The answer to misleading information about USSR had issues feeding its population. source : https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5
The answer to misleading information about USSR had issues feeding its population. source : https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5
I always say, true communism isn’t possible without true democracy. Leaders must be elected in elections that actually matter.
It’s likely not something that is possible with first past the post voting, or any ordinal voting system. A cardinal voting system could do it. My current favorite is STAR.
it’s baffling to me that voting (or democracy for that matter) for a lot of people means, electing a person every 4-5 years and expecting them to be “good” leaders.
if the process isn’t directly tied to accountability at all times, how is that democracy? you elect lesser of many evils (in most places you won’t even have more than 2 “eligible” candidates) and that’s it?
whatever voting system you have, it will not solve this systemic problem.
You need to vote a lot, directly on meaningful details.
The systemic issue of “lesser evil” is a direct result of first past the post voting. Ordinal voting methods cause you to have limited choices.
It’s hard to have a functional democracy, it takes work, it takes a voting method that doesn’t sabotage the process.
That said, it’s impossible to have a true communist utopia with any other form of government, and especially not an authoritarian rule.
If some animals are more equal than other animals, then you’ve betrayed the ideal, and everyone will suffer for it.
No, it is not.
It is a consequence directly of the ideal of representation.
First past the post voting is at fault here, or rather it’s at the core of a deep systemic problem.
This video explains it quite well.
The TLDR is Arrow’s Theorem, that basically says that all ranked voting methods (and particularly first past the post) tend to result in two party dominance over time. This is the “lesser of two evils” effect, because either side doesn’t have to convince their supporters that they’re good, just that their opponent is worse.
You are not engaging the more general problem, which is not specifically the number of evils, whether two or more, nor the process by which one evil may be selected among many.
The general evil is the ideal of representation, or according to some, at least representation lacking consistent and absolute accountability to the represented.
You’re using some sort of weird known only to you verbiage. That’s why I’m not engaging with it.
The problem is simple, and known. First Past the Post voting has been mathematically shown to cause the rise of a two party political system. Once you have two opposing parties, they don’t have to work for the good of the people anymore, they just have to sling enough mud at the competition.
There is no single problem, and many of the problems are not necessarily simple.
Many perceive a problem from decisions that affect them being made by elected representatives.
Others may be more agreeable to elected representatives making decisions, but demand much greater participation by and accountability to the constituency.
Communists have long been critical of representative government, because it enforces a class disparity of elites over the governed, not broadly different from aristocratic rule.
Yes, yes, we all know that the dream is to live in a fully stateless society.
But we also know that a fully stateless society isn’t actually possible, because then who would organize the large infrastructure projects?
There’s quite a bit more that government do, but I don’t really care about law enforcement. Most crimes go unpunished as police don’t actually try to solve crimes, just enforce laws on the poor and minorities…
International trade and such are a big one.
And a military, because that’s how the last two attempts at stateless communism failed.
So if you must have a government (and you really must), then it should be the best one possible.
Any form of dictatorship is right out. That’s a flat betrayal of the communist dream, and places the people into a new form of feudalism. It stops being the dream of communism and starts becoming the nightmare of Leninism, or worse, Stalinism.
Direct democracy is the dream, but you quickly run into an issue of scale. You would need dedicated communication channels to constantly broadcast information about proposed laws and regulations, and the entire population would need to spend a good portion of their time reading and researching, and not you know, working on their own shit.
This leads to a representative democracy. You pick people whose full job is to read and research that shit. They then have aids and staff who further read and research.
Now, there are several problems that can crop up with representative democracy, but if you look back at the posts above, the specific one I referenced, the “Lesser of two evils” has one cause. First Past the Post voting.
Arrow’s Theorem is a major problem for representative democracy, but it’s not a problem without a solution. You simply ditch FPtP in favor of a cardinal voting system like STAR.
That’s the first step. The next is Apportionment. The US has one of the least representative democracies around due to a law passed in 1929 called the Reapportionment Act of 1929. It capped the size of the House at 435 members, despite the population tripling since then and adding two extra states, that number stands.
After the apportionment is fixed, there need to be term limits. I’m in favor of consecutive term limits. As in, you’re not limited to the total number of terms, but to the number of terms in a row.
After that, well, there are a few nitpicks, but most things would sort themselves out with those three fixes.
No election should be anything other than proportional. Even better is sortition. However you need an apparatus very different from a liberal democracy to make it work, which is good, we need to stop making governments that look like liberalism. Which is a core part of the failure of the soviet union and communism to date, that saying you’re doing socialism isn’t enough, we need novel organization of people.
The massive issue with proportional elections is that if you have a very unpopular incumbent, and 5 seats up for election, you need more than 80% of the population to vote against that incumbent to get rid of them.
The other issue is that the current popular proportional voting system is STV, which has some serious flaws. There are proportional versions of things like Score which are much better.
The solution I tend to favor, though, is tiny districts. For the US, there should be far more than 435 districts. I’ve seen different numbers bandied about, but 1400+ is a good place to start. I’ve seen proposals for 6500~ districts.
Why would some fraction of seats be up for election?
Yes, many systems exist and stv is meh, that’s not really a point against a proportional system unless you think fptp is a point against single winners and in that case the proportional systems looks a lot better.
Districts are arbitrary and abusable, just sample the will of the population and build bodies that look like the population. You can get tiny districts by forcing choices at the smallest level possible.
A proportional system will have multi-member districts. That’s the point. Unless you think that a national election can account for the needs and desires of a local population.
You don’t want to have someone from LA speaking for the needs of people in Kansas. Hell, you wouldn’t want people in LA speaking for the needs of people in Sacramento.
That’s where districts come in. To solve the issues with districts, you have two choices, either multi-member proportional districts, or shrink the districts down to the point where any resident can voice their opinion to their representative and expect a response.
Right now, the US has districts with more than 1 million residents. If even 1 in 1000 people have concerns that they voice, their representative will just ignore it all, because tens of thousands of voices are impossible to listen to.
That’s why smaller districts are key, even if you have multi-member proportional districts. No more than maybe 100k people per district.
A smaller district is also much harder to pack, crack, or otherwise gerrymander.
There is no downside, unless you have a favorite political party that only exists due to the current broken system.
Pedantry corner: Communism’s goal is to achieve a communist society, which is defined by being stateless. In a true communist society there would be no need for elections nor government. Now, how to actually get there… is where people disagree, especially anarchists and marxists.
Back on topic, I think the electoral system Cuba and Vietnam use are already a better starting point. There are no parties (parties are allowed to exist but they don’t run in elections, not even the Communist Party), every candidate is independent and they cannot self-nomimate or be placed by someone higher-up, they must be nominated by their community, and everyone gets an equal opportunity to run their campaign.