and capital for the repression of the proletariat via the absolute restriction of all nominal bourgeois democratic civil and political freedoms.

"For the Fascist, everything is the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian." — Benito Mussolini

Usage in bourgeois academia

Bourgeois academics commonly use the term "totaltarianism" to attack socialist states such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and People's Republic of China under Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong respectively. In this way, they seek to conflate socialism with fascism. However, this label is erroneous; socialist democracy offered much greater and more meaningful freedoms in comparison to their capitalist counter-parts. This is in addition to the fact that totalitarianism is a capitalist concept.

The foreign reactionaries who accuse us of practicing 'dictatorship' or 'totalitarianism' are the very persons who practice it. They practice the dictatorship or totalitarianism of one class, the bourgeoisie, over the proletariat and the rest of the people. They are the very persons Sun Yat-sen spoke of as the bourgeoisie of modern states who oppress the common people. And it is from these reactionary scoundrels that Chiang Kai-shek learned his counter-revolutionary dictatorship. —Mao Zedong, On the People's Democratic Dictatorship

See also

• Authoritarianism