this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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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.
"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?"
What are you even talking about? Communism is democratic
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.