- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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Democratic socialism just means you believe in democratically governed socialism, not that you think you can just vote capitalism into socialism. There’s both reformist and revolutionary democratic socialists. I both believe in democracy and also see that the only way to overturn capitalism (at least in the US) would be through revolution. All the democratic part means is that they’re opposed to monarchies or dictatorships.
Are you saying that you can have undemocratic socialism?
Isn’t that what USSR was, dictatorship?
Dictatorship of the proletariat is democracy for the people
How? You still have 1 person having full power instead of being first among equals?
Stalin was a captain of a team
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
Counterpoint:
What’s the background for this report, who compiled it, what the sources were and so on?
It sounds pretty dubious since it has big ass text at the start saying
This is UNEVALUED information
It’s a top secret report created by the informational gathering apparatus of a global super power/nation state, with all the interest to get an accurate picture of their geopolitical rival, but also with the interest to keep their population not in the know (not it’s like the only time in US history). The fact that it fits with other historical accounts of Stalin by e.g Domenico Losurdo.
Funny how you libs always pull out skepticism when it’s against the western narrative. Even if it’s unvaluated, it’s not going to be significantly off. The CIA is pretty good at what they do
What are you talking about about? Go read a goddamned book about the political structure of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its many voting structures, its multiple state entities, its levels of power of distribution, and THEN try to argue that 1 person had full power.
It’s ridiculous to think that your level of ignorance counts as a political perspective on history.
This idea would seem to rest on the logic that any given poor person would be less likely to be corrupted by power than a given rich person (presumably due to their experiences being poor). In my experience when you give someone who is used to destitution access to power and resources their instincts are incredibly self serving. Being part of the proletariat does not automatically indicate any amount of empathy, humility, self control, forward thinking, or any other characteristic of a good, fair leader.
Dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t mean “a random worker becomes dictator”, it means the workers dictate the rules.
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Good question. No. It was not. Please read about it. There is plenty of writing about the political structure of the USSR, its constitutional documents, its legal and court systems, etc. It is imminently possible for you to learn about it if you’re curious
besides the oxymoron of a dictatorship of the people, yes, you can have government that claim to be socialits that are a dictatorship
Yes, under a dictatorship, it’s literally happened before. Are you being serious or is this supposed to be some sort of gotcha where you go “socialism can’t exist without democracy so the label is pedantic”?
Socialism under one party governments have happened, that is not democracy, even if democratic elements exist within. You can’t have democracy under one party, the people need the ability to form an opposition party if the need arises.
You don’t understand party systems, so you imagine one-party systems are undemocratic. You are incorrect. In a multi-party systems, competing interests fight for power using the electoral system. That means you would have a capitalist party and a socialist party and they would fight for votes. Why in the world would you ever expect a communist country to have multiple parties?
Instead of that, communist parties have structures within them for different factions to have sub organizations within the party. These are all people who support communism but differ on the particulars. They fight for power within the party, ensuring that the country remains communist while still enabling democracy.
It is only in fully capitalist countries that have eliminated the power of their internal communist where you have multiple capitalist parties that actually collaborate and then spread propaganda that only multi-party states are truly democratic. It’s transparent bullshit.
That’s why we say that under capitalism you can change the party but the not the policies and under communism you can change the policies but not the party. Ever notice just how democratic the West is regarding war? No matter how much the people don’t want war, no matter what party is in power, the leadership always chooses war. No matter how much we want profits to take a back seat to social issues, profit always wins. The policies of capitalism are unchangeable by the people. Is that democracy simply because you get to choose which team is oppressing you and killing foreigners?
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Having a single party simply means that the society as a whole agreed on a single collective vision. There can be plenty of debate within the framework of a party on how to actually implement this vision. Meanwhile, any class society will be a dictatorship of the class that holds power. Given that socialist society would arise from an existing capitalist society, it would necessarily inherit existing class relationships. What changes is which class holds power. That’s the difference between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Finally, the notion of dictatorship in a sense of a single person running things is infantile beyond belief. People who peddle this notion are the ones who should truly be ashamed of themselves. As Anna Louise Strong puts it in This Soviet World:
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a wild dronie appears
You’re right, I’m just wasting my time in a really dumb losing battle.
No. That’s incorrect. Democratic socialism is always and has always been an opposite to revolutionary socialism. Read some goddamned books. ALL forms of socialism are democratic, essentially by definition, but certainly by historical precedent. The only undemocratic “socialist” movements have been fascist movements using socialist aesthetics.
What about democracy? Can’t voting fix our problems?
- Red Phoenix - Pacifism - How to do the enemy’s job for them. Youtube Audiobook
- Why not just vote leftists into office: what’s wrong with democratic socialism?
- Halim Alrah - Why liberal democracies are a sham.
- What about social democracy / democratic socialism / the Nordic model? Isn’t Sweden socialist?
- On the unraveling of the Nordic welfare states: increasing inequality and forced austerity.
- Scandinavia’s covert role in western imperialism
- Paul Cockshott - On Socialism and Democracy. 2 3
- Comrade Hakim - Why electoralism always fails.
- Why not just vote leftists into office: what’s wrong with democratic socialism?
- An Overview of Leninism, audiobook. Lenin - State and Revolution , audiobook
- LeftVoice - Bourgeois Democracy - What do Marxists mean by this term?
More like, under new management.
Thank you, as a democratic socialist this is what I was looking for.
Sometimes I wonder how many “Marxists” really have read Marx.
Only those that did know that you can’t vote away capitalism.
No you can’t. It collapses on the weight of its own contradictions. Any imposition of socialism without the right material conditions is doomed.
- What I remember from Marx and/or Engels is that a sharpening of capitalism’s internal contradictions are necessary but not sufficient. Revolution is still needed. We can’t expect some automatic transition from capitalism to socialism.
- Marx wasn’t a prophet. The first successful communist revolution happened in Russia under feudalism, not capitalism.
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It’s not a passive process and the arising of socialism isn’t guaranteed.
What’s that im reference to?
In reference to how socialism will truly come about, Marx literally criticized the kind of thinking that dominates left wing thinking nowadays.
Communism and Marx are objectively left wing, and “left wing thinking” could mean any number of things. Without being specific about what you mean, it’s unfalsifiable.
Pity he was banned. I was curious to see what his specific points were.
There’s some interesting discussions to be had of Marx’s writings on electoralism, revolution, and republics.
What thinking did he criticise so literally?
The DSA has everyone from reformist soc dems, to anarchists, to MLs, to Maoist Third Worldists
and that’s precisely the reason it’s been so effective
Were you were being sarcastic? I am Brazilian and know nothing of the DSA.
Yes, he was being sarcastic.
Supa-hot-fire.gif
“I’m about to ruin this man’s whole career”
Marxist: Let me mock one of my closest ideological allies. That will help bring about revolution.
Democratic Socialist: The fuck did I do to you, bro?
Democratic socialists are not our ally
And that’s why you’ve got no chance as a movement. And you couldn’t create anything sustainable even if you did. Congrats.
A succesful united front is only achievable by picking your fights. Focus on the capitalists, not on who may eventually turn sympathetic to our worker’s cause. When the capitalists divide us, it won’t work.
(Speaking as an ancom).
This is so dumb.
If you want change, you have to take power. Power is where the people think it is.
If people can’t even realize their own power as workers and unionize, they’re not about to rise up in some glorious revolution. And even if they did, the majority would just do capitalism again, because most people can’t imagine anything else
But the economic system is collapsing. When it does, we need power. That’s how this works. We take local, State, and federal positions and use them to do progressive things, to improve material conditions.
And then when we get to an inflection point, we need leaders who already have the support of the people. We need populist progressives in power
The reason it’s dumb is because DemSocs don’t actually have the ring of power to be able to cast it into the fire in the first place.
How many Bolsheviks were in positions of government? How much of the PLA was in power in China?
The sad reality is that nearly every successful socialist revolution was born through civil war.
Ernst Thälmann tried that
Many others within germany were also trying that too. It did not work
We must build duel power, not power within the bourgeois system
@Confidant6198@lemmy.ml I am not a marxist. Destroy it anyway.
This is simplistic. If reform works, do it. If it cannot, use force. Even Marx, if I remember correctly, supported the reformist Chartists in relatively democratic countries like England (while supporting revolutionary methods in feudal Germany).
