A lot of people are saying that bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
BBC, 2014: Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.
This is not news, you say.
Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here’s how they explain it:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
This is what happens when people figure out their “representatives” only represent the ruling class.
One problem in the US is that the purpose of the House of Representatives has been completely subverted. It was supposed to scale up with the population so the representatives really would be part of the community they represent. But we stopped increasing the number of representatives and that lets the ruling elite control them better. The representatives no longer come from their community and the wealthy have less candidates they have to prop up. And the lower count means that gerrymandering is far more effective.
The main problem though is that the US government was built intentionally and from the ground up around representing wealthy landowners. The entire system was never meant to represent the common person and it never will.
Exactly. It wouldn’t matter how many representives you add if the while system is designed for and by the oppressors
Another problem in the US is the Senate working as intended
Agreed
We need direct democracy tbh.
Well yeah, bourgeois “democracy” is only really democratic for capitalists and not workers.
glad to see someone gets it 
As Churchill once famously said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
I guess one of the nicest things about democracy is that it has a built-in mechanism for removing a government. It may not be reliable at getting good leaders in place, but at least when there’s a bad one it has a way of getting them back out again without having to go in shooting.
Do you have any idea how long senators serve? Racist, violent, war hawk, regressive leaders stay in office in the USA for decades. How about family dynasties? The number of years American and European democracies are managed by family dynasties is terrible. And then of course you have fascists getting elected to high office in Italy.
All the evidence shows that Western democracies are going to end in violence.
Interestingly, Cuba has more democracy than anything ever experienced in the North Atlantic. Because the point isn’t to use democracy to get representation, it’s to use democracy to change society in the interests of the people.
How about family dynasties?
Wait, did somebody say Kennedy?
The fact that you think that genocidal scumbag had good ideas means your opinion can be safely discarded.
He had some good ideas. He was right about Poland being the hyena of Europe.
fair point
Lol, what?
Churchill oversaw one of the biggest genocides in history in India ignoramus.
That means everything he says is false?
ignoramus
Oh, the irony.
the only irony here is you comment 😂
Not really.
it’s clearly what you believe
It’s still the best way even if it’s bad. Ranked choice voting would make it better.
It’s demonstrably not, but westerners just keep clinging to their failed system lacking the courage and imagination to try anything different.
Go on. Enlighten us.
consider yourself enlightened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism
edit: love how you can state basic facts and libs start seething
That’s not a political system at all. It’s a process that could be implemented in many styles of government. It is not incompatible with representative democracy either. It is a bad idea though. It means that a government has a hard time changing course, even when it needs to. Because it silences people from questioning decisions.
This is demonstrably false because in the real world Chinese system has proven itself to be far more flexible and adaptable than any western regime. That’s the reality. In fact, it’s obvious that multiparty parliamentary systems are the ones that have hard time changing course. They’re literally designed to prevent that. It’s not possible to do any sort of long term planning when governments keep changing and people keep pulling in different directions. The horizons for planning become very small. And of course, it’s pretty clear that western systems do a great job silencing opinions that fallout of the Overton window. Entire books have been written on the mechanics of this.
And we’re the ones clinging to a failed system? You’ll have to dig a little deeper for your credibility if you want to stick to this imperious schtick of yours.
If you can’t see that the west is failing then you need to start engaging with reality. China is running circles around you losers.
What’s better?
Ask the people of El Salvador, and they’ll say having a dictator is better because democracy has demonstrably failed them.
El Salvador under a dictator actually has less gang violence than Mexico under a democracy.
Westerners will blind themselves to this reality, though. They always do.
When dictatorships go badly, they go extremely badly. Far more badly than even a broken representative democracy. The odd of having a sold string of reasonably good dictators are vanishingly small. A good dictator is the best form of government. Good luck maintaining that though.
When a bourgeois democratic state goes badly, it tears off its liberal mask and reveals the fascism beneath. The capitalist class dispenses with democratic theater and rules by naked dictatorship. Western liberals shouldn’t wonder why fascism is on the rise in the West: it’s because Western monopoly capitalism is increasingly going mask-off. Monthly Review, 2014: The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism
China is totalitarian and becoming more autocratic by the year.
LMFAO
Communism
Proletarian democracy
What definition of proletarian democracy? It’s not well defined and means vastly different things to different people.
A brutal crackdown on the ability of the bourgeoisie to influence elections, buy politicians, and hold office, such that liberals will crow about “human rights” and “freedom” being violated. We can draw fine distinctions between different systems, but fundamentally they still fall on the same side of the fence.
Democracy in which the bourgeoisie are denied political agency as class relations are in the process of being dissolved. The problem isn’t actually democracy, the problem is that in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (democracy where capitalists are in control) capitalist interests override democracy.
Not that democracy doesn’t have problems inherently, but they’re pretty minor compared to the problems we are facing.
But the alternatives that people are proposing leaves people with no representation at all. You can’t have representation when you aren’t even allowed to discuss ideas that the government already disagrees with.
“Not allowed to discuss ideas the governments disagree with” in a myth, a fairy tale told by the kind of people who get banned from everywhere they go for “just having different opinions.”
What are the opinions? What are the ideas? The US Civil War, by these terms, could be boiled down to “a clash over different ideas”, it’s not a useful metric. The fact is, no government on Earth is going to let you actively advocate for their violent overthrow, especially not when theyve just clawed their independence from, in many cases, centuries of colonial rule. And when you actually look into the historical events that anticommunists gesture vaguely at as examples of “communist authoritarianism”, that’s what it always turns out to be. The cycle goes like this:
Western capital foments fascism–> western capital arms fascists—> western capital directs fascists against socialist state, attempts to topple government for sweet natural resources–>socialist state cracks down on fascism–western capitalist press goes into overdrive about the plight of the poor fascists–>“Actually socialism is as bad as fascism, haven’t you read this article in the Bezos Post?”
What they do in Cuba, or the PRC, or the former USSR
Democratic centralism 👀
That’s not a political system at all. It’s a process that could be implemented in many styles of government. It is not incompatible with representative democracy either. It is a bad idea though. It means that a government has a hard time changing course, even when it needs to. Because it silences people from questioning decisions.
It’s literally how communist states are organized, how is it not a political system?
Ranked choice voting
Libs are constantly going on about this. A different voting scheme isn’t going to solve the real proplem which is that the oppressor class controls the government and not the people. It’ll just be a new way of having the illusion of choice to allow people to pretend the US is a democracy
This article got me thinking, but I wonder how things would go with a random democracy. Every cycle, you pick 100 or 200 people at random and they are the congress. Add in field experts, not lobbyists, to provide expertise on topics.
Of course, nations would never do this because the ruling class would now have 1% representation.
Ah, yes, the Athenian Method.
The problem with democracy is that people can be manipulated.
that’s why education of the people is a core pillar of a democratic nation.
