this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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this is what liberals actually believe
The Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Cubans should have leveled inequality and shored up democracy before they took power.
For all your sneering stupidity, you forgot your point. Are you saying they're actually democracies, or that there is a more effective set of material conditiond to establish to stop them rapidly sliding into autocracy?
You seem to think authoritarian states where wealth is consolidated and noone but members of the single party can vote for the single leader are sufficiently democratic and didn't follow a predictable path toward autocracy - or that it's desirable and democratic for that to happen. Just about any state that isn't busy larping at communism does a better job at democracy.
You want to throw the DPRK into the mix too, champ?
I guess I gotta spell it out:
Those “supposedly communist regimes” couldn’t “level inequality” or “shore up democracy” because they weren’t in power. They had to “skip straight to revolution” to get in power and accomplish their goals. In all the examples I brought up, and one of them is the dprk, inequality was leveled and democracy shored up after the revolution.
The idea that somehow the Kuomintang, tsar, Bautista puppet state, Rhee puppet state or Diem, the french who preceded him or Americans that came after would simply allow fundamental changes to the social and economic system of oppression that kept them in power for any reason at all but especially to create more equal, democratic and egalitarian societies is so absurd I almost don’t know where to start.
People don’t “skip straight to revolution”, it’s a necessary step to changing society.
Now you might suggest that those revolutionaries should have used nonviolent methods first, and that’s pretty out there when you consider the actual conditions each country was under when those revolutions began, but I understand that you would be suggesting that because you believe truly that nonviolent means can achieve the same ends as revolution.
In response I would direct your attention to Chile, where socialist Allende won a democratic election only for his every action to be stymied by the capitalist west and to ultimately be executed by a us backed fascist coup when they couldn’t destroy the country without violence.
I also wanna take just a second and ask you to be civil here. There’s no need to call names or insult each other.
Force is fine. Speedrunning straight to toppling the government entirely is at this point a well-established way of creating an autocracy. If that's the near-inevitable outcome, why topple the government to get something worse? It's moronic.
You use force to push for change - with the threat of all the violence and revolution backing that. If you have the sustained force required to topple and effectively replace the government with a democratic machine, coercing the existing government into changes to protect your democracy seem straightforward. If you don't have the numbers or coordination, how do you think starting a government from scratch is going to work out? Helpful hint: Look at historical case-studies.
I don't understand why ML's are so keen to bang on about material conditions when they work so hard to ignore them.
Literally every single example I gave got something better, not worse, out of their revolutions.
The dprk was formed after the Japanese colonial government was run out at the end of ww2. The Russian revolution replaced literal feudalism. Vietnam replaced another brutal colonial regime, the Cuban revolution swept away slavery in all but name and the chinese people chose the cpc over the same people who had ruled them as a colony.
They were all better off than before after recovering from those formative conflicts!
What would you have the people of Korea do? Petition the United Nations over jeju island? Should the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks have asked the Romanoffs to please give them representation? Am I to understand the nva would have achieved better ends by pleading with Diem for an end to repression? Perhaps the Cuban people just needed to vote more! Surely the Chinese would be better off if they had only accepted the Kuomintang and had a million man march on Beijing!
These are absurd statements, but when you suggest that each of the examples given should have used their power to pressure and work within their oppressors’ governments instead of simply seizing the reins of state themselves I have to type them out in the hope you’ll understand how what you’re saying sounds!