Recently I posted a pretty harmless meme in my DSA chapter’s Discord (see image). It was in response to South Korea’s recent spate of Fascism.
In response I had comrades jump down my throat, attacking me for critical support of AES states like DPRK and China. According to these comrades “there is no real Socialist nation.”
As tempting as it is to quit DSA I think I should stay and try to educate.
Comrades also jumped on me for a comment I made months ago in response to some right wing BS where I said “maybe Democracy isn’t always a great idea”. The point I was trying to make was that Trans rights and other basic freedoms should never be put up to a popularity contest… I’m ok with a state that defends these rights and doesn’t allow a reactionary majority to vote them away!
During this thread, people brought up multiple times that DPRK isn’t Democratic because the Kim’s have always been the figurehead, China isn’t Democratic because “reasons” (racism), China lies about their suicide rates to WHO, etc.
Frustrating. I’ll post more details in the comments.
My question: What constitutes a “real” Democracy? Is it leadership changing hands every few years? We don’t have that in the U.S. Is it secret ballots? All the nationa above have that. Is it that the people’s votes and voices actually change the government actions? We saw this in China unfortunately when people demanded ending the COVID lock downs early. It was the wrong thing to do but done for the right reason.
And is there any hope for these people in my chapter? One of them was basically racist against Chinese people and they seem very set in this “not real Socialism” mindset.
join Democratic Socialists of America
it’s full of demsocs
I thought of DSA as a “big tent” but for the Left. NGL It’s tempting to leave but I also want to organize 🤷♂️
Just gotta hope the people who aren’t chiming in read the links and see where I’m coming from.
I thought of DSA as a “big tent” but for the Left.
Same, bro. Same. When I joined my chapter when it existed, I was a bit intimidated by the fact that there might be actual Marxists, since at the time, I thought I was a baby socialist. But I found out real quick that I was substantially further left than most of them. I guess I can’t fault them because they were genuine focused on local issues, which is noble.
Look into the DSA’s Marxist Unity Group(MUG). It’s an internal Marxist committee that seemed promising when I was lurking.
shitting on the DPRK and China as a western “leftist” is basically a sign of willful ignorance. those people can be dismissed as lazy and racist for not doing the homework of reading the history of how those states were forged in the fires of resistance to western capital formations and aggressive imperialist encirclement.
to criticisize these countries with the same ahistorical talking points of western capitalist media is to repeat the lies a sadistic abuser tells about the survivor who has successfully resisted their abuse and found an admirable way to thrive.
native English speakers purporting to be leftist who can’t even bother to listen to a few episodes from the season of Blowback about Korea should fuck all the way off. I have nothing but contempt for them and they are no different than avowed fascists, imo.
Many westerners come to socialism not out of necessity, but out of disillusionment. We are raised with the idea that Liberal Democracy is the best system of political expression humanity has devised. When confronted with the reality of its shortcomings, rather than narrowly discard liberalism or electoralism, the western anti-capitalist tends to draw sweeping conclusions about the inadequacy of all existing systems. Curiously, though it would at first seem that such denunciations are more principled and severe, they are in fact more compatible with existing and widespread beliefs about the supremacy of the western system. That is to say, when a Marxist-Leninist asserts the superiority of existing socialist experiments, they are directly challenging the idea that westerners are at the forefront of political development. By contrast, the assertions from anarchists and social democrats that we need to build a more utopian future out of our current apex are compatible not only with each other, as discussed earlier, but also do not really offend bourgeois society at large. They in fact end up not sounding too different from the arch-imperialist Winston Churchill holding forth on how ours is the worst system, except for all the others which have been tried. Western chauvinists, consciously or unconsciously, struggle with the idea that they should study and humbly take lessons from the imperial periphery. [15] It is much easier for the chauvinist, psychologically, to position oneself as at the very front of a new vanguard.
My question: What constitutes a “real” Democracy? Is it leadership changing hands every few years? We don’t have that in the U.S. Is it secret ballots? All the nationa above have that. Is it that the people’s votes and voices actually change the government actions? We saw this in China unfortunately when people demanded ending the COVID lock downs early. It was the wrong thing to do but done for the right reason.
My view is that the most important definition of democracy is the one that highlights why people value it in the first place: the majority of people getting most of what they want, most of the time.
I think the way I’ve phrased it is quite generous, and allows a democracy to be pretty badly flawed and still count. As far as I see it, without most people getting what they want most of the time, democracy is basically the worst form of government. You as a citizen have more work to do, just to still not get the shit you want!
To me, that implies a consequentialist attitude towards it. Basically, democratic systems and processes are only valuable to the extent that they produce democratic outcomes (most people getting what they want). Maybe I’m losing my own thread, but as I’m defining it, a literal monarchy could be a better democracy that one with a “democratic system,” if the monarch in question was better about pursuing the interests of the majority of citizens. But, it would still be desirable to have a democratic system in place rather than one that will change with the whims of the next ruler, on the basis that it could more reliably produce democratic results.
I think it’s also important to consider the “ranking” of democracy compared to other values. To me, it seems clear that democracy (most people getting what they want) is good, but democracy doesn’t validate every shitty thing a bunch of people want to do. Consider a bigoted population democratically deciding to purge a minority population, or the citizens of an imperialist country democratically backing a war.
Critical support doesn’t require DPRK et al. to be “real socialism” etc.
Right! Like I totally understand China is “Market Socialism” and see that as them on the road to Socialism. There are contradictions but also many strides in the right direction. I see the Deng reforms as a form of self-defense against the changing material conditions making switching to Capitalism tempting. I have a half-baked theory that “treats” and jealousy over said treats is what contributed to USSR collapsing, which China sidestepped by getting ahead of by “opening up”. That will probably be a separate post one day.
I have a half-baked theory that “treats” and jealousy over said treats is what contributed to USSR collapsing, which China sidestepped by getting ahead of by “opening up”.
I’m somewhat there myself. It became way too (falsely ofc) obvious to the Soviet working class that Liberalism was just as or more emancipatory to them than the USSR’s socialist methods. Now I say falsely because pretty much without a State to resist the plundering of outside Capital, a lot of fucking people died and had their standard of living crater into the ground. But it is a central failure of the USSR, and imo a success story of China, to properly educate and elucidate the reality of Capital and their socialist project and incorporating the working class into a State to combat Capital. Great man theory is a shit, but the fact that every Soviet leader was continually worse at managing and combating Capital from Stalin onwards is pretty obvious, and yet that China has only gotten stronger and more robust in standing against bourgeois elements at home and abroad.
I wrote this during my trip to China, it’s an excerpt from a longer entry, but I found the same line of thought you discuss here;
I think one of the smartest things they’ve done here in China is allow the integration of western luxury brands into society. This prevents the sort of fetishism that was prevalent in the USSR, where people who bought into the (frankly delusional) hype around western brands being of high quality that contributed to (a minority) of people being willing to trade the benefits of socialism for the “benefits” of capitalism.
All the luxury brands are here, and they hold similar status that they do in the west, eg Rolex, Tesla, Nike, etc. but because they’re not forbidden fruit, the fetishizing is not accompanied by desires to dismantle such a system in favor of those forbidden fruit.
