A 24-country survey finds a median of 59% are dissatisfied with how their democracy is functioning, and 74% think elected officials don’t care what people like them think.
Democracy in which the bourgeoisie are denied political agency as class relations are in the process of being dissolved. The problem isn’t actually democracy, the problem is that in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (democracy where capitalists are in control) capitalist interests override democracy.
Not that democracy doesn’t have problems inherently, but they’re pretty minor compared to the problems we are facing.
But the alternatives that people are proposing leaves people with no representation at all. You can’t have representation when you aren’t even allowed to discuss ideas that the government already disagrees with.
“Not allowed to discuss ideas the governments disagree with” in a myth, a fairy tale told by the kind of people who get banned from everywhere they go for “just having different opinions.”
What are the opinions? What are the ideas? The US Civil War, by these terms, could be boiled down to “a clash over different ideas”, it’s not a useful metric. The fact is, no government on Earth is going to let you actively advocate for their violent overthrow, especially not when theyve just clawed their independence from, in many cases, centuries of colonial rule. And when you actually look into the historical events that anticommunists gesture vaguely at as examples of “communist authoritarianism”, that’s what it always turns out to be. The cycle goes like this:
Western capital foments fascism–> western capital arms fascists—> western capital directs fascists against socialist state, attempts to topple government for sweet natural resources–>socialist state cracks down on fascism–western capitalist press goes into overdrive about the plight of the poor fascists–>“Actually socialism is as bad as fascism, haven’t you read this article in the Bezos Post?”
A brutal crackdown on the ability of the bourgeoisie to influence elections, buy politicians, and hold office, such that liberals will crow about “human rights” and “freedom” being violated. We can draw fine distinctions between different systems, but fundamentally they still fall on the same side of the fence.
That’s not a political system at all. It’s a process that could be implemented in many styles of government. It is not incompatible with representative democracy either. It is a bad idea though. It means that a government has a hard time changing course, even when it needs to. Because it silences people from questioning decisions.
When dictatorships go badly, they go extremely badly. Far more badly than even a broken representative democracy. The odd of having a sold string of reasonably good dictators are vanishingly small. A good dictator is the best form of government. Good luck maintaining that though.
When a bourgeois democratic state goes badly, it tears off its liberal mask and reveals the fascism beneath. The capitalist class dispenses with democratic theater and rules by naked dictatorship. Western liberals shouldn’t wonder why fascism is on the rise in the West: it’s because Western monopoly capitalism is increasingly going mask-off. Monthly Review, 2014: The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism
What’s better?
Proletarian democracy
What definition of proletarian democracy? It’s not well defined and means vastly different things to different people.
Democracy in which the bourgeoisie are denied political agency as class relations are in the process of being dissolved. The problem isn’t actually democracy, the problem is that in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (democracy where capitalists are in control) capitalist interests override democracy.
Not that democracy doesn’t have problems inherently, but they’re pretty minor compared to the problems we are facing.
But the alternatives that people are proposing leaves people with no representation at all. You can’t have representation when you aren’t even allowed to discuss ideas that the government already disagrees with.
“Not allowed to discuss ideas the governments disagree with” in a myth, a fairy tale told by the kind of people who get banned from everywhere they go for “just having different opinions.”
What are the opinions? What are the ideas? The US Civil War, by these terms, could be boiled down to “a clash over different ideas”, it’s not a useful metric. The fact is, no government on Earth is going to let you actively advocate for their violent overthrow, especially not when theyve just clawed their independence from, in many cases, centuries of colonial rule. And when you actually look into the historical events that anticommunists gesture vaguely at as examples of “communist authoritarianism”, that’s what it always turns out to be. The cycle goes like this:
Western capital foments fascism–> western capital arms fascists—> western capital directs fascists against socialist state, attempts to topple government for sweet natural resources–>socialist state cracks down on fascism–western capitalist press goes into overdrive about the plight of the poor fascists–>“Actually socialism is as bad as fascism, haven’t you read this article in the Bezos Post?”
A brutal crackdown on the ability of the bourgeoisie to influence elections, buy politicians, and hold office, such that liberals will crow about “human rights” and “freedom” being violated. We can draw fine distinctions between different systems, but fundamentally they still fall on the same side of the fence.
What they do in Cuba, or the PRC, or the former USSR
Democratic centralism 👀
That’s not a political system at all. It’s a process that could be implemented in many styles of government. It is not incompatible with representative democracy either. It is a bad idea though. It means that a government has a hard time changing course, even when it needs to. Because it silences people from questioning decisions.
It’s literally how communist states are organized, how is it not a political system?
Ask the people of El Salvador, and they’ll say having a dictator is better because democracy has demonstrably failed them.
El Salvador under a dictator actually has less gang violence than Mexico under a democracy.
Westerners will blind themselves to this reality, though. They always do.
When dictatorships go badly, they go extremely badly. Far more badly than even a broken representative democracy. The odd of having a sold string of reasonably good dictators are vanishingly small. A good dictator is the best form of government. Good luck maintaining that though.
When a bourgeois democratic state goes badly, it tears off its liberal mask and reveals the fascism beneath. The capitalist class dispenses with democratic theater and rules by naked dictatorship. Western liberals shouldn’t wonder why fascism is on the rise in the West: it’s because Western monopoly capitalism is increasingly going mask-off. Monthly Review, 2014: The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism
China is totalitarian and becoming more autocratic by the year.
LMFAO
Communism