keep in mind that Socrates might not have been as nice as you think, his students ended up doing a coup and their government collapsed in 8 months, their reign was so violent that ended in about the death of 10% of Athens. The tyrants run away amd they put Socrates on trial, and in his defense, Socrates refused to denounce his disciplines and just said it was a whitch hunt because they are mad that he is smarter than everyone else.
So, Socrates might have been more of a Reactionary grifter like Peterson than a wise kind humble man.
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
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.
Let’s not muddy the waters…the orange turd we can’t name is the type of ism we don’t want ever again. We also don’t want George Bush or another repeat of any of the political families currently in power or their friends. We want direct vote not college vote. WTF is an electoral college doing now that we have communication technology? Its an old and stupid idea.
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.
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.
You’re giving the liberals too much credit by saying they admit that electoralism has never worked.
The liberal position is not only that electoralism works but that it is the only thing that works.
Liberals believe electoralism doesn’t work because not enough people believe in it and we can fix it by voting harder.
Actually existing electoralism
Real electoralism has never been tried before
True. After years of letdowns, some might accept that electoralism is a rigged game, but then the next generation completely forgets everything.
And for all of them, the socialist road is demonized and kept hidden, so no alternative seems possible.
There’s a split in liberalism, between true believers and those disillusioned but who can’t see a way out. I believe the latter are more common these days, and are the target of the meme. The cure is organizing and reading theory, becoming a leftist in the process, but right now they still cling to faux-progressivism and electoralism.
For many liberals having elections is the highest political priority.
So electoralism working is a tautology for them.
Real liberal democracy has never been tried
It’s just the outside forces that have made it fail. In theory it’s perfect system
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!
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.
The Soviet Union was one of the latest. Yeltsin taking office, failing to get his way, and then shelling parliament into surrender being the most prominent example of the failures of electoralism, even in an ostensibly proletarian state.
Gaza also a great instance of the wages of strict electoralism. You rally your people behind a more militant political body (Hamas in 2006) and the end result is your heavily armed neighbors using the results of an election as causa belli. Hell, the American Civil War is another great example, what with a Southern coup government rising up after a Presidential election defeat.
It is through organization and revolution that we can actually move on into a better world.
It gives us a fighting chance, at least. But it is also hard, painful, and requiring enormous self-sacrifice particularly among the early adopters.
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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.
25·2 days agoWe 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
Two more quirks of Athenian democracy: Only males were allowed to vote, and soldiers, mostly lower class salarymen, couldn’t vote if they were in service.
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.
The prevalence of your type of reasoning is why democracy doesn’t work.
The problem is that the whole point of democracy is to align decision-making with the will of ”the people”. That puts the impetus on citizens to actually manifest a will and constitute their interpretation of who the people are. Politics and culture.
That is, people need to actively engage in public discourse about their respective interests. Such discourse demands a lot of things, freedom of speech for one, but most importantly it requires all participants to frequent avenues for discussions among those that share interests outside narrow social groups like friends and families (i.e. in spheres of the ”public”). For example, in political party organizations, trade unions, business groups, pubs and town squares, and, possibly, virtual spaces for disembodied discussion, such Lemmy (however, the disembodiment is more likely to result in discussion for the sake of discussion between people that don’t actually share living conditions or other froms of unity of interest, but I digress).
If such discussion takes place – an increasingly rare thing – there is no need to individually ”differentiate good candidates from bad candidates” and each voter’s intelligence certainly isn’t of consequence. In a functioning democracy, who to vote for, should follow naturally from your participation in public discourse.
It is clear that the scale of the political project complicates the formation of public opinions – though Pete Hegseth no doubt would like to try, you cannot run a country of 300+ million people on spirited bar stool banter – however, the principles remain the same. By definition, you can’t approach democratic decisions like a consumer does choosing a brand of toothpaste – the core principle of democracy is to eliminate any individual’s power, in favor of the collective (e.g. majority).
Democracy is a high effort process that terminates in the poll booth. Voting is foremost a formality that should not be fetishized.
If such discussion takes place – an increasingly rare thing – there is no need to individually ”differentiate good candidates from bad candidates” and each voter’s intelligence certainly isn’t of consequence. In a functioning democracy, who to vote for, should follow naturally from your participation in public discourse.
yeah that’s what i meant. still, people have to be engaged in a way that i don’t see them being engaged in. And that’s still the central issue, i’d say.
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.
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.
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.
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.
:)
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Communal society: Electoralism is cringe.
Slave society: Electoralism is cringe.
Feudal society: Electoralism is cringe.
Liberal society: noooooo, electoral democracy portents the end of history elections are based nooooo
Socialist society: Electoralism is cringe.
Communist society: Electoralism is cringe.
Which greek philosophers said that? and what did they say? do you have any sources to confirm?
Both plato and aristotle, but aristotle thought that any election-based state turned out in practice, to be an oligarchy or aristocracy, not a democracy (which he define as rule by the poor, with random selection by lot).
Aristotle’s politics books 4-6 talk a lot about this:
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.4.four.html
In other words, what today we call “representative democracy”, the ancient greeks correctly identified as oligarchy.
Did the greeks suggest any replacement?
I see electoralism weaknesses, but what other systems are less prone to power capture and then raw authoritarianism?
If people don’t choose their representation, then who does? Or is representation the flaw?
Socialist democracy. The political structure is a way to reinforce the economic base, so by moving onto socialism, the working class is in control of the state. The issue isn’t with voting, period, but the idea that we can escape capitalism just by doing so.
That is more clear. I think I should have better defined “electoralism”. Social democracy sounds much better than raw unfettered capitalism.
Social democracy is capitalism with safety nets, I mean socialism. Rather than private ownership being principle, ie covering the large firms and key industries with the state dominated by capitalists, public ownership should be principle and the working class should dominate the state.
Your response is rational, informational, based in fact, and measurable.
The original image is uncited incendiary garbage. This is not a time where we need more division and infighting. If you can’t be nice, please just stick to the facts.
Are you not familiar with the concept of a meme?
The original image is a meme designed for humor over rational argument…
Cool
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We want unity, around correct political lines. The point of agitprop is to get people talking and coming to a consensus on the correct line to follow.
I’m on the instance that I own and operate, Redlemmy.com. If I interact with you it’s because I choose to.
im gonna voooooote!!!
