> However, in this 'neoliberal age' the most totalitarian regimes are actually far left with noticeable examples being the PRC and DPRK. While there is absolut

> However, in this 'neoliberal age' the most totalitarian regimes are actually far left with noticeable examples being the PRC and DPRK. While there is absolutely no denying that the PRC and DPRK are totalitarian regimes, many scholars of political economy and sociology would argue that they are simply totalitarian in a different way; for instance, one common theme is that the notion of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia has conditioned us to think of totalitarianism in a very specific way with specific consequences. The issue is that totalitarianism can acutally be conceived of in terms of totality, a concept critics of neoliberalism use a lot. See the work of Herbert Marcuse, who, while before the time of neoliberalism, argued the notion of totality in the West, while quantitatively not as bad as the regimes you name, was still more pernicious in the fact that we don't consider them totalitarian. Orwell was somewhat of a break in this style of thinking, but now we conceive of totalitarianism as Orwellian rather than otherwise. I have a comment here[0] with more about this. In short, we tend to start from the assumption that are own societies are not totalitarian because the totalitarianism is natural to us. But it's also a mistake to assume that there is a "view from nowhere" which can tell us which societies are tolatitarian and which are not. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20187622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20187622