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[-] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

We need a digital liquid democracy platform. We have the technology and infrastructure for it now, and it’s time for the people to rule themselves.

[-] PillowD@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

I have never heard the word electoralism in real life.

[-] ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 4 points 8 hours ago

If Mamdani wins and keeps his mandate strong to the point that opposition to him is career suicide, he can implement some amazing improvements.

Bernie's success in Burlington was never going to translate to broader America, but NYC is hard to ignore.

The real test will be what Democrats do nationwide in response to a Mayor Mamdani administration. If they do the same old New Democrat/Third Way bullshit they've been doing since Bill Clinton won* in 1992, they'll continue to be irrelevant in the face of populist hucksters like Trump.

[-] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago

Democracy can and will work once a simple rule is implemented. Namely: no one who wants the power to rule should ever be allowed anywhere near power. Of course the rich won't allow such a law to be passed, and enforcing it is the stuff of thought crime dystopic nightmares, but I'm sure we can overcome those small issues.

[-] hamid@crazypeople.online 11 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

These liberals really need to read Lenin before commenting. A certain OP may have even read it aloud for them so they can just listen to it if reading is too hard.

https://www.marxists.org/audiobooks/archive/lenin/1917/staterev/index.htm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0-IkmzWbjoatUez9-2vaAvB78afoKNRC

[-] VoxAliorum@lemmy.ml 4 points 14 hours ago

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.

[-] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 18 hours ago

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.

[-] narwhal@mander.xyz 20 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

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.

[-] turdcollector69@lemmy.world 1 points 5 minutes ago

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.

[-] mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 hours ago

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.

[-] mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 hours ago

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.

[-] PearOfJudes@lemmy.ml 6 points 16 hours ago

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.

[-] Strawberry 3 points 9 hours ago

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.

[-] VoxAliorum@lemmy.ml 18 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Electoralism =\= Democracy

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 15 points 16 hours ago

The problem isn't democracy, it's democracy under capitalism, and the idea that we can actually transition to socialism via electoralist means.

[-] commiunism@lemmy.dbzer0.com 40 points 1 day ago

Real liberal democracy has never been tried

[-] RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 8 points 17 hours ago

It's just the outside forces that have made it fail. In theory it's perfect system

[-] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 35 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The great lie of liberal democracy is the idealist notion that literally anything can be voted in if enough people vote for it, and that this will have political supremacy over those in power. This analysis puts the state outside of class struggle, above it, and not as the mutually reinforcing superstructural aspect of society. The role of the state is to reinforce the base, ie the mode of production, and it does so through propagating ruling class ideology (ie, liberalism), and through a monopoly of violence.

Electoralism is a sham. The lessons of the failures of electoralism scar the global south, the coup against comrade Allende taught us all too well. The state is not outside or above class struggle, but is mired in it. Without replacing the bourgeois state with a socialist, proletarian one, the ready-made levers for reinforcing the bourgeois mode of production will cause a reversion. The Paris Commune was the first such example of this failure in action, and it has happened again, such as with the coup against Allende and the installment of Pinochet.

What is there to do, then? Organize. Build up parallel structures that take the place of existing capitalist mechanisms. Join a party, read theory, and solidify the politically advanced of the working class under one united banner. Build a dedication to the people, defend and platform the indigenous, colonized, queer, disabled, marginalized communities, and unite the broad working class. It is through organization and revolution that we can actually move on into a better world.

If anyone reading wants a place to start with theory, I made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, aimed at absolute beginners. Give it a look!

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[-] Fredthefishlord 13 points 1 day ago

The world and society have explicitly gotten far better since and because of the advent of serious representative democracy.

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 day ago

The US and Britain genocided entire continents using representative "democracy" (IE capitalist dictatorship).

[-] Fredthefishlord 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Mr_WorldlyWiseman 3 points 18 hours ago

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.

[-] Fredthefishlord 6 points 22 hours ago

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

[-] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] taiyang@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago

Seeing CA propositions get rigged with misinformation and tricky language suggests to me that direct democracy might also not work without proper safeguards.

[-] theolodis@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Seeing how many selfish and uneducated people there are, I think we'd be beat off if the majority of people doesn't get a say, and the (communist) party just takes the decisions for the greater good of the people.

[-] adrianmalacoda@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 day ago

Arrested Development was literally a satire of the Bush family/administration, whom are now being rehabilitated by usonian liberals.

[-] ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Edie@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

  We are sometimes inclined, I think unwisely, to treat democracy and dictatorship as two mutually exclusive terms, when in actual fact they may often represent two aspects of the same system of government. For example, if we turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, to the article dealing with “Democracy,” we read: “Democracy is that form of government in which the people rules itself, either directly, as in the small city-states of Greece, or through representatives.”
  But the same writer goes on to say this: “All the people in the city-state did not have the right to participate in government, but only those who were citizens, in the legal and original sense. Outside this charmed circle of the privileged were the slaves, who had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled. They had no political and hardly any civil rights; they were not ‘people.’ Thus the democracy of the Greek city-state was in the strict sense no democracy at all.”
  The Greek city-state has been cited time and again by historians as the birthplace of democracy. And yet, on reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, we find that in fact this was a democracy only for a “charmed circle of the privileged,” while the slaves, who did the work of the community, “had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled.”
  The classical example of democracy was, then, a democracy only for certain people. For others, for those who did the hard work of the community, it was a dictatorship. At the very birthplace of democracy itself we find that democracy and dictatorship went hand in hand as two aspects of the same political system. To refer to the “democracy” of the Greek city-state without saying for whom this democracy existed is misleading. To describe the democracy of the Greek city-state without pointing out that it could only exist as a result of the toil of the slaves who “had no political and hardly any civil rights” falsifies the real history of the origin of democracy.
  Democracy, then, from its origin, has not precluded the simultaneous existence of dictatorship. The essential question which must be asked, when social systems appear to include elements both of democracy and dictatorship, is, “for whom is there democracy?” and “over whom is there a dictatorship?”

—Pat Sloan, in the Introduction to Soviet Democracy

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[-] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 4 points 1 day ago

The Liberals got wrecked so hard Peter Dutton lost his seat.

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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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