What about democracy? Can’t voting fix our problems?
- Red Phoenix - Pacifism - How to do the enemy’s job for them. Youtube Audiobook
- Why not just vote leftists into office: what’s wrong with democratic socialism?
- Halim Alrah - Why liberal democracies are a sham.
- What about social democracy / democratic socialism / the Nordic model? Isn’t Sweden socialist?
- On the unraveling of the Nordic welfare states: increasing inequality and forced austerity.
- Scandinavia’s covert role in western imperialism
- Paul Cockshott - On Socialism and Democracy. 2 3
- Comrade Hakim - Why electoralism always fails.
- An Overview of Leninism, audiobook. Lenin - State and Revolution , audiobook
- LeftVoice - Bourgeois Democracy - What do Marxists mean by this term?
The voting for leftists into office one is there twice.
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Thank you, as a democratic socialist this is what I was looking for.
More like, under new management.
Yes, and this time you are part of the management, and so is almost everyone. Instead of management being a few rich arseholes.
Democratic socialism just means you believe in democratically governed socialism, not that you think you can just vote capitalism into socialism. There’s both reformist and revolutionary democratic socialists. I both believe in democracy and also see that the only way to overturn capitalism (at least in the US) would be through revolution. All the democratic part means is that they’re opposed to monarchies or dictatorships.
All socialism is democratic, so “democratic socialism” in practice either means reformist socialism, social democracy (capitalism with safety nets, usually dependent on imperialism), or is a means to distance this new socialism from the really existing socialism in the world today and historically. Reformism is wrong and doesn’t work, social democracy is still capitalism and depends on imperialism in the global north version, and the last is just red scare “left” anti-communism that reeks of chauvanism.
No. That’s incorrect. Democratic socialism is always and has always been an opposite to revolutionary socialism. Read some goddamned books. ALL forms of socialism are democratic, essentially by definition, but certainly by historical precedent. The only undemocratic “socialist” movements have been fascist movements using socialist aesthetics.
Are you saying that you can have undemocratic socialism?
Isn’t that what USSR was, dictatorship?
No, the soviet union was democtatic. It was even dissolved through a vote. The soviet union had a more comprehensive and complex system of democracy than liberal democracy.
Good question. No. It was not. Please read about it. There is plenty of writing about the political structure of the USSR, its constitutional documents, its legal and court systems, etc. It is imminently possible for you to learn about it if you’re curious
Dictatorship of the proletariat is democracy for the people
There was no dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky prevented labor unions from going on strike. War communism was forcing workers to labor as slaves. The new economic policy sent managers bourgeois back to run the factories.
It was a top down dictatorship. Not a bottom up dictatorship of the proletariat. It was supposed to be all the power to the soviets. The soviets ended up being a tool for the politburo.
This is remarkably liberal. In times of existential war, strict control and competent planning was necessary. The NEP was strictly necessary going from barely out of feudalism to a somewhat developed industrial base upon which economic planning can actually function properly. The system of soviet democracy waa far better at letting workers run society, and the wealthiest in the USSR were only about ten times as wealthy as the poorest (as compared to the thousands to millions under Tsarism and now capitalism).
The USSR was a dictatorship of the proletariat, through and through. There is no fantasy version of socialism that can ever exist without needing to deal with existing conditions, obstacles, and barriers.
And at what point is it no longer a “dictatorship of the proletariat”? Do you really think, say, the Soviet leaders were looking out “for the proletariat”? Is Kim Jong-Un doing so because the country’s official name contains the word “people”?
The working class saw a doubling of life expectancy, reduced working hours, tripled literacy rates, cheap or free housing, free, high quality healthcare and education, and the gap between the top and bottom of society was around ten times, as opposed to thousands to millions. The structure of society in socialist countries is fashioned so that the working class is the prime beneficiary. Having “people” in the name of the country makes no difference on structure, be it the PRC, DPRK, or otherwise, what matters is the structure of society.
How? You still have 1 person having full power instead of being first among equals?
You don’t, though, this is ahistorical. Not only was the politburo a team, but the politburo wasn’t all-powerful, merely the central organ. There was a huge deal of local autonomy.
What are you talking about about? Go read a goddamned book about the political structure of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its many voting structures, its multiple state entities, its levels of power of distribution, and THEN try to argue that 1 person had full power.
It’s ridiculous to think that your level of ignorance counts as a political perspective on history.
Stalin was a captain of a team
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
Counterpoint:
What’s the background for this report, who compiled it, what the sources were and so on?
It sounds pretty dubious since it has big ass text at the start saying
This is UNEVALUED information
It’s a top secret report created by the informational gathering apparatus of a global super power/nation state, with all the interest to get an accurate picture of their geopolitical rival, but also with the interest to keep their population not in the know (not it’s like the only time in US history). The fact that it fits with other historical accounts of Stalin by e.g Domenico Losurdo.
Funny how you libs always pull out skepticism when it’s against the western narrative. Even if it’s unvaluated, it’s not going to be significantly off. The CIA is pretty good at what they do
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This idea would seem to rest on the logic that any given poor person would be less likely to be corrupted by power than a given rich person (presumably due to their experiences being poor). In my experience when you give someone who is used to destitution access to power and resources their instincts are incredibly self serving. Being part of the proletariat does not automatically indicate any amount of empathy, humility, self control, forward thinking, or any other characteristic of a good, fair leader.
Dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t mean “a random worker becomes dictator”, it means the workers dictate the rules.
And how does a dictatorship by a particular class meaningfully differentiate itself from a dictatorship by an individual? On a practical level, would the dictatorial class elect their own leaders democratically, have internal struggles to chose the dominant leader based on perceived merits and authority, or expect the collective of the class rule autonomously?
I can intuit this system working with democratic internal elections, but i would struggle to refer to such a system as a “doctatorship”. The proletariet don’t represent a homogeneous group with uniform needs and so would need robust democratic structures for the system to not break down into authoritarianism the first less than perfectly cool leader shows up.
Also, how do you keep the bourgeoisie from just claiming to be proletariat and gaining access to the leadership class over the immediate time frame without inducing cruelty that will earn retaliation? And then again how do you prevent infiltration over the course of generations without committing genocide? I can see maybe just wanting to strip all of the bourgeoisie of their wealth and attempting to integrate into the proletariat, but without strong democratic structures the formerly powerful would trivially coopt the whole system for their gain, or even sabatoge it to prevent others from “getting ahead” or even to exact revenge?
This comment is filled with baked-in assumptions on your part without any evidence of you trying to understand the systems beforehand. Marx used the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” to contrast liberal democracy as the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” Proletarian democracy depends on the large firms and key industries at minimum being publicly owned, so that the working class controls the economy and what everything else relies on.
You can’t “hide” being bourgeoisie, and there’s no reason “genocide” is necessary. These are ridiculous notions. Infiltration by opportunists is something that exists, and is why you can get kicked out of any competent party for wrecker behavior or opportinism.
besides the oxymoron of a dictatorship of the people, yes, you can have government that claim to be socialits that are a dictatorship
The dictatorship of the proletariat refers to proletarian democracy, and is juxtaposed against liberal democracy as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
It’s not an oxymoron, the idea is that when there are forces with opposed interests, one has to win. Note that this is talking about opposed interests, not interests that are merely in conflict.
So no matter how much you try to make concessions for the other, you have to choose if you want a bourgeois dictatorship (liberal democracy) or a proletariat dictatorship (people’s democracy) at the end of the day. Socialists just use less euphemism, and therefore accused of “admitting to dictatorship”, but a liberal democracy is the exact same type of dictatorship. The bourgeoisie interests dictate, and they make concessions for the sake of the proletariat.
Yes, under a dictatorship, it’s literally happened before. Are you being serious or is this supposed to be some sort of gotcha where you go “socialism can’t exist without democracy so the label is pedantic”?
Socialism under one party governments have happened, that is not democracy, even if democratic elements exist within. You can’t have democracy under one party, the people need the ability to form an opposition party if the need arises.
if we’re going on about pedants then I might as well add that a democracy can’t exist with only two parties, either.
You don’t understand party systems, so you imagine one-party systems are undemocratic. You are incorrect. In a multi-party systems, competing interests fight for power using the electoral system. That means you would have a capitalist party and a socialist party and they would fight for votes. Why in the world would you ever expect a communist country to have multiple parties?
Instead of that, communist parties have structures within them for different factions to have sub organizations within the party. These are all people who support communism but differ on the particulars. They fight for power within the party, ensuring that the country remains communist while still enabling democracy.
It is only in fully capitalist countries that have eliminated the power of their internal communist where you have multiple capitalist parties that actually collaborate and then spread propaganda that only multi-party states are truly democratic. It’s transparent bullshit.
That’s why we say that under capitalism you can change the party but the not the policies and under communism you can change the policies but not the party. Ever notice just how democratic the West is regarding war? No matter how much the people don’t want war, no matter what party is in power, the leadership always chooses war. No matter how much we want profits to take a back seat to social issues, profit always wins. The policies of capitalism are unchangeable by the people. Is that democracy simply because you get to choose which team is oppressing you and killing foreigners?
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Having a single party simply means that the society as a whole agreed on a single collective vision. There can be plenty of debate within the framework of a party on how to actually implement this vision. Meanwhile, any class society will be a dictatorship of the class that holds power. Given that socialist society would arise from an existing capitalist society, it would necessarily inherit existing class relationships. What changes is which class holds power. That’s the difference between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Finally, the notion of dictatorship in a sense of a single person running things is infantile beyond belief. People who peddle this notion are the ones who should truly be ashamed of themselves. As Anna Louise Strong puts it in This Soviet World:
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a wild dronie appears
You’re right, I’m just wasting my time in a really dumb losing battle.
Sometimes I wonder how many “Marxists” really have read Marx.
Only those that did know that you can’t vote away capitalism.
No you can’t. It collapses on the weight of its own contradictions. Any imposition of socialism without the right material conditions is doomed.
Capitalism doesn’t just collapse, it prepares the conditions for its own overthrow. You can have a successful revolution without the entire collapse of society. In the era of imperialism, for example, we see export of the contradictions of the global north to the global south, which is why no revolution has happened in the global north despite Marx’s predictions.
- What I remember from Marx and/or Engels is that a sharpening of capitalism’s internal contradictions are necessary but not sufficient. Revolution is still needed. We can’t expect some automatic transition from capitalism to socialism.
- Marx wasn’t a prophet. The first successful communist revolution happened in Russia under feudalism, not capitalism.
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It’s not a passive process and the arising of socialism isn’t guaranteed.
What’s that im reference to?
In reference to how socialism will truly come about, Marx literally criticized the kind of thinking that dominates left wing thinking nowadays.
Communism and Marx are objectively left wing, and “left wing thinking” could mean any number of things. Without being specific about what you mean, it’s unfalsifiable.
Pity he was banned. I was curious to see what his specific points were.
There’s some interesting discussions to be had of Marx’s writings on electoralism, revolution, and republics.
What thinking did he criticise so literally?
The DSA has everyone from reformist soc dems, to anarchists, to MLs, to Maoist Third Worldists
and that’s precisely the reason it’s been so effective
Were you were being sarcastic? I am Brazilian and know nothing of the DSA.
Yes, he was being sarcastic.
Supa-hot-fire.gif
“I’m about to ruin this man’s whole career”
@Confidant6198@lemmy.ml I am not a marxist. Destroy it anyway.
This is simplistic. If reform works, do it. If it cannot, use force. Even Marx, if I remember correctly, supported the reformist Chartists in relatively democratic countries like England (while supporting revolutionary methods in feudal Germany).
Marxist: Let me mock one of my closest ideological allies. That will help bring about revolution.
Democratic Socialist: The fuck did I do to you, bro?
Democratic Socialists are anti-communist. Either they are reformist, which is wrong, social democrats, which is welfare capitalism, or seek to separate themselves from existing socialism by implying it isn’t democratic. None of the above are based on allyship with Marxists. At best, demsocs can be recruited from for better orgs, or aligned on specific movements like Palestinian liberation.
Democratic socialists are not our ally
And that’s why you’ve got no chance as a movement. And you couldn’t create anything sustainable even if you did. Congrats.
Marxists control the world’s largest economy by PPP, democratic socialists don’t come anywhere close to that. If you’re making a jab at Marxists on the basis of relevancy and sustainability, the best the democratic socialists had was less than 5 years in Chile before comrade Allende was couped.
This is so dumb.
If you want change, you have to take power. Power is where the people think it is.
If people can’t even realize their own power as workers and unionize, they’re not about to rise up in some glorious revolution. And even if they did, the majority would just do capitalism again, because most people can’t imagine anything else
But the economic system is collapsing. When it does, we need power. That’s how this works. We take local, State, and federal positions and use them to do progressive things, to improve material conditions.
And then when we get to an inflection point, we need leaders who already have the support of the people. We need populist progressives in power
Ernst Thälmann tried that
Many others within germany were also trying that too. It did not work
We must build duel power, not power within the bourgeois system
Power exists where people believe it to be. You want to build up alternate systems? Go for it, I think that’s great. I’d join up. Let me know when that’s an option on the table
But you can’t ignore where the power actually is. No revolution happens without organizing around people already in power.
And as much as you can learn from the past, we’re well into uncharted territory. You can read all the praxis you like, but those are the writings of academics.
At some point you have to talk to people, you have to get average people on board. You can’t do that by giving them pamphlets, they’re not going to read them.
You do it by picking your strongest argument, like housing or taxing the rich, and you get them on board. You give them leaders to rally behind, you gain their trust by improving material conditions for them. You fix their problems and win their loyalty, you tell them you’re going to fix their problems, and then you do everything you can to get money out of politics so that we can unfuck things
If you want to organize on the side, go for it… But we live in an extremely low trust and antisocial society. I just don’t see it happening anytime soon
The perfect is the enemy of the good
The reason it’s dumb is because DemSocs don’t actually have the ring of power to be able to cast it into the fire in the first place.
How many Bolsheviks were in positions of government? How much of the PLA was in power in China?
The sad reality is that nearly every successful socialist revolution was born through civil war.
