happyandhappy

Whatever leadership of the United States exists should be determined by a balance of popular democracy and informed public opinion. This both communists and liberals nominally agree on, but liberalism can never fully fulfill on its promise of. Communism itself is birthed by the failures of liberalism to fulfill its own promises, where - despite being a progressive break from feudalism - it is shackled by its mandate of class society: a form of society where classes with antagonistic and irreconcilable interests will ultimately have to sublimate into what is typically referred to at this point as "socialism or barbarism".

First, I would probably need to convince you that "liberal democracy" is and always has only ever truly protected the interests of the propertied ruling class. I could start from the inception point of liberalism - the French Revolution - but I think it is inarguably obvious except to only the most blind, sheltered and ideologically committed that even the current day shining example of liberal democracy only exists for the interests of the propertied ruling class to maintain the status quo of normalized superexploitation of the working masses.

https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-little-impact-on-public-policy/ There's this study where:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

since the first official collaboration between the Democrats and Republicans in the 1960s to crush Black Reconstruction and Northern unions, both parties in our so-called "pluralist" democracy have only ever sought to: reconcile the antagonistic contradictions of class society and enrich themselves in the process. There is literally "little to no" popular democracy in the United States, where typical of liberalism only the propertied and those designated by the state as "people" get any "popular" say.

Secondly, I'd like to bring your attention to Cuba. Just in the past year they passed a popular referendum to pass an amendment to the Family Code of the constitution to make Cuba the most progressive country in the planet on LGBTQ and familial rights, far surpassing even the most progressive liberal countries on LGBTQ rights in particular. This referendum (which is just honestly so inspiring to me) was passed through the development and efforts of the Cuban people to reckon with and educate the populace of a majority Catholic and historically homophobic country and with both civilian activist and governmental organizations were able to educate the people to decide for themselves on the correct position to take.

When the referendum was introduced in 2019, Cuba carried out nationwide education and outreach; nearly 6.5 million Cubans took part in more than 79,000 meetings facilitated by community orgs to shape the amendment democratically. In regards to participatory democracy: over 400,000 proposals were offered by the people resulting in the 25th version of the Code for the referendum vote – which was approved by a 66-33% vote.

“For the first time ever, the Family Code recognizes diversity and the value of affection...provides the opportunity to strengthen family ties, to access collegiate conflict resolution, to open space for all members of a family to be heard, cared for and respected...each of the chapters of the Code is a door to inclusion, understanding, and logically, love.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20220928125838/https://en.granma.cu/cuba/2022-09-22/love-also-generates-kinship from Granma the official newspaper of the PCC

“We have inherited a Spanish culture which is strongly patriarchal, homophobic, and highly discriminative. Such a long period of prejudices cannot be eliminated immediately. But, are we going to continue reproducing the oppressive, exploitative past, the past which invents prejudices in order to dominate persons? This is a society in search of socialism; we are fighting to articulate revolutionary ideas which will guarantee a society where the genuine emancipation of human beings is attained. For that reason, we must go on working, with the support of the media, in different actions which invite reflection. When we talk about an educative strategy, we are talking about education with a bio-ethical viewpoint, which invites dialogue and reflection. We do not want to impose our viewpoints. [...] The most important thing we have achieved is dialogue. The Cuban population is discussing these issues. We receive many letters of thanks, telephone calls, messages on our webpage [...] Many people approach us and tell us very gratifying things, like “now I’m a better person,” “thanks to your work I no longer discriminate against my children,” or “I no longer feel afraid of homosexuality.”

-Maria Castro Espín, Director CENESEX (National Sex Education Center founded in 1989)

This is democracy. Not Mitch McConnell being the 6th richest person in the entire state of Kentucky. And I think this is where State and Revolutions concepts really come into play. What we have in the United States is a 2-party *Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. There is no democracy for the proletariat (working class). Democracy is an ideal that we have to do our best to approximate: it will require experimentation and scientific trial and error in order to ultimately birth a system completely unimaginable to us with the outcomes of "democracy", and revolutionizing the current system to a truly democratic path is really only the beginning.

Also it's important to note that liberal media (media controlled by capitalists that espouse the values of liberalism: individualism, capitalism, and maintenance of the status quo) will always try to portray its own system as superior using completely arbitrary values that - to those of us who grow up in a liberal society - will also always try to portray themselves as invisible, or ubiquitous, or unbiased.

The survey team found that compared to public opinion patterns in the U.S., in China there was very high satisfaction with the central government. In 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of respondents were either “relatively satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with Beijing. In contrast to these findings, Gallup reported in January of this year that their latest polling on U.S. citizen satisfaction with the American federal government revealed only 38 percent of respondents were satisfied with the federal government.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/

China and Cuba, despite having different forms of democracy than liberal "multipluralism", have a significantly stronger popular mandate than the United States. And anybody can run for local positions, both China and Cuba have a plurality of political parties in their congresses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People%27s_Congress even on wikipedia you can literally see that little rainbow of different parties.

The reason why Marxist-Leninist countries need to be able to "enforce a political majority" (which again we already have covered that the United States does a thousand-fold) is because capitalism has a need to constantly expand into newer markets, and looks at the interior and non-privatized industries of communist countries as assets begging to privatized and subsumed into the market. The concept of the "shock doctrine" outlines this, where the fall of the soviet union in 1991 - regardless of your opinion on them - lead to a crushing and disastrous humanitarian disaster where corporations were consuming the entire nationalized interior and leaving the people to die in hospitals that could no longer supply running water. Even now capitalism looks at every single "new market" interior with malice and is currently looking to dismantle and liberalize any resistance to this process.

and here's some resources that i think may be helpful if you are seeking to understand my position:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQfibsxYg8E

I recommend every single Michael Parenti lecture you can find on youtube. He is a really great communicator and has a very sharp understanding of marxism. This lecture will help explain shock doctrine and my last paragraph for you. I would highly highly highly recommend his book Blackshirts and Reds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhxYqxm_TPE

here's a podcast i really like that discusses State and Revolution and will probably be an easier gateway into the concepts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4glOA3MGuw

this is a nice tight video explaining in short form the contradictions within capitalism and so called social democracy.

neoliberalism is a function of capitalism's contradiction of requiring constant exponential growth. in an infinite timeline neoliberalism will sadly completely consume any semblance of "social democracy", and you can already see even the classic european social democracies are beginning to eat away at and privatize their welfare states.

other people are also pointing out unequal exchange, which is a critical concept to factor into the equation when trying to understand where the wealth of the european social democracies come from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjLmYCfKU7o this video is a really good short primer on the topic!

im not an expert in political economy, but if you read the article he goes into a lot of specific reasons why china is still in a great position in regards to the future, although it will take responsible leadership that pushes back against mainstream neoclassical economics.

didnt mean to come at you in any way btw i just had a visceral reaction to the site (and most factcheck sites tbh)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz9ICFDk8Js

this guy doesn't even support china's policy and he will debunk all of this shit for you

youve got a lot of spunk for somebody who doesnt really know what they are talking about. China has 56 recognized and protected ethnic minority groups where scholars are creating alphabets for minority languages that had not been previously written as a way to preserve their languages. How many indigenous people in the US and Hawaii can even say that they speak their language after having had them systematically destroyed for decades?

Overall, we rate Ground News Least Biased based on publishing news stories from both sides of the political spectrum and appropriately labeling their bias. We also rate them mostly factual rather than High due to the use of poor sources that can publish false or misleading information; however, these news stories are typically reported by other credible media outlets meaning they most likely are factual.

dirty browns bribed by the dirty yellows

he's probably referring to this https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2023/08/02/china-consumption-or-investment/

tldr chinas quarterly growth has slowed and liberal economists are claiming china's miracle is over. private sector investment has shrank 0.2% for the first time since data collection in 2005 but investment by state firms has expanded 8.1% in the same period. there's also a current global manufacturing recession. doesnt mean "its over" or whatever tf they're saying but interesting to note.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/global-economy-asias-factory-activity-shrinks-chinas-slump-global-slowdown-weigh-2023-08-01/

I do however prefer democracy (flawed it may be) to a more authoritarian system when it comes to changing systems for the better.

the issue is strictly this part of your ideology. "authoritarian" as it refers to liberal geopolitics is a completely frivolous word with absolutely no useful meaning. "authoritarianism" as a whole was invented to conflate nazi germany with the socialists they were attempting to genocide, while putting "non-authoritarian" US and UK on the other side of the scale. The US who's policy of manifest destiny provided inspiration to Hitler to do the same thing to the Soviet Union, and the UK - who at the time of 20 million+ soviets dying to end the nazis in 1943 - was creating the conditions for the Bengal Famine and doing nothing about it as "[Indians breed] like rabbits".

if you are really interested look into the system of soviets (worker committees) and soviet democracy worked. look into how the democracy of China works. look into how the democracy of Cuba works. in all of these countries the "authority" of the state is subject to a complex system of democracy in order to implement policies to the benefit of the poor and working masses.

interestingly enough, State And Revolution is an incredibly insightful reading on the historical development and understanding of the state, and was developed at the historical juncture where the contradictions and failures of social democracy were coming to the forefront of the discussion. its a really great read that I highly recommend regardless of political inclination, where any discussion on the nature of what the state is, where does it come from, and what is its purpose is inarguably incomplete without having read it first.