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.
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?”
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.
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 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.
Democratic centrism is more of a rule or process or principle. It isn’t even a form of government and it’s compatible with many forms of government.
Proletarian democracy isn’t well defined so I can’t say anything since it means 1000 different things to 1000 different people and often does include representative democracy.
Participatory democracy similarly is a spectrum and is compatible with representative democracy.
So to actually talk about this you would need to be more specific about how the “better” form of government would work.
Bu what metric does that system work though? It’s hard to judge it because the info is all unreliable and the government doesn’t share data. We don’t know how bad or good wealth inequality is there.
How do you define “working”? Otherwise I don’t know how you’re measuring it. Would you say that a system that allows for literally one of the most unpopular genocides in history is “working”? Or a system that is working overtime to increase income and wealth disparity rather than reduce it? Is that working? I certainly wouldn’t but I’m guessing you think that’s working swell
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
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.
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.
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.
You’re talking about an implementation of representative democracy and you’re not offering any concrete alternative. So I refer you to my first comment where I said that representative democracy is bad, but still better than the others.
I was talking about bourgeois democracies, which have only ever represented the capitalist class. A concrete alternative has already been suggested, socialist democratic centralism, a form of proletarian democracy, but you dismissed it as not even being a political system, despite it having been practiced in various countries throughout the last century. Capitalist states and corporate media label socialist states as “authoritarian,” because the capitalist class doesn’t want us to consider any alternatives that would usurp them.
Can you link something describing what that system of government looks like. Because all I’ve heard of is descriptions of the principles and the Italian party from history. And looking how, that’s all I can find also.
This is demonstrably false because in the real world Chinese system has proven itself to be far more flexible and adaptable than any western regime. That’s the reality. In fact, it’s obvious that multiparty parliamentary systems are the ones that have hard time changing course. They’re literally designed to prevent that. It’s not possible to do any sort of long term planning when governments keep changing and people keep pulling in different directions. The horizons for planning become very small. And of course, it’s pretty clear that western systems do a great job silencing opinions that fallout of the Overton window. Entire books have been written on the mechanics of this.
China is in the process of ethically cleansing their own population
This is not true at all, despite what our governments and corporate media keep feeding us. As part of China’s affirmative action policies, the Uyghurs and other ethic minorities were excepted from the One-Child policy, and in Xinjiang they have grown in numbers relative to Hans as a result, and this happened similarly with other ethnic minorities. The “Uyghur genocide” (“cultural” or otherwise) psyop is BS.
We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.
Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.
The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.
Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.
Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).
Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.
How am I the one burying my head in the sand if I’m exposed to the same propaganda and media that you are?
What “reliable” sources do you want? Western governments, Western corporate media, Western think tanks, who have a Cold War II agenda for regime change in China, and want to bury the threat of a good example?
And we’re the ones clinging to a failed system? You’ll have to dig a little deeper for your credibility if you want to stick to this imperious schtick of yours.
While the West is certainly struggling I fail to see how China is the preferable alternative from a political perspective. Care to enlighten me as to why it is better for its citizens which must be the goal and purpose of government no?
and prioritizes worker interests over capitalist interests (the complete shutdown during the pandemic for example unlike many capitalist countries like the US, or the current refusal to bail out real estate developers, letting them go bankrupt)
So with that data point you’re saying China is the country to be born in 2024? Because while I’m not at all discrediting their incredible pace in improving the life of their citizens from an economic perspective.
But I’m personally far more concerned about questions about freedom of expression and of opportunities and as such would prefer to be born in any Nordic country as an example, or Switzerland as another. Sure you could argue the Nordic model doesn’t scale because a population of 10 mil is not the same as more than 1 billion. But that wasn’t really a part of the question here. To me economic growth is just one dimension, an important one but not the only one to judge a country against. So once again, from a political perspective, which is what we’re talking about here when we’re saying that the West is failing, how is China better? I mainly see the mainstream outlets and they show a bleak state of affairs from that perspective, can you counter that?
No that’s not what I’m saying, and the fact that’s what you got out of it says volumes. China has consistently been improving lives of the people living in China since the revolution. People have seen their lives improve in pretty much every single way with each and every decade. That’s an example of a system that actually works in the interest of the public.
I’m personally far more concerned about questions about freedom of expression and of opportunities and as such would prefer to be born in any Nordic country as an example, or Switzerland as another.
That’s because you have your basic needs met and you have no empathy.
It’s demonstrably not, but westerners just keep clinging to their failed system lacking the courage and imagination to try anything different.
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.
.
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.
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.”
I’m not holding my breath on a lib getting into specifics
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.
Communism
What they do in Cuba, or the PRC, or the former USSR
Almost any other kind of democracy. Representative democracy is better than fascism but it is the worst form of democracy
Worse than what form of democracy exactly?
Everything else people have mentioned in the comments. Proletarian democracy, democratic centralism, participatory democracy, etc.
Well, the first two are really just a way of saying socialism.
Democratic centrism is more of a rule or process or principle. It isn’t even a form of government and it’s compatible with many forms of government.
Proletarian democracy isn’t well defined so I can’t say anything since it means 1000 different things to 1000 different people and often does include representative democracy.
Participatory democracy similarly is a spectrum and is compatible with representative democracy.
So to actually talk about this you would need to be more specific about how the “better” form of government would work.
All the others?
Name one. One actually concrete form of democracy that would work better.
Whatever its called that cuba does where national representation is organized and chosen at the local level. Idk im not a political scientist.
But also name ten that are worse
Bu what metric does that system work though? It’s hard to judge it because the info is all unreliable and the government doesn’t share data. We don’t know how bad or good wealth inequality is there.
I answered your question but you didn’t answer mine.
By what metric does the US system work?
How do you define “working”? Otherwise I don’t know how you’re measuring it. Would you say that a system that allows for literally one of the most unpopular genocides in history is “working”? Or a system that is working overtime to increase income and wealth disparity rather than reduce it? Is that working? I certainly wouldn’t but I’m guessing you think that’s working swell
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Even the US State Department dropped the made-up Uighur genocide. When will you dumbass libs get it
Participatory democracy
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
Go on. Enlighten us.
consider yourself enlightened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism
edit: love how you can state basic facts and libs start seething
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.
Everyone can see that the US government is ossified, incapable of changing course (or of representing the people). And it’s no accident: it was designed to be so. The Separation of Powers is BROKEN, Here’s Why
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The Separation of Powers is BROKEN, Here’s Why
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The Separation of Powers is BROKEN, Here’s Why
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You’re talking about an implementation of representative democracy and you’re not offering any concrete alternative. So I refer you to my first comment where I said that representative democracy is bad, but still better than the others.
I was talking about bourgeois democracies, which have only ever represented the capitalist class. A concrete alternative has already been suggested, socialist democratic centralism, a form of proletarian democracy, but you dismissed it as not even being a political system, despite it having been practiced in various countries throughout the last century. Capitalist states and corporate media label socialist states as “authoritarian,” because the capitalist class doesn’t want us to consider any alternatives that would usurp them.
Can you link something describing what that system of government looks like. Because all I’ve heard of is descriptions of the principles and the Italian party from history. And looking how, that’s all I can find also.
This is demonstrably false because in the real world Chinese system has proven itself to be far more flexible and adaptable than any western regime. That’s the reality. In fact, it’s obvious that multiparty parliamentary systems are the ones that have hard time changing course. They’re literally designed to prevent that. It’s not possible to do any sort of long term planning when governments keep changing and people keep pulling in different directions. The horizons for planning become very small. And of course, it’s pretty clear that western systems do a great job silencing opinions that fallout of the Overton window. Entire books have been written on the mechanics of this.
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This is not true at all, despite what our governments and corporate media keep feeding us. As part of China’s affirmative action policies, the Uyghurs and other ethic minorities were excepted from the One-Child policy, and in Xinjiang they have grown in numbers relative to Hans as a result, and this happened similarly with other ethnic minorities. The “Uyghur genocide” (“cultural” or otherwise) psyop is BS.
Those are some wild and unreliable sources for why it isn’t a genocide. You’re burying your head in the sand.
How am I the one burying my head in the sand if I’m exposed to the same propaganda and media that you are?
What “reliable” sources do you want? Western governments, Western corporate media, Western think tanks, who have a Cold War II agenda for regime change in China, and want to bury the threat of a good example?
Joseph Kahn, the managing editor of the New York Times, is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as are the CEOs of NPR & PBS. And those are the ones I know off the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Foreign_Relations
The Council of Foreign Relations is a place where the government and the capitalist class hash out the media’s agenda. On its founding, Walter Lippman was its head of research. The title of Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent came from a quote in Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion. Are you familiar with Edward Bernays, who literally wrote the book, Propaganda? Are you familiar with the Powell memorandum or the Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy?
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thanks for letting us know that you’re a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect
And we’re the ones clinging to a failed system? You’ll have to dig a little deeper for your credibility if you want to stick to this imperious schtick of yours.
If you can’t see that the west is failing then you need to start engaging with reality. China is running circles around you losers.
While the West is certainly struggling I fail to see how China is the preferable alternative from a political perspective. Care to enlighten me as to why it is better for its citizens which must be the goal and purpose of government no?
A socialist state that has
consistently decreased poverty in the country; lifting 800 million people out of poverty so far,
consistently increased homeownership rates; 90% right now,
and prioritizes worker interests over capitalist interests (the complete shutdown during the pandemic for example unlike many capitalist countries like the US, or the current refusal to bail out real estate developers, letting them go bankrupt)
does indeed have the superior system yes.
The American Dream Is Alive and Well — in China
If you’re failing to see how China is preferable then you should spend the time educating yourself on what China has achieved instead of trolling here. Here’s one example that you can educate yourself on https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
So with that data point you’re saying China is the country to be born in 2024? Because while I’m not at all discrediting their incredible pace in improving the life of their citizens from an economic perspective.
But I’m personally far more concerned about questions about freedom of expression and of opportunities and as such would prefer to be born in any Nordic country as an example, or Switzerland as another. Sure you could argue the Nordic model doesn’t scale because a population of 10 mil is not the same as more than 1 billion. But that wasn’t really a part of the question here. To me economic growth is just one dimension, an important one but not the only one to judge a country against. So once again, from a political perspective, which is what we’re talking about here when we’re saying that the West is failing, how is China better? I mainly see the mainstream outlets and they show a bleak state of affairs from that perspective, can you counter that?
No that’s not what I’m saying, and the fact that’s what you got out of it says volumes. China has consistently been improving lives of the people living in China since the revolution. People have seen their lives improve in pretty much every single way with each and every decade. That’s an example of a system that actually works in the interest of the public.
That’s because you have your basic needs met and you have no empathy.
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Read another book.