One can’t simply look at an authoritarian political regime and...
Nick ☭ 🌱@redf0undation
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Aug 18, 2026
~1 min read
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One can’t simply look at an authoritarian political regime and conclude, “Those people are incapable of democracy.” You have to ask what political and economic conditions produced that regime, and what international forces shaped those conditions. 🧵
Neoliberal Akiho ✨🇺🇳🇨🇦@NeoliberalAkiho
Western “Imperalism” is a good thing. Why would I want third world dictatorships to have as much power as western democracies? That’s stupid.
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Capitalist development did not unfold uniformly across the world. Many societies entered the capitalist world economy after industrial capitalism was already dominant elsewhere, leaving them to develop under conditions shaped by existing international economic power.
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Colonialism intensified this uneven development by reorganizing economies around imperial accumulation. This encouraged export dependence and limited the development of autonomous domestic industry and bourgeois classes.
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Political independence for the colonized did not automatically end economic dependence. Many newly independent states inherited economies still structured around foreign capital, commodity exports, and external markets.
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Where domestic capital was weak or fragmented, the state often became central to accumulation and industrialization. Nationalization and state enterprises could therefore become tools for building productive capacity.
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This also made control of the state exceptionally important. When the state controls major productive resources, political struggles over state power become struggles over the direction of accumulation itself, creating conditions favorable to authoritarian centralization.
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As previously established, these states were not developing in isolation. Former colonial powers and new imperial powers continued to exert economic and political pressure on them, limiting the possibilities for independent national development after formal decolonization.
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When governments broke from this dependency through nationalization or independent development, they often faced intervention, sanctions, coups, or other pressure. This was heightened during the Cold War, with Western liberal democracies often propping up authoritarian regimes.
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The result is not evidence of an inherent inability to develop democracy. Rather, it is the political outcome of a particular historical trajectory of uneven capitalist development shaped by capitalism’s prior development elsewhere, colonialism, and imperial domination.
