Like allowing multiple political parties, full freedom of speech and assembly, abolishing the police, ownership of weapons, direct democracy etc.
The common justification is that they were in a dire situation where allowing too much freedom would allow counterrevolutionaries and foreign imperialists to sabotage and destroy them. I find this unconvincing, to what extent is security better than freedom? To what extent can the current leadership be trusted to "protect the revolution" than possible others better suited who couldnt take power?
Even then, why did the Soviet Union and other communist countries not democratize after WW2 when they arguably established sovereignty with their nuclear weapons?
Just as the capitalist ruling class preferred fascism to losing their power to communists, it seems the Marxist-Leninist rulers preferred capitalism to a more democratic form of socialism.
We see this happen now in Cuba, the last bastion of Marxism-Leninism, where the ruling class has been gradually introducing privatization and market reforms rather than allowing things like open elections, freedom of speech etc. Under capitalism, they can still rule.
Cuban democracy is incredibly participatory. Read these two comparisons of its system with America’s, and this process of writing and approving its new constitution.
Here’s a primer on how China’s political system works, complete with multi-party collaboration But China’s real gem is its responsiveness to people’s needs. It’s how it ends up with such a high approval rating, and why more people in China feel like they live in a democratic system than people in America.
I’m not a huge USSR-head, so I don’t have much info on their democracy, but in passing I’ve heard it was pretty decent.
I don’t see why a two party, partisan system ought to be the final form of democracy, especially when its results are so blatantly shit. If there’s a different form that people feel is more democratic, why shouldn’t that be considered democracy?
Do you really need a formal, country-wide vote for leader, replete with game show esque contests on national TV and mass advertising, to qualify as ‘democratic’? If so, is that sort of ‘democracy’ even worth having?
Places like China get a reputation as dictatorships because they treat """respectable""" people like bankers, business owners, and their propaganda arms (journalists, think tanks, "intellectuals") in the same way that the US treats the poor, racial minorities, etc.
We got the good ass post but I am waiting for the good ass-post
The US imprisons proportionally about as many people as the USSR did in the GULAG system. Then add in a the people on parole and probation, the NSA, CIA, and FBI, and our tyranny would frankly make Stalin blush.
The difference is that the US "justice" system targets poor and working people while the Soviets imprisoned a lot more members of the intelligentsia and reminants of the bourgeoisie. No shit the media loves to crow about the "tyranny". It's tyranny because places like the USSR targeted the people who rule our society now. Naturally the wealthy and their lapdogs and voices (most "journalists" and "policy wonks" in the West) freak the fuck out when a system treats them like they treat the so-called lazy poor.
China is similar. A lot of the people who get executed or imprisoned are corrupt business leaders. Would it really be tyrannical if the CEO of Wells Fargo was perp walked in primetime, or people like Larry Summers disappeared into a van?
I've been wondering something about the research Bloomberg cites there actually. The poll looks really good for China, but kinda terrible for Venezuela. Any idea what's going on there?
Sanctions have dropped the quality of life. The oil industry is in tatters. There’s an opposition party calling for coups and invasions on the regular. The democratic system there is barely functional right now.
EDIT: or it’s what Unperson said.
Well the pressure from the US certainly is stronger on Venezuela than China. While Venezuela seems to be holding firm well enough despite it, I can't imagine it's been easy for the people either.
If you go to the source you immediately see the problem:
Methodology
This report presents an overview of a study conducted by Dalia Research and the Alliance of Democracies in the Spring of 2020. The sample of n=124,000 online-connected respondents was drawn across 53 countries, with country sample sizes ranging from 1,000 to 3,000. Nationally representative results were calculated based on the official distribution of age, gender and education for each country’s population, sourced from most recent and available data from Barro Lee & UNStat, and census.gov. The average margin of error across all countries sampled is (+/-) 3.25%.
Data Collection
Dalia’s surveys are conducted online through internet-connected devices, such as smartphones, tablets and computers. Dalia follows an open recruitment approach that leverages the reach of over 40.000 third-party apps and mobile websites. To ensure coverage across different demographic groups and geographical regions, Dalia targets a highly diverse set of apps and websites – from news to shopping, to sports and games. As a result, Dalia generates up to 21 million answers every month from respondents living in as many as 100 different countries.
The 'survey' is an online poll, deliberately not adjusted for income. The fact that Bolivia always ranks really poorly in these kinds of polls, because most of the population doesn't even have access to the Internet, let alone use it for anything but interpersonal communication, was used as justification for the coup.
If you liked that one, you’ll probably also like this one here.
And yeah, the lack of that release valve is really significant.
While the Soviet Union was a one party state, it allowed independent candidates. Cuba bans parties entirely.
China, Vietnam, Nepal, the DPRK, DDR and others had/have Multi-Party systems with varying levels of Communist party dominance. Laos technically does but the other parties all dissolved over time.
Yugoslavia had a pretty cool indirect system of elections via a complicated cascading system of workers council delegates and other mass organisations, which is probably the closest we've come to an "ideal" workplace democracy, aided by Tito not being under direct attack by the west.
I might be a little bit uninformed, but the reading I've done about the Soviet system seems to me that they had a much better participatory democracy than any western "democracy" I've ever known.
Yeah same as cuba https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aMsi-A56ds To be clear I'm not sure if you are allowed to run as an open capitalist but I understand why they would prevent people from doing so
Define "freedom" and there will be a meaningful way to answer this question. Like, the US is "more free" in the sense that it has Enlightenment liberal "rights" in its constitution, but that's a fundamentally Western lib definition of "free", and you don't have to be particularly woke to recognize that "cops show up and kill you" isn't very free assembly, for instance.
ETA: I'm an anarchist, so thinking about what "being free" means is important to my theory, but I don't think the US is a very good example of a "more free" place, all told.
One thing that really left a strong impact on me was the first time I heard an explanation of the Mass Line. So you're trying to build up yourself a nice little Maoist guerrilla insurgency. What is the first step to getting people on your side? Figure out what they want! You go to the people community by community, village by village, and you talk to them about their hardships and struggles. You gather them together so they can work though these problems and come up with solutions. With an emphasis on dialectical materialism, the solution to all of these problems will naturally circulate around extinguishing the malevolent influences of Capitalism. But you start small, and you work in that direction as the low hanging fruits are eliminated.
You aid the people in building organizations around alleviating these hardships and struggles, engender their trust, build solidarity, and expand to more villages, more communities. They key is, you're not trying to simply serve the role of a charity. You're trying to feed, shelter, and medicate the people - yes - but more importantly you are trying to cultivate a culture where communities are empowered to do these things themselves, to analyze problems to their root causes, act towards resolving them, and go on to help others. It is like a pyramid scheme except instead of selling knives to people who sell knives, you're empowering communities to empower other communities.
Elections are virtually nonexistent in this process - or at least, unemphasized and peripheral. Volunteers step up when they identify with the goals of the movement. People take on leadership roles because their contributions to the cause are recognized and respected. And yet, it seems to me like a much more democratic process for all the people involved than the pinball game we play with liberal democracy.
This whole "you need to have multiple political parties who are in constant conflict with eachother in order to have democratic freedom" is an extremely weird western-centric point of view. Does a communist country need capitalist opposition parties? Does a communist country need multiple communist parties? Why would it matter how many political parties there are if the country is otherwise democratic?
A one-party state is the equivalent to a no-party state - yet the emotional response to such a thing is completely different. It begs the question why and I think the answer is extremely obvious to anyone with any sense of historical context. Everyone's opinion starts and ends with "one-party" as if this is some how the only measure of freedom, since that is literally the only extra choice there is in a liberal democracy. The average person in the west has virtually no idea what socialism or communism means other than "one-party dictatorship" because that's literally all the western propaganda powers had to do in order to convince the populace that this is what separated us from them, completely disregarding the fact that dictatorships all over the world were and are still allied to the west and have been propped up by the west. The only thing that mattered to the ruling class in the west was that their dictators were "capitalist" and that was good enough for the average person who imagined that term to be interchangeable with "free".
As far as "nukes establishing their sovereignty" you are correct... which is why there was never a military invasion of the nuclear powers. The way the CIA and other intelligence agencies would work to destabilize the communist countries would be political actions, which would be made incredibly easy in a country that decided to liberalize. Look at what happened to the USSR after the cold war had already died down and tell me they should have done it earlier. None of the countries involved have recovered and every single country is worse off than when they were in the USSR.
No liberal democracy would survive extended economic warfare with the united states much less the entire western world for very long at all. It is not a coincidence that the only countries still standing against them have "strongmen" type governments, because all the "free" countries that stood against them fell extremely fast. The United States didnt accidentally become the world's dominant economic power, they've been forcing their will onto others for a hundred years.
I won't take credit for this since it isn't my original idea, but someone else on here pointed this out and it never clicked for me before then. American Liberals are quite fond of citing George Washington's criticisms of party politics as given in his Farewell Address.
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
They are very quick to pull this out of their back pocket when bemoaning the existential hostility and eternal deadlock which exists in Congress, but they never seem to realize that what Washington is essentially advocating for a one party state.
Now, I'm not the kind of nerd who looks up to George Washington as any sort of role model, but the dude is obviously respected throughout common society. I think it is good rhetorical move to pull this one out whenever you encounter Liberals dismissing political systems on the sole basis that they are one/no party states. This is a rhetorical tactic that Ho Chi Minh used famously at the outset of Vietnam's anti-colonial struggle. He quoted lines of the US Declaration of Independence verbatim to state on one hand "We're just doing the thing that you did. We're even justifying it in your own words," while on the other hand highlighting the hypocritical nature of a country which celebrates its revolutionary history while crushing revolutions all over the world.
great twitter thread on Soviet democracy:
https://twitter.com/BLKSKNLENINCCCP/status/1311479676267765761more brief infographic:
https://i.redd.it/yr81c4n73oa51.pngyour question is stuck in a liberal frame
Doesn’t Cuba have multi-candidate elections now? I thought that was the big thing in the last constitutional referendum.
I’ll confess that I don’t know exactly how their system works, or what multi-candidate means in this context. I had kind of picked up that the previous way involved candidates chosen in civic meetings and put up to a popular approval vote, but I don’t know the details.
Every time this comes up, you have people saying "actually these countries were the most democratic of all", which just raises further questions:
- Were elections done via a first-past-the-post system or some kind of ranked choice?
- Did the people vote for censorship, population transfers, death sentences and purges, state-organised trade unions, non-freedom of movement, suppression of research and expression etc? We can acknowledge there are western exaggerations and fabrications, but we do know that these things nevertheless happened.
- If they voted for representatives who contributed to the implementation of these policies against their will, to what degree were they able to recall these representatives, and did they exercise that privilege?
- Would it be possible to distinguish between a citizen who supported these things, and those who were pretending to for fear of reprisal, i.e. doublethink?
- To what degree were their representatives democratically electable? Many candidates were appointed by the party - is there a case to be made that what was in principle democracy was in practise bureaucracy? Also what's the deal with patronage and clientelism?
- Given the principle of vanguardism regarding the eventual formation of a mass, class-conscious party membership that would lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat, why did parties like the CPSU or CPC maintain a division of membership into upper and lower parties? Again, this feeds into bureaucracy and undermines the assertion that high membership = high participation
- Did the existence of Samizdat for instance bewray a widespread sense of suppression, or only the beliefs of a minority?
- Why did the CPSU consistently receive 70% of the vote for 30 years, before attaining 87% with Gorbachev? Why did these dissenting votes not gradually wither or grow?
I'm sure there's more but that's all I can be bothered to articulate. Not trying to bust any balls, just curious
