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.

  • Dyno [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    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