Ie this take sometimes but I don’t know what the alternatives are. When you win your revolution, what system will you put in place?
ITT I’ve seen “random elections”, and plenty of people saying “socialism”, plus someone (I hope) is thinking “anarchism”, but how is it managed? What takes the place of elections for public office?
OK, it’s been about a week with no replies. I am starting to suspect that perhaps there is no plan.
Arrested Development was literally a satire of the Bush family/administration, whom are now being rehabilitated by usonian liberals.
I really like the idea of randomly elected representatives. Sure, they will try to better their situation for afterwards but with enough corruption control (which is probably easier to implement), this will only ensure that they support their kind of workers a bit more than the rest.
I remember being so excited to vote my first time. I’ve now concluded that it’s a complete waste of time.
On the contrary, voting helps install your enemy of choice. I’d rather fight Democrats than Republicans, and I vote accordingly. Actual progress requires non-electoral action, but electoral action makes that fight more favorable.
You wanna pick and choose between all the different flavors of suck go right ahead. I’m not wasting my time voting for these idiots.
I wish you’d reconsider, you’re just making things harder for the rest of us. We’re on the same side here.
No, you’re on the side of genocide
What a joke, are you 15?
There’s no actual evidence that the DNC treats leftists any differently. Both parties did the Red Scare, both parties root out communists, both parties bomb and sanction socialist countries.
Oh yeah, I’m totally making things harder for everybody else 🙄
“We’re on the same side” my ass. Fuck the Democrats.
Yes, because everything is easier for the left when Republicans are in power 🙄. I swear, it’s going to be easier to radicalize liberals than to convince you lot to stop shooting yourselves in the foot. Have fun circle jerking over your ideological purity, I guess. We’ll be over here actually trying to make things better, if you feel like helping.
Sure, whatever you say 🤡
Uh, are you feeling okay? What you just posted is devastating to your point. I’m saying to try to keep the ratchet on the stationary stage line enough to actually push left, you’re saying “Lol just let it spin right”. This is so incredibly stupid, what idiot thought that the ratchet effect supports such a stupid argument? I feel like I’m in a room full of toddlers shouting nonsense catchphrases.
In bourgeois ‘democracy’, electoralism serves to legitimize and perpetuate the interests of the ruling class. Should laborers become the ruling class, I don’t have a problem with it doing the same.
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ngl I do hate this kind of nhilism in terms of democracy. Like I agree with that one quote from that greek guy which says that a democracy needs smart people, but democracy is the best system we’ve come up with that to a small extent, makes politicians meet the peoples needs.
The problem isn’t democracy, it’s democracy under capitalism, and the idea that we can actually transition to socialism via electoralist means.
But its about working with the system we have. We can always advocate for the system being not broken, but intentionally taking advantage of minorities and increasing wealth for the rich whilst doing the opposite for the poor.
Even though I agree that any democracy in the west isn’t truly democratic, with outright bribery in the form of lobbyist, and a two party duopoly. Even though I acknowledge this, everyone must vote for the less bad party, whilst also spreading the word for what they would truly want.
Even if the system is inevitably going downhill, slowing it down and pushing every means, through voting for the less evil option, and protesting, spreading word about socialism is the best option.
No, the best option is to organize directly and agitate against the system. This historically has protected marginalized groups far better, it’s how the Civil Rights movement passed. Simply “spreading the word” about socialism does absolutely nothing about the existing levers of power we can and cannot pull, we must do so in the context of broader organizing.
Yes, and vote as well.
The ancient greeks did not consider electoralism to be democracy. They used a combination of direct democracy and sortition. And it should be apparent now that they were right, and we’ve been played for fools for 200 years by the capitalist class who holds all of the true power in our states.
The ancient Greeks are by no means someone to look for in terms of democracy. Aristotle believed slaves were naturally less human and needed masters, and they didn’t let women, or those who didn’t own land vote.
You could say this about all western “democracies”
Electoralism =\= Democracy
I have never heard the word electoralism in real life.
keep in mind that Socrates might not have been as nice as you think, his students ended up doing a coup and their government collapsed in 8 months, their reign was so violent that ended in about the death of 10% of Athens. The tyrants run away amd they put Socrates on trial, and in his defense, Socrates refused to denounce his disciplines and just said it was a whitch hunt because they are mad that he is smarter than everyone else.
So, Socrates might have been more of a Reactionary grifter like Peterson than a wise kind humble man.
The world and society have explicitly gotten far better since and because of the advent of serious representative democracy.
The US and Britain genocided entire continents using representative “democracy” (IE capitalist dictatorship).
You don’t know what a dictatorship is. So far there isn’t a form of government that hasn’t. But unlike a dictatorship, the democracies improved
Very few modern states are settler states based on native eviction: only the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel.
The major colonialist powers of the last few hundred years were a tiny number of european nations.
But unlike a dictatorship, the democracies improved
The US and other capitalist states based on representative democracy aren’t democracies, and you’d be hard-pressed to find ppl saying they’re improving.
Even off the top of my head, there’s japan as well. So your first statement is explicitly wrong. I’m sure I can find numerous more examples if I care to start digging.
The US and other capitalist states based on representative democracy aren’t democracies, and you’d be hard-pressed to find ppl saying they’re improving.
Improved. I didn’t use the present tense. Backslides happen. They’re alarming and need to be stopped. So, you’re advocating for pure democracy. Do you believe every rule and regulation should be decided by majority vote? Personally, I believe some form of representative democracy is the only practical way to run a country/collective. Otherwise, constant votes will prevent people from paying attention
Russia too. To some extent Sweden and China too.
Also plenty of settler states out there but they didn’t evict indigenous people as much.
Things got better after unified monarchies ordained by God superceded quarreling petty kingdoms. Things got better with constitutional monarchies with aristocrat parliaments. Things got better with suffrage and classic liberal democracy.
Each system has its limitations and contradictions, and each of them were superceded when those became incompatible with the current reality.
Yup. Capitalist liberal democracy is the best system we’ve ever had at scale. It’s shite for numerous reasons, but it’s better than what came before. We can acknowledge the benefits while simultaneously acknowledging that we can do better.
Capitalism was in many ways progressive as compared to feudalism, but came with new devastation and greater imperialism on a massive scale. Socialism has been far better for the people than capitalism has been, though, and as imperialism crumbles and socialist countries are rising this is becoming clearer and clearer.
Real liberal democracy has never been tried
It’s just the outside forces that have made it fail. In theory it’s perfect system
Seeing CA propositions get rigged with misinformation and tricky language suggests to me that direct democracy might also not work without proper safeguards.
Democracy has as a necessary precondition that people are intelligent enough to differentiate good candidates from bad candidates.
The real question therefore is whether the people are intelligent enough. That decides their fate.
The prevalence of your type of reasoning is why democracy doesn’t work.
The problem is that the whole point of democracy is to align decision-making with the will of ”the people”. That puts the impetus on citizens to actually manifest a will and constitute their interpretation of who the people are. Politics and culture.
That is, people need to actively engage in public discourse about their respective interests. Such discourse demands a lot of things, freedom of speech for one, but most importantly it requires all participants to frequent avenues for discussions among those that share interests outside narrow social groups like friends and families (i.e. in spheres of the ”public”). For example, in political party organizations, trade unions, business groups, pubs and town squares, and, possibly, virtual spaces for disembodied discussion, such Lemmy (however, the disembodiment is more likely to result in discussion for the sake of discussion between people that don’t actually share living conditions or other froms of unity of interest, but I digress).
If such discussion takes place – an increasingly rare thing – there is no need to individually ”differentiate good candidates from bad candidates” and each voter’s intelligence certainly isn’t of consequence. In a functioning democracy, who to vote for, should follow naturally from your participation in public discourse.
It is clear that the scale of the political project complicates the formation of public opinions – though Pete Hegseth no doubt would like to try, you cannot run a country of 300+ million people on spirited bar stool banter – however, the principles remain the same. By definition, you can’t approach democratic decisions like a consumer does choosing a brand of toothpaste – the core principle of democracy is to eliminate any individual’s power, in favor of the collective (e.g. majority).
Democracy is a high effort process that terminates in the poll booth. Voting is foremost a formality that should not be fetishized.
If such discussion takes place – an increasingly rare thing – there is no need to individually ”differentiate good candidates from bad candidates” and each voter’s intelligence certainly isn’t of consequence. In a functioning democracy, who to vote for, should follow naturally from your participation in public discourse.
yeah that’s what i meant. still, people have to be engaged in a way that i don’t see them being engaged in. And that’s still the central issue, i’d say.
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I would replace intelligent with well educated, at least
I have come to dislike the word “education” as it refers to plato’s cave analogy in such a way that somebody else leads you out of it.
“Education” is therefore not something that you do yourself, but that somebody else does on you. It is therefore objectifying and puts the humans in a passive position.
Meanwhile, “insight” or “inspiration” is something that you do yourself as it is you who brings up the interest to learn something. Therefore it is a much better word.
Yeah I kind of didn’t like that word as I was writing it. Similar to how “tutoring” literally means to “straighten” or basically to inculcate to normativity.
Meanwhile, “insight” or “inspiration” is something that you do yourself […]
Good edit, this is a better word choice.
:)
I think your capacity to think is irrelevant or even played against you when the elites pour obscene amounts of money to change your perception of reality. Even the greatest minds can’t escape this.
I feel like the belief that intelligence somehow grants immunity to propaganda has utterly devastated media literacy and subsequently our political landscape.
When people started taking memes and blogs as legitimate sources of information we were cooked.
The Liberals got wrecked so hard Peter Dutton lost his seat.
Your use of “work” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and is very reductive. I’d recommend reading theory until you properly understand the issue, Dessalines.
Is your “theory” originating from three letter organisations or have you never actually read it yourself?
See, the problem with Dessalines’ meme is that it uses “work” as a binary category. As in, something either has no effect or it completely restructures society. It is absolutely true that electoralism can’t completely restructure society, and there are many valid explanations for why that is in communist theory. However, Dessalines reveals his lack of understanding by equating completely restructuring society with “working”.
If we were to construct a true binary between working and not working, it would be between having zero effect, and having any effect, no matter how small. The beating of a butterfly’s wings has some effect on the world, and could theoretically contribute towards a tornado that sucks up all the bourgeoisie and allows the workers to democratise the means of production. So obviously voting has some tiny effect, since it’s stronger than a butterfly’s wings. Voting works, in other words. But that’s a virtually meaningless statement if we’re constructing a binary as Dessalines did.
The correct approach is to ask “how much can voting accomplish”, and with that question we can actually arrive at an answer with some nuance and a justification from within the theory. But the binary question Dessalines asks can afford no nuance, and is obviously not supported by theory or anything else. Which proves that even if Dessalines read theory, he didn’t understand much of it.
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The socialist alliance party is working with Israel? Wowzers, I didn’t know that! Can you provide a source, or are you making things up?
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I think the fundamental issue is that “works” doesn’t have a good measurable metric and so when discussing it tends to fall into that false binary that you correctly identified.
The best I’ve seen that attempts to work around this problem was this paper from back in 20141. Unfortunately their results showed that while you’re correct that causitive impact is not zero that <5% correlation, especially for a field with as high a signal/noise ratio as political science, is an incredibly disheartening answer for “how much can voting accomplish?”
So while you are likely correct that it’s not nothing, it does suggest reality is much closer to the meme than your attempt at “nuance”.
If you have any sources that cite measurable and non-anecdotal impact that tell a different story I’d love to read them.
^1 linking the preprint because it’s not paywalled^
Closer than my attempt at nuance? I didn’t know I made an attempt at nuance yet. I thought I just vaguely gestured towards the nuance and said it exists. Can you please explain what my position is on how much I think voting can accomplish so I’m all caught up with the conversation?
The correct approach is to ask “how much can voting accomplish”, and with that question we can actually arrive at an answer with some nuance
I’m with you here, you’re “just asking questions” and I provided context on my understanding of the answers to those questions.
But the binary question Dessalines asks can afford no nuance, and is obviously not supported by theory or anything else.
A “theory” is a reductionist model that is falsifiable, by claiming that the level of nuance you suggest proves Dessalines understanding is “not supported by theory” you explicitly state that nuance as an empirical contradiction of the theory.
Either: A. You have some measure or metric which wasn’t clearly communicated showing how that nuance falsifies the theory. ^Which was my initial understanding and was hoping to clear up the miscommunication there.^
B. You’re doing a tiresome argument from ignorance thing and simply muddying the waters because the “theory” conflicts with your pre-formulated understanding of reality and you haven’t put in any effort to actually validate your own understandings.
You claim, rather rudely I might add, that “Even if Dessalines read theory, he didn’t understand much of it.” Don’t do the glib, spineless, two-faced “I didn’t make any claims yet”.
Prove it pot, say it with your chest.
Lmao I read that whole entire comment, and it wasn’t easy, and it’s all frantic backpedaling.
For the record I think the study you’re citing makes a methodological mistake by applying an issues based measurement framework in a representative democracy, but I have no intention of elaborating because you’re not arguing in good faith and you’re just going to waste everyone’s time.
Anyway next time post the version of the study that actually passed peer review and got published, not a draft.
it’s all frantic backpedaling.
Kettle
I think the study you’re citing makes a methodological mistake by applying an issues based measurement framework in a representative democracy
I don’t necessarily disagree. It’s definitely not a holistic view, but I haven’t found much else that even asks that question much less has any real methodology behind it. Have you?
What would be the correct methodology in your opinion?
I have no intention of elaborating
You’re not communicating anything other than the vaguest of concern trolling. You clearly have thoughts and opinions, this is a place to share those.
You can’t both be upset when you are misunderstand and refuse to communicate.
Quit backpedaling and say it with your chest.
Anyway next time post the version of the study that actually passed peer review and got published, not a draft.
You do know how to use sci-hub right? You have the title, or if you’re morally opposed to that option a quick Google and you can pay $30 here for it.
However, before you gish-gallop into concern trolling the source I linked why don’t you provide one, or multiple, of your own that supports the concerns you have surrounding “nuance”.
