Is there any room in Marxism for people who don't like democracy and would prefer a strong man leader type in the vain of the USSR under Stalin, the DPRK or Mao's China?
Even though we have successful examples of this the modern left seems obsessed with "our democracy"
65 posts and 11 image replies omitted.>>2799291because you fail understand the class character of bourgeois democracy, and how it is not really democracy. You repeat "the modern left" but you mean liberals living in bourgeois imperialist "democracy"
>>2796060Yeah because one party states cannot be democratic, or at least there is no mechanism beyond the individual will of the General Secretary/politburo (depends on how oligarchic vs autocratic it is) to ensure it remains such. Strong man politics cannot free people because by its very nature it subjects the masses to the individual whims of one person. Leninists will insist otherwise but they're lying because what they really want is to be part of the elite ruling clique and replace the capitalists as the new ruling class, not actually emancipate the proles from a ruling class.
Nobody here understands the main purpose of bourgeois democracy and the key innovation behind it. It's not some high-minded principle of citizen participation, though that does serve a useful error-checking function (if you're really shit you'll be removed from power), it's not even circulation of elites (though again, this is usually useful), it's not even changing parties in power (see Japan or Sweden 1930s-70s) it is, above all else: The stable transition of power.
Let's say strongmen outperform parliamentary democracy when they're in charge. Parliamentary democracies probably still beat strongman regimes in the long run! Why? Because in such a system, there's never a reliable mechanism for changing the person in charge when the strongman dies. Maybe you can have his kids do it, like a king - but then what if there's a disputed succession? A close ally - but then maybe said ally falls out of favor just a year before the strongman dies, or maybe he's the favored candidate of the strongman but not of all the other power-brokers. A junta of some kind - but then you've replaced your strong individual leader with an ossified committee who probably hate one another. And let's say some faction or individual is on the losing side but has a power base - why shouldn't he use it to try to stage a coup, which will with very high likelihood result in outright civil war?
In a parliamentary system it's very simple: If you aren't the faction in power, you put your resources into winning the election and taking power. Even in a system where the parties don't circulate much, as in Japan, there's a nice stable set of institutions for making sure the country is governed by a succession of different LDP prime ministers (and they change those pretty often!) instead of having one guy who'll bring the whole state down with him when he invariably dies. The result of that is that people can spend all their time going about their day doing whatever it is people do, losing an evening every 3-5 years to going to the polling booth, instead of fighting and dying in a pointless civil war over who gets to sit in the big chair.
I don't want much of anything of the left. I'd be glad getting class war but I'd settle for reprisals.
Whoever lets me off my boss, is the side I'd pick my gun for. Unfortunately rightoids, troglodytes they may be, are organized by people who are rather class-pilled themselves. So leftoids are the only hope for the man who wants to see rich people (or a subset thereof) liquidated.
>>2799371>naive question that does not distinguish between bourgeois democracy and actual democracythen can you give an example of "actual democracy"