A lot of people are saying that bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
BBC, 2014: Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.
This is not news, you say.
Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here’s how they explain it:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Well yeah, bourgeois “democracy” is only really democratic for capitalists and not workers.
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Ah, yes, the Athenian Method.
It’s still the best way even if it’s bad. Ranked choice voting would make it better.
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.
- The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
- 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots
- A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
- Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
- Tank Man video footage. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989
.
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.
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?
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
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.
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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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.
- The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
- The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
- Uyghur genocide allegations
- US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- The blueprint of regime change operations
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.
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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.
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Read another book.
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That could be a nice improvement to the US’s representative democracy also. The nice thing about ranked choice voting is that it forces people to have more than one choice. People may only approve of exactly their favorite choice.
