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Are Politicians Puppets? Who Really Runs the World?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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politics
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The downgrade to a "flawed democracy" highlights the reality of a system that's never truly been for the people it's always been about serving the interests of the capitalist class. A "full democracy" is a myth in a society where the economic system is designed to prioritize a select few. The real solution isn't about restoring a broken democracy but about dismantling the capitalist structures that prop it up. A good dictatorship, one that truly serves the people and removes the influence of the elite, could be the only way to actually return power to the masses.
I, personally, don’t accept any kind of dictatorship can ever be good. That there is a series of humans with self interest in between the resources of a nation and the populace of a nation leads me to doubt that possibility. If it were possible, we would have seen more than a few prosperous Marxist nations.
I’m referencing Marxism specifically because, to my mind, it requires individuals, like union leaders, to represent the interests of their union constituents (all of whom are shareholders of the means of production) and would require those representatives to act in the interest of the laborer-as-shareholder which, as I see it, puts them in a moral overlap between politics and economics. i.e., Marxism would be the most likely form of government to satisfy the conditions if a morally good dictator, and yet historically it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.
I actually fully believe in a genuine democratic capitalist government being a great means of achieving full democracy, but we have never truly been a democratically capitalist country.
This is impossible to achieve, because whenever “democracy” becomes too “genuine” for their tastes, the bourgeoisie will unleash fascism.
I am (perhaps naively) hopeful that there can be mechanisms in place to avoid this. Ranked Choice Voting seems like one possible lever, but I think it’s probably true that any certain that has a hierarchy is vulnerable to capture by those with access to the most resources.
Genuinely: What are some political systems capable of avoiding capture by the elite (Bourgeoisie, Royal, etc. classes?