Many countries include ‘Democratic’ or ‘People’s’ in their names, even though they are not democratic and do not serve their people. Examples: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Lao People’s Democratic Republic People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria Democratic Republic of the Congo And German Democratic Republic (East Side) in 1949–1990. None of these states are democratic, power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a small ruling elite. Who are they fooling with these names?
Marxist-Leninist theory judges democracy by class content, not procedure. The key question is “democracy for which class?” Liberal democracies are seen as formally free but substantively controlled by capital (bourgeois democracy), while one-party socialist states claim to be “people’s democracies” because the state (in theory) represents the working class/peasantry against capitalist and landlord classes. Popular will, in this framework, isn’t expressed through multiparty competition but through the party as the organized vanguard representing proletarian class interests — elections, if held, ratify this rather than allow contestation between competing class programs.
This is in contrast to Liberal democracy defines democracy procedurally: competitive multiparty elections, freedom of speech/press/association, checks on power, peaceful transfer of power. By this standard, one-party states with suppressed opposition and concentrated power fail regardless of their self-description.
So on the naming question, This is genuinely contested. Two views exist:
Official/Marxist-Leninist justification: These states claim genuine “people’s democracy” precisely because it excludes bourgeois parties and concentrates power to defend workers’ interests against capitalist restoration — so from their own theoretical framework, the name isn’t false, it’s just a different definition of democracy.
Critical/liberal view (widely held in the West and by many scholars): The names are propaganda — legitimizing branding for authoritarian, often personalist or elite-controlled, rule with little actual popular participation or accountability.
Which framing is “correct” depends on which definition of democracy you accept as valid — that’s ultimately a normative/philosophical dispute, not a factual one.
This is a great explanation
I feel like I sense AI but it is stl pretty informative
Just because it’s a well-written answer doesn’t automatically mean it’s AI. There’s a couple syntax errors/typos in there that lead me to believe that at the very least it wasn’t JUST a straight up copy/paste from ChatGPT
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Bro I use double dashes all the time–often to make little asides like I’m doing right now–and have been using them for years. It was just something I picked up by reading actual books. Now AI comes around and I’ll occasionally be falsely accused as one just because of that one small aspect of my writing style. Feels bad man
This makes zero sense. If power is concentrated, then it doesn’t represent workers interests. If it represented all workers interests, then power would be diffused.
How are these one-party governments, gauging the interests of their workers? How are they doing this without democracy and voting? Afaik these countries don’t even ask their citizens for feedback
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Soviet_Democracy
They do have democracy and voting and the actions of their government are far more aligned with the expressed will of their people than any Liberal Democracy (which are all just Oligarchies with a veneer of democracy).
https://act.represent.us/sign/usa-oligarchy-research-explained
The first link above is for the USSR, but the soviet (small ‘s’) form of democracy has been used by many communist democracies that the West decries as authoritarian helholes (which generally just means they refuse to bow to the international capitalist order).
The second is for the US but the only difference of you did the same research for any Liberal Democracy would be a question of degree not of substance.
North Korea has democracy and voting? That’s news to me. They definitely don’t have very much. So you don’t think North Korea is authoritarian?
I think “authoritarian” is a meaningless designation that only really means “geopolitical adversary of the current hegemon”.
The term came into common usage during the Cold War as a way of conflating communist countries with fascist ones in the minds of Western Liberals.
North Korea has a really fucking weird political system but luckily it is not the only country that calls itself socialist. The USA are also undemocratic but you don’t seem to judge all parliamentary “democracies” by one especially bad example
The person you’re responding to’s description is slightly wrong. A “People’s Republic” defines a Socialist state who’s government is made up of an alliance of parties, rather than a single communist party, and that United front government might have parties intended to represent sections of the national bourgeoisie. So there’s a nominal Power sharing element here.
That said, I’m not sure how it logically follows that a state which represents the interests of workers must therefore be decentralized in some way? These places often end up with centralized political systems (though the list of States OP gave is full of a whole lot of variety in their institutions and political cultures), because of outside influence.
The DPRK is like that because some white guys drew a line across a country, and them bombed it until pilots complained there were no more targets to bomb, and civilians began living in caves. The DPRK (and the ROK for that matter lbr) has been something of a basket case ever since. But that’s because power centralization is a response to material conditions, not a result of what someone named the country.
People’s Democracies are defined by the presence of multi-party systems, like I explained earlier. Though these secondary, non-Socialist, parties have greater or lesser degrees of importance depending on what country we’re discussing.
That said, there are all kinds of institutions by which a people’s democracy gauges the interests and feedback of the workers and other represented classes.
I’m going to talk about China, even though it wasn’t referenced in the OP, because it’s a People’s Republic, and I can speak to its institutions with the most confidence:
One way class interests are gauged by the state is through the party system. This doesn’t matter so much in the primary legislature, the National People’s Congress, because the allied parties have a small fraction of the seats, but the NPC is historically a rubber stamp for the much more vibrant, body, The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (where the communist party only has 97 seats out of 2,169), where various sectors of society are represented, including parties, ethic and religious groups, organisations in the arts and sciences, mass organizations that represent women or young people, trade unions, etc.
In all state owned enterprises as well as in large parts of the private sector, there are a network of Workers Congresses which allow workers to engage in firm management.
There are also Party Committees in many workplaces, where the communist party itself plays a role in firm governance. These institutions make sure private companies follow the five year plans set out by the state.
There are also trade unions, which represent workers interests in other ways, and have representation in government.
There are also an extensive amount of Worker, Consumer, and Agricultural Cooperatives in China you might find this interesting, as it speaks to your concerns about decentralization. Between State Owned Enterprises, and the private sector that the state is always trying to reign in, co-ops straddle the line between these, by being worker owner and run firms, more independent of state power, and not beholden to the interests of capital like a private corporation.
People are often (sometimes rightly) critical of the privatization of the Reform and Opening up period. But that capital inflow has allowed China to turn around and invest in a domestic cooperative sector that rivals private capital. Huawei is the largest telecoms company in the world, for instance, and it is a worker co-op.
So there are lots of ways that’s workers interests are guaged and turned into an economic plan that will benefit them. Obviously, these institutions have been more or less effective at different times, or in different parts of the country. And a the Chinese system isn’t universal (The DPRK or former East Germany looked a fair bit different to this. While modern Vietnam or Laos modeled a lot of their own reforms off of China), but hopefully it gives you some insight.
There’s another comment in this discussion that talks about how the closest Chinese word for “people’s republic” is 民主 and means government which works for the benefit of the people. So their definition includes a benevolent dictator.
And that seems to align with what you’ve said too. Sure, there may be commissions for gauging the interests of the people. There may be co-ops. But ultimately the CCP holds all power. They can dissolve the commissions if they want to. They can take over the co-ops if they want to. If the people make demands or raise complaints, the CCP can just ignore them.
I think China is unquestionably lucky that the CCP does seem to actually care about the people. But this amount of authoritarianism does not seem to work as well in many other countries.
And if you genuinely think that what North Korea has right now is the best they can do for their people (even despite the turmoil caused by other countries), then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I mean, I guess? I don’t know enough Mandarin to speak on that.
Look, I’m not trying to argue with you. I’m just answering your questions, and explaining to you what those institutions look like in China. You’re more than welcome to do your own research and come to your own conclusion, but I think you should go into it with a sense of curiosity about the world, rather than trying to get in sick dunks on the internet.
And look, I have my qualms about China’s system too. But they eliminated absolute poverty. Tf are you talking about?
I mean, the DPRK’s ongoing 20x10 regional development policy is using its new influx of Chinese and Russian capital to improve economic development and living standards outside of Pyongyang. So that’s certainly an improvement.
But that can only to so far when the Korean war never ended. If you actually care about the wellbeing of the Korean peninsula, you’d want the war to end, the US to leave and lift all sanctions, and for there to be an internationally mediated peace negotiation that would decide what peaceful future between North and South Korea might look like. Perhaps an EU style arrangement with open borders between the two countries, and shared economic interests, while each gets to retain their respective political and economic systems, as they see fit.
I’m an ardent socialist. I think the cult of personality around the Kim’s is weird and unhelpful. But my opinion is meaningless in the face of the material reasons why that personality cult exists, and the material solutions that need to be implemented in order to bring peace and prosperity to the Korean peninsula.
And I’m simply sharing what I’ve learned from my research on the subject. Not entirely a direct response to your comment, sure, but relevant enough that I felt like sharing, not just to you but other readers.
Or Kim could give up power and reform the government to a more western style of democracy. That would naturally end the war as well, and probably improve relations with South Korea considerably.
If pressure on North Korea is released, there’s no telling if the authoritarian government would change their ways at all. In fact that pressure might be necessary to push them to change.
Thank you comrade Deepseek o7
Fair enough, you caught me. Did do some edits but the explanation Qwen gave was way better then anything I could’ve put together, and IMO better then a lot of the other responses here that didn’t give the other side and just gave the western liberal consensus view it gave at the bottom.
It is the best explanation I read so far. AI seems to be generally good at explaining stuff.
Could be, but the post history doesn’t look genAI to me. (I am no expert in detecting genAI output, tho.)
Love it when someone asks why socialists do something, then reject the socialists’ own explanation for the capitalist propaganda explanation.
You shouldn’t be getting downvoted, you are literally just explaining the differences in how democracy is viewed by socialists.
I didn’t downvote, but some might have done due to the obvious AI writing style
Which one of those governments do identify as socialist?
ML is mostly authoritarianism with a smidgen of communist cosplay. It should be called stalinism ihmo, but I think the ‘Democratic’ is similarly applied, as a front that hides the actual fact.
Lol, imagine just straight up repeating lies from the Nazis who joined the CIA after the war and thinking you’re supporting Democracy against Authoritarianism…
https://archive.org/stream/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds/Michael Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds_ Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997%2C City Lights Publishers) - libgen.lc_djvu.txt
I’m begging you to learn something.
It’s not getting rejected for being different, it’s getting rejected for being logically unsound
Your lack of knowledge of how socialist governments function does not make them illogical.
good counterargument, the logic makes sense now
“I still don’t get it therefore your argument was bad” lol
thanks for the explanation
Is there much scholarly debate on the validity of these opposing definitions? It seems like it’d be difficult to support an argument that the Marxist-Leninist style governments support the working class more than a procedural democracy.
Most of the time they don’t, but In certain cases they can. Yeah obviously North Korea is worse for workers then south korea. But if you look at the current governments of the two superpowers it becomes more contested.
If you look at the government of Xi jinping and the government of Trump, who would you say represents the interests of their people more? Who has higher approval rating in their country, hell who has a higher approval rating globally? Who is enacting more policies that help the people?
Faith in the governments of liberal democracies is near a historic low, people now more then any time since the 30s don’t think the government they voted for represents them. It’s to the point where even the government of Cuba has a higher approval rating then the US government. You could chalk that up to propaganda, but you could probably chalk up the remaining 30% approval of Trump to Fox News propaganda as well.
This isn’t to say I’m in favor of getting rid of procedural democracy, it more often represents the will of the people more then one party states. Just saying it doesn’t always and it’s getting worse at it.
Totally agree that the current US government is shit and getting worse and ultimately it is due to weaknesses in the way the procedural democracy was setup.
To me that fact can be viewed as a fixable design flaw. A Marxist-Leninist system (as far as I understand it) at its root doesn’t seem like a better way to prevent corruption or power grabbing since there’s no built in checks at all. You’re simply relying on the good intentions of the ruling party which, as we’ve seen from all governments, change over time and can be influenced in many ways.