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Fewer people now say representative democracy is a very good way to govern in many countries surveyed.
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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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.
The people of China and Vietnam have vibrant discussions of ideas, and they democratically steer their governments. Their voices have more effect on their states than ours here at home. There isn’t a ban on Winnie-the-Pooh in China, and the people are generally vastly better informed on the 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots than we are.
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You seem to have uncritically accepted every single thing you’ve been told, which, to be fair, I largely had as well, until I witnessed in real time how obviously fabricated the justification for the Iraq War was, and how seemingly credulously the media propagated it. It took me the last 20 years of investigation to dig myself out from under a lifetime of imperial core propaganda.
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?
It’s it though. It’s a principle applied to Chinese communism. It’s not a required part of communism and it isn’t form of government on its own. It’s not even the most major part of a government system.
It's not required for communism per se, but it's certainly a form of government organization. It's how the People's Congress works?
It seems this person is just going to keep repeating that it isn’t a form of government no matter what.
At this point the onus is on @[email protected] to specify what criteria need be met for something to be considered “a form of government.”
It doesn’t define how leaders are chosen or how laws are enacted. It can’t be a system of government. Unless you have selected a specific implementation of government that uses it and are conflating the term with that government system. If that’s the case, then I agree that arguing over the definition is pointless. So what implementation or design do you think is better.
The current government structures of Cuba, China, Laos, and Vietnam aren’t a secret, nor is the Soviet Union’s. From a declassified CIA document (PDF):
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.
Of course we’re told that: it’s a given that the US will call a country it wants to browbeat or regime change “authoritarian,” and corporate media will repeat it.
The Western concept of “totalitarianism” was constructed by Hannah Arendt, who came from a wealthy family and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. It’s a bourgeois liberal, intentionally anticommunist construct that lumps fascism and communism in the same bucket.
Monthly Review, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
LMFAO