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"
>>2796067
> is best to leave people to rule themselves where it can be afforded
why
>>2796060Yes you're an ultras son
>>2796070Because it is inconsequential at worst and positively serving power at best, since if people appreciate the liberty afforded to them, you maintain legitimacy in government. The intervention of the state into people's lives is always a necessary evil, not a good in itself.
>>2796067
"people" can't rule themselves under class warfare,which is the basis of any class society
>ideology about abolishing the power of the ruling class of a few
>lets just establish a new ruling class but instead of a few its a single guy
stop trying to constantly reestablish class relations everytime you have a revolution, empower the soviets! Not the man
Communism negates bourgeois civilization with its class dictatorships of all flavors (democracy, autocracy, etc)
So no
>>2796075>it is inconsequential at worst and positively serving power at bestbut you're just replying with unfounded truism
you're ignoring any negativity that could come with self governance
>since if people appreciate the liberty afforded to them, you maintain legitimacy in governmentthis again isn't true, there have historically been governments maintain "legitimacy" despite lacking a democratic underpinning
>The intervention of the state into people's lives is always a necessary evilagain this is just an unfounded truism, what makes it evil beyond the fact that you personally don't lke it?
>>2796096relation to means of production is what defines a class not the power they wield.
>>2796102what determines power in a society?
>Is there any room in Marxism for people who don't like democracy and would prefer a strong man leader type
No, because you have a preference. Material conditions will decide if democracy is needed to decide shit or what vibes the leader should have.
>in the vain of the USSR under Stalin, the DPRK or Mao's China?
All of those were democratic tho
You've taken the liberal strawman of Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Mao, etc. all of whom were more democratic than you give credit, and said "yeah I want that". You're not a Marxist, you're a fascist. Go find a dom on grindr, instead of looking for your submissive satisfaction in "great man" theory.
>>2796111>memespeakYeah hold on lemme mark my internet sub bingo card
>>2796110>>2796113
>All of those were democratic thoIf you read the OP it is in comparision to the modern left's view of democracy which more or less favors a more direct form of democracy then what we see in Stalin, the DPRK or Mao
>>2796070Having one guy be in charge of figuring out what is materially necessary rather than having everyone contribute to decision making is retarded unless there's an emergency. Some labor aristocrat "strongman" doesn't know what is needed in every professional field. You need meetings and for a consensus from a diverse range of perspective from informed peoples.
>>2796117>Having one guy be in chargethis is a strawman, having a single leader on top do not mean he is the only one working in government
>>2796060yes, a substantial chunk of leftists are like this.
however: you will not get along well with the democratic types, because you have a fundamentally different disposition to them. politics nowadays is mostly a personality test, and "wants a strong authority figure" is
broadly negatively correlated with leftism, bar the aforementioned chunk who love their stalin figures.
>>2796070lots of people making lots of little mistakes sums to almost-nothing when they control only their own affairs or a tiny number of other people's affairs, and in general lots of people can learn from those little mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are happy accidents that spawn something good. one man making one minor mistake can cause gigantic fuckups when he controls everyone's affairs, and one man making moderately above-average decisions might still fall behind the many-mistakes model since he'll have less happy accidents.
the best illustration of the principle is found not in the horror-stories of anticommunist screeds or what-have-you, but in the united kingdom, where local councils have basically been hollowed out and nearly all decisions of any importance are made at the center. while these decisions are not literally centralized in one person, the principle is basically the same: governance in the UK is more centralized than in any other country in europe.
an example: the local authority in leeds wishes to build a tram. the people of leeds wish to have a tram. the central authority refuses to allow the leeds authority to borrow money, to raise money by taxation, to enter into some kind of public-private partnership scheme, or otherwise have the tram built except by using central treasury money. the treasury then also refuses to give leeds the money, because it hasn't demonstrated that this project is nationally important enough for the national treasury to spend money on. so even though it's been promised for literal decades, leeds is the largest city in europe without a mass transit system of any kind.
and every moment the treasury spends frustrating the people of leeds in their long-standing aspiration for a tram (which in any ordinary country they could fund and plan entirely locally) is time they can't dedicate to other, more pressing issues!
i would gladly bet the amount of time and money spent
not building a tram in leeds in case it might be a bad idea is as much as it would've cost if leeds had just been allowed to build a tram 30 years ago.
>>2796118what role do you envision for such a leader?
(and, to a lesser extent, how do you imagine others conceive of "democracy")
i appreciate it's a big ask but: relating it back to the question of how we built a tram in leeds (in a hypothetical socialist britain) might be illustrative.
>>2796060i love when self important retards make these approval seeking threads
>garsh gee willickers aww shucks howdy fellers uwu i'm just a wittle smol bean hyuck hyuck hyuck, got any room for a marxist who hates minorities and women and wants an aryan daddy figure whose dick he can suck?????????stop it. get help.
>>2796257you have 5 seconds to explain the difference between class dictatorship and individual dictatorship
>>2796060One of the major variants of Russian Marxism is called Marxist-Leninism and in contemporary western contexts is usually ordered around 'democratic centralism' which essentially means electing a committee, who then amongst themselves elect a leader who can do what they like because they were elected.
>>2796293that's not what demcent means. demcent means the party committing uniformly to the strategy that won, even if it was controversial and barely won.
i.e. if a party votes 49.9% to 50.1% in favor of some measure, the side that "lost" the vote still has to commit to implementing the measure. As opposed to non-demcent systems where that 49.9% will try to sabotage or delay the measure.
>>2796060Sadly your kind seem to be a majority here at leftypol.org. Let me ask you this: How can proletarian dictatorship exist without proles having any political power?
>>2796308And how is that supposed to be enforced ? They can read people's mind in demcent government ?
>>2796070Because control of one's own destiny is a fundamental human desire. Are you an alien?
>>2796308>if a party votes 49.9% to 50.1% in favor of some measure, the side that "lost" the vote still has to commit to implementing the measure. Yeah that sounds ridiculous. So basically if you've got two factions running for leadership positions, the one that gets 50.01% can effectively do what they want. Such a method alienates half the organisation and makes consensus subordinate to brute force majoritarianism.
No wonder Russian Marxism is so ineffective in the west
>>2796338even most of the Stalinist states agree with you on this, they didnt pick strong men leadership, it picked them, thats the difference.
>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"
You're too much of a dumbass, sorry. gtfo:
>>>/reddit.com/r/yankeesuburbanlife/
>>>/reddit.com/r/thedeprogram/
>>2796345Justify your rhetoric right now. Considering that Stalin
>was called out in Lenin's testament (which he suppressed) as a dangerous dictator-aspirant>eliminated large sectors of the original bolsheviks >played rivals against each other only to betray the survivor (eg Trotsky vs Kamenev+Zinoviev)It seems beyond reasonable doubt that he not only chose but relentlessly pursued strongman leadership at everybody's expense
>flood detectedsorry mods
>>2796060>Is there any room in Marxism forNo.
>>2796343That's not really what it means. It's more like: if 50.1% vote to participate in elections, the losing side agree to work hard to get party figures elected even if they think it's a bad strategy because the alternative is that the party quite literally half-asses their bad strategy, which is likely the worst of all possible worlds.
Imagine a party choosing directly between participating in an election and trying to launch an uprising, everyones favourite LARP dichotomy. If it gives it's all to the election, it might win seats. If it gives it's all to the uprising, it might prove strong enough to take power, but failure is all but guaranteed if one half of the party is out knocking doors and asking for votes while the other half is being blown apart by the army on live TV.
>>2796070- People obey you if it's in their interests and preferences, and are usually better placed to determine than your guesses
- Debates and consensus produce cohesion, even if they're not in the interest of everyone, by making everyone feel recognized and heard.
>>2796110
>No, because you have a preference. Material conditions will decide if […]What do you think "material conditions" determine lol ? The material conditions structure your interests and preferences, they're not an external thing.
Cuck general
>>2796402except that's the theory, in practice this leads to splits because if there's one thing about vanguards is that they believe they are right above all else, so why would you stay in an organisation that has people with wrongthink in charge?
>>2796425This is why we have religion, btw
people talk about this extreme 50.1% but in practice this almost never happens. from my life the most extreme cases are 2/3 for something and a third against
some of you fags just want a bdsm relationship and that has nothing to do with marxism
https://hidwehproject.nekoweb.org/pages/blog/posts/2026-04-27-Brief-Remarks-On-Technology.html>With this said, I think the relational view leads Floridi to make a very commendable observations with regards to the reality of democracy, namely that good democracy should try and maximize the granularity of alternatives in regards to voting. With, for instance, the American election system, the voter can only really choose between two parties. There is no real third or fourth option. Moreover, upon choosing a party, they have very little control over the subsequent range of choices that can be made by said party. This ends up diminishing the presence of real representation. In this point we see an ontological turn in the conceptualization of politics. What is important is not only the ability to choose, but also having an effect on how the space of actions gets parametrized. The problem of information encapsulation has become a political problem. We might here make a distinction between quantitative and qualitative democracy to drive this point home.>The way things are done, there is very poor qualitative representation. Personally I believe localism can play an important role. At smaller scales of governance, individuals are able to have a more feasible shot at influencing choices not just quantitatively but also qualitatively as well. We should note here how action parametrization and hence qualitative representation is something that can be partially dissociated from the formally democratic form. For instance, in a capitalist economy, money becomes the main signal for action parametrization. The logic of "profit" and investor speculation ends up determining what companies persist and how these companies evolve over time. At the same time the range of qualitative actions has the corporation as a basic bottleneck. For instance, McDonalds has a different space of products compared to Starbucks, and the average person is not likely to eat anything that falls outside the things offered by fast food chains and grocery stores. Hence, we see how speculative and consumer dynamics become the main positive signals that build towards representation.>Note that we can apply this same logic to authoritarian and monarchical regimes as well. Even these political entities have their own subtle forms of qualitative democracy. For instance the monarch got their information and suggestions for possible actions to take from their advisors, and their advisors had various ways of gathering information contrained to the feudal mode of production and their lacking information technologies at the time. The Soviet bureaucrats also had devised ways to try and model something akin to consumer demand in an effort to keep their socialist economy running smoothly. A blogpost talking about Nick Land and his relation to Timenergy theory makes a great point as well in pointing out how the neo-reactionary advocation of monarchy is in fact a perfectly redundant gesture:<The real transformation is not the return of kingship as dream-image but the collapse of sovereignty into algorithmic governance. Decisions are increasingly delegated to predictive models, actuarial tables, risk algorithms, and automated logistics. Authority no longer resides in the symbolic pact between ruler and ruled. It is coded into the protocols of platforms, the scripts of financial markets, the architectures of surveillance. Moldbug’s neo-monarchist script is therefore less the master narrative than a symptom produced by this infrastructural displacement. He articulates in clumsy political theology what has already occurred silently in code: the outsourcing of command to systems indifferent to the subject.>In general it is important not to discount how much qualitative decision making is determined by the underlying mode of production, a constraint that is even placed upon an absolute monarch or dictator. There is an extent in which many of the average leftist's fears of authoritarianism is in a way just falling for the great man of history theory. In an ironic turn of events, they are often still not materialist enough. >>2796102the fact you think these are separate things is laughable
>>2796446can you explain how they are not in regards to Stalin, Mao, and the Kims?
>>2796060authoritarianism is a sexual fetish and not a legitimate ideology
>>2796327it means committing through action. i.e. no sabotage
>>2796060OP should look into bordiga and organic centralism memes aside
why did jannies delete the pro-democracy Marxism thread
its called daddy issues and youll fit in with 80% of this website
>>2796060There's no point in being against democracy. I am of the same personality type. I struggled with precisely this for some time. What you oppose is the capitalist political system, which is not really a democracy anyway since interest groups hold far more relevance to what's done than the votes. You just lack the context to articulate that sentiment properly. The problem here is that westerners coopted the word "democracy" when they have next to no expression of the will of the people, as you can see with Israel and many other issues.
>>2798546libs usually believe in institutional democracy, more than just voting itself, which wouldn't make it incompatible either, still a strong-man is incompatible with any form of competent democracy
>>2796060All those states you listed were democracies. Their fans would argue that point at length. Feudalism was democracy of the lords, slavery was democeacy of the big land owners. Seems we can't escape it.
Unfortunately, many a socialist & communist it seems are not able to even begin to understand what I have come to call "The Vozhd Principle" & why the masses often spontaneously cry out for Their Leader.
It is fundamentally not, as is often petulantly claimed, a demand for a replacement father or mother, much less a displacement of some sexual fetish onto politics, nor a manifestation of various forms of ignorance/stupidity/superstition, etc.
Rather the masses understand intuitively the need not only for a living symbol to rally around, but even more fundamentally: Someone whose very existence is tied go theirs; Someone who's material interest, by virtue of their position as head of all of society, is to repress divided competitive individual ambitions & behaviours and enforce "collective good".
For communists in particular, The Leader is ultimately the one who, from above, guarantees the "central" aspect in central planning.
Its therefore not fundamentally matter of democracy or autocracy. The Leader could be elected or come to power through other means. There can even be a system of referenda for the legislative & generalized conscription as the basis for the military (I myself am in favour of these things). Rather the ultimate question is one of popular legitimacy & moral righteousness (in whatever concrete contingent forms those may take).
>>2798512I'm generally not in favor of the average person being able to determine laws. Also surviving to the age of 18 to effect political outcome isn't a good litmus test for an educated voter.
>>2798632again I'm contrasting them to the modern left's view of "our democracy" which would bemoan a DPRK system if implemented
>>2798621>libs usually believe in institutional democracyirrelevant, all their systems devolve into bought leaders boiling people's actions into voting for the elections, everything else is ideological hogwash to justify themselves.
>>2796337so you concede there is a difference? Good.
>>2799289doesn't matter, what matters is that they're proletarian.
>>2796060>Is there any room in Marxism for people who don't like democracynaive question that does not distinguish between bourgeois democracy and actual democracy, which can exist only when class society has been overcome. If you mean the former, yes. No Marxist likes bourgeois "democracy." If you mean the latter, no, that is just reactionary nonsense.
> would prefer a strong man leader type in the vain of the USSR under Stalin, the DPRK or Mao's China?Stalin was the general secretary of the CPSU and regularly had his own decisions overriden. Same with other so called "strong man" examples. You just fell for bourgeois propaganda equating communism with fascism and decided that made communism sound based.
>Even though we have successful examples of this This is rooted in your misconceptions outlined above
>the modern left seems obsessed with "our democracy"so is this
>>2799289Your personal outlook is not relevant to class struggle.
>>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"
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