SlAvA UkrAnI!
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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Elections are not indicative of democracy. The fact that capital is what determines which parties are viable, what candidates are allowed to run, and controls the entire economy means that elections in capitalism are more of a pressure valve than an actual way to get your voice across. Capitalism is incompatible with working class democracy.
How the hell are elections not indicative of democracy? I mean, just because you have elections doesn't mean you have a proper democracy (e.g. if there is only one party available), but how those elections are run says a lot. They're the core of any democracy. Democracy is, by definition, the people being ruled by the people. So you need some form of governance that is accountable to the people.
And capital is far from the only thing that determines if parties are viable. Yes, it plays too much of a role (especially in the US, but there are many western countries that aren't the US), but let's not pretend it's some mysterious being that decides everything. That ignores so many important factors.
Elections aren't democracy, as you said democracy is rule by the majority. Pluralism, the ability to choose between parties, isn't actually democracy either. A single party system can be more democratic if it's a consultative democracy and reflects the will of the majority, like how it works in China (though China obviously has many, many elections). That also doesn't mean pluralism is inherently antidemocratic, countries like the DPRK have multiple political parties with seats (even if the majority are held by the WPK), just that the will of the majority be upheld.
In capitalism, a tiny class of people controls the most essential means of production and distribution for society. The state represents their interests, and any parties that exist must represent them, or instead have strong grassroots support and work against the state (such as the Bolsheviks). Choosing between any number of capitalist parties doesn't mean workers are going to be represented. No western country represents the will of the majority.
Oh really? How do you hold the people in power accountable, then, if they're part of the only party that is allowed to exist (which that party itself decided, what a coincidence!)?
False, that is the result of capitalism when it goes unchecked, not the definition. And different countries have different levels of checks on capitalism.
Yeah, no, that's not the case. Otherwise explain to me how many western countries have leftist parties and even marxist-leninist parties. It's just not the will of the majority. Which leads me back to the point: your (or even my) satisfaction with the results don't measure how democratic a country is, despite the FUD spread by authoritarians and wannabe authoritarians to destabilize democracies by encouraging people to not participate.
Recall elections, consultative democracy, electing candidates, etc.
Capitalism cannot be "checked." Capitalism inevitably tends towards centralization of the essential means of production and distribution into fewer and fewer hands, but even in the earliest stages capitalists were far outnumbered by workers.
Very few leftist parties can get anything done in western countries because the media is largely controlled by capitalists, and the state itself serves capitalists. Taking PSL as an example, a great deal more people agree with their positions than the ~1% of the vote they receive, but they are either actually barred from running, or receive a tiny portion of the vote due to not wanting to spoil your vote, as well as a lack of positive publicity from media (or any publicity, for that matter).
And if PSL or any other socialist party ever becomes large enough to receive a substantial percentage of the vote, we'll see the mask of humanity fall from the face of capital. Not that that should stop us from organizing.
Yep, more naked repression will happen, but on the flip side size is also a strength. It protects people.
Yes, but who enforces the consulting and the usage of the information gathered from consulting? Without accountability, that's just fantasy and/or simping for authoritarianism. Let's not forget, every authoritarian leader, party or Organisation has its supporters who will claim they're not authoritarian.
Except when it doesn't. There are plenty of examples where countries that have capitalism based economies moved significantly to the left. Look at Nordic countries, for instance.
What about all the public broadcasters? There are many countries where they're quite strong. And as to parties getting things done, what about:
I could go on and on, but that's not the point. The point is that fascists are trying to weaken the electoral system because they know how effective it can be. Otherwise, they wouldn't give a fuck. And part of the way they do that is by downplaying its efficacy in order to wear it down and eventually get rid of it.
The people hold them accountable, through the mechanisms I described previously. "Authoritarianism" is not a thing, all states are tools of the ruling class to oppress the rest, they are necessarily uplifting one class and oppressing the rest. Socialist states have the working classes as the ruling class.
Nordic countries offer sizable concessions to their working classes because the Soviets were right next to them, and already offered better safety nets. These are concessions, to prevent revolution, and are funded through imperialism and neocolonialism. The working classes do not actually hold state power. These countries are still highly centralized, dominated by finance capital, and rely on the export of capital to the global south along with huge megacorps plundering the global south to persist as they are. To get rid of imperialism and keep safery nets requires socialism.
The state serves private interests in capitalism, this is why nationalizing within a capitalist economy is not socialism, and privatization within a socialist economy is not necessarily a restoration or capitalism. Public broadcasters are not representatives of the working classes, and you're again giving examples of concessions given largely because of working class organization, not through the "democratic processes."
Fascism is a result of the decay in capitalism and imperialism, and is where neocolonial methods are turned inwards. That's what causes fascism to rise.
So, free and fair elections. Well, now we're back to square one, and pretty much describing how Western democracies work.
Ah, yes, the soviet Union, definitely not imperialist. Sarcasm aside, they literally did not allow their population to leave. They killed people who dared to leave. That's not a sign of things going well, to mention just one.
Just because you repeat it a hundred times doesn't make it true. The very mechanisms you described are used (with varying degrees of success depending on how well the democracy functions) to keep the state accountable to the people.
So then why are these mostly things that parties campaigned on, got voted into power for and then implemented?
That's a very, very broad interpretation that many historians would disagree with. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that it's the case. How do these capitalist structures decay into imperialism then?
Nope. You're making a metaphysical error, focusing on similar structures while ignoring the entirely different context, the class character of the state. The mechanisms of elections exist within a definite social context, and in the case of capitalism, capitalists definitionally hold power over the media, production itself, and more to gain what they want. The state exists to serve the ruling class.
The Soviet Union was not imperialist, correct.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer's Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski's Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and this is why the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries. A lot of Eastern European countries were swarmed with western capital during the destruction of socialism, which is what temporarily caused the rise of the far-right in these countries, but in time their problems will no longer be able to be ignored.
This isn't true, though. Concessions come from organized resistance, at the consent of the ruling class. Capitalists do not fear the state, the state serves them. What the people actually want is not what the state does, what happens is the state fulfills the will of the ruling classes and tosses the crumbs they deem necessary to keep the populace from outright revolting. This is why organization gains concessions, not the bourgeois democratic structure.
I believe you mean fascism, not imperialism, so correct me if I'm answering the wrong question. The decay into fascism generally happens when the state begins nakedly applying colonial methods to the domestic population. In the US, for example, this involves mass incarceration of ethnic minorities, attacks on queer people, mass deportations, and the attack on left wing organizations. In Germany, it involved the brown shirts killing communists, and rounding up Jews, Slavs, queer people, disabled people, and mass murdering them.
Voting doesn't stop this. Hitler was handed power, and the US has been fascist no matter which party is in control. Capitalists deem it necessary due to drops in imperialist extraction, and a need to respond to crisis that stands to upset their rule. It's like a fever that kills off anything risking the system.
Whelp, I was away for a while, didn't realize this thread was still alive. So, here we go.
You're talking about the marxist definition of capitalism, which is far from the generally accepted one. The standard definition of capitalism doesn't have capitalists in the sense that you describe. It doesn't contain a capitalist class, either. The general definition talks about private citizens, meaning anyone in society. Which is the whole point: that anyone could use it to improve their financial situation, provided a sufficient amount of intelligence and rigor. Now, unchecked capitalism definitely doesn't work like that in practice (at least not for long), but let's not distort what capitalism is in the first place.
As to your statistics: you're removing absolutely all historical context and attributing everything to a false capitalism-socialism dichotomy. Look at the statistics for other countries, you will find similar patterns just about everywhere due to other factors: a lack of wars, baby boomers, etc. If things were so much better in the USSR, there wouldn't be a need to literally shoot people who dared want to leave.
You still haven't explained how capitalism leads to this. You've just said that it is that way but in more detail.
Again, you're distorting history. Hitler never got more than around 40% of the vote in the time where Germany was democratic. His ultimate rise to power came through an extreme situation and a loophole in the constitution.
This isn't the "Marxist definition" of capitalism, it's an analysis of existing systems. You're focusing on definitions when I am talking about what exists in the real world. Classes do exist. Capitalists do control the media and the state. Capitalism cannot actually be "checked."
As for my data on the USSR, you're more than welcome to attack the points, but you didn't. Instead, you handwaived the real and genuine material improvements made BT socialism. The USSR was not a unicorn paradise, it was a real system with real, dramatic, steady improvements that were massive leaps beyond what came before.
Capitalism leads to fascism, because capitalism centralizes over time and results in crisis, usually from overproduction or speculation gone awry. This results in boom/bust cycles, and in each cycle the capitalist class gets stronger and the workers get weaker and more desperate. Fascism arises as a violent means of suppressing worker organization that rises in response to crisis.
As for Hitler, he was voted against and still took power. Germany has never been democratic, except in the DDR. Capitalists wanted Hitler in power, so they made it happen. The loophole could just as easily been crushed had they not wanted him in power, which is why focusing on legalistic protections is horrible analysis in the context of highly biased class society, which is all existing society.
To quote your earlier post:
Oh, and of course capitalism can be checked. There are many examples worldwide, from anti-monopoly legislation to environmental regulations. Of course, as with everything in that regard, there are more and less effective variants.
As to your data: again, these trends exist in many other countries, including more capitalist ones. So yeah, maybe it's not the socialism (or rather, your preferred form of socialism) that was the deciding factor, or at least it wasn't the only factor. If you don't even compare and contrast to other data points, your analysis is deeply flawed.
But at least you finally explained how you believe capitalism naturally turns into fascism... Or at least, how unchecked capitalism turns into fascism. But again, it's possible to keep capitalism in check.
As to your Hitler argument: that's an overly simplistic account that most historians worth their salt would deeply reject. There is so, so much important context that you're leaving out - the stab-in-the-back myth, the massive reparations demanded from Germany and subsequent economic problems, another economic crash after that, and yes, the loophole was a gaping one (you could pass emergency legislation which could be overturned by Parliament, but you could use that emergency legislation to prevent Parliament from convening - something that many other constitutions have measures in place to protect against), and more. Ignoring all these other factors is, well, ignorant.
And Germany has only been democratic in the DDR? I know people who lived in the DDR, and they would want to have a word with you... Let me explain to you how elections worked in the DDR: voting was compulsory, there was a list, but you couldn't actually choose anything - you just threw that list into the urn. Technically, voting was secret, but if you tried to cast your ballot in secret, you were immediately suspect as an opposition member. And yes, people got disappeared in the DDR, ICE-style. So there was absolutely no way you, as a normal person not part of the ruling class, could change anything. That's not democracy by any stretch of the imagination, it's a false legitimation of an autocratic government. Yeah, there's a reason (or rather, many reasons) why many, many people attempted to leave despite the DDR making it deadly, and many people got shot just for the crime of wanting a better life than they could get in the DDR.
I can admit to a wording error on my part, the point being made was that capitalists de facto hold power over media and control the means of production by the very fact that they are capitalists, and controlling industry is what capitalists do.
As for "checking capitalism," it cannot actually be. When you have a small class that dominates production and the state, any legislation "checking" capitalism is done with the consent of those it is supposedly checking. Moreover, this is often a game of manipulation between capitalists. Capitalism itself turns to crisis, and this is unavoidable.
As for Hitler, it's of course a simplified overview. This is a Lemmy comment string, not academic discourse. I can back up with good reasoning my claims, such as how the US demanding repayment on loans for World War I accelerated the reparations from Germany to the other western powers, which put an even greater strain on their economy and drove their need for new colonies.
As for the DDR, it was a socialist state. You could not be a Nazi or a supporter of capitalism, the DDR was run by the majority of society, the proletariat. Western Germany continued much of what was going on under the Nazis, encroached on East German territory, and played a pivotal role in destabilizing East Germany. This is what caused the rise in the Stasi. People generally left the DDR mostly because they could get free and high quality education, and then make more money in West Germany. They took advantage of the socialist system and then abandoned it in favor of living a labor aristocratic lifestyle.
With proper checks, it doesn't need that upper class's consent, because power and production are separated. That's precisely what proper checks do, and your entire argument is based on the concept that it's impossible, when it is very well possible. Ironically enough, in the USSR, production was centrally controlled - by the state, so you had that very combination of production and power, the very same combination which you rightly claim leads to major problems.
Except it just simply wasn't. The majority of society had no real say, as I had explained earlier.
They left everything they had, their friends and their family, knowing they might well never see them again, and put their life in serious danger, just to make more money? And that by the millions? I mean, seriously, give it a serious thought, because that simply doesn't add up.
Never mind that west German education was pretty good as well, these people generally left with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. They arrived in West Germany essentially in poverty. And didn't stay in poverty. That says something.
Honestly, the more you talk about it like that, the more you make the DDR sound like an abusive partner. "I am protecting you, everyone else is dangerous and wants to do bad things to you. When I seriously hurt you? Oh, no, that's not my fault, that's other people interfering in our relationship, that's just the natural consequence of that! Plus, everyone else would hurt you even more. But don't you dare leave me, or I'll kill you."
You still see the state as outside of class struggle, which is why you believe you can keep the ruling class in "check." The reason the USSR had a much better structure than capitalist economies is because the ruling class of the USSR was the same as the majority of society, the proletariat. Production and the state are intensely intertwined in both capitalism and socialism, the state is the means by which the ruling class cements its rule.
As for the DDR, the ruling class, similarly to the USSR, was the proletariat. Democracy in the DDR was controlled by the working classes, and the working classes controlled the state. They did not have a western, liberal form of democracy, but this is exactly why they were genuinely more democratic as opposed to the west.
I don't necessarily need to respond to your metaphors substituted as a point. It's very well-known that the USSR charged reparations from Germany, which was in their right but caused economic hardship in East Germany, and that the west was flooded with support from the US and the rest. Further, East Germany had much less to work with, and was more devastated by the war. Despite this, it had a better form of society that, if both had continued to be distinct, would have surpassed the west down the line.
If you're part of the ruling class you're no longer "the same as the majority of society". Simple as that. And the ruling class was definitely not controlled by the rest of society as I explained earlier. It didn't stop their propagandists from trying to display it as such though.
You did not explain how the "ruling class" was not the majority of society. You explained that you have an incomplete, non-Marxist view of what class is, and thus we are talking about entirely different subjects.
Classes are relations to ownership of production, not levels of wealth, and not hierarchy. The ruling class of the USSR was the proletariat, administrators were proletarian and the state was run in the interests of the proletariat. Capitalists, fascists, landlords, kulaks, etc. were the oppressed classes and had their property expropriated.
Ruling class does not mean leadership, nor "tiny," it refers to the class in power.
Consider Australia: all of the major political parties nakedly serve the interests of capital, and decide who can and cannot run in their elections. This is the case in all of the liberal "democracies". They aren't "free and fair" elections by any reasonable definition.
The electorate through their votes at the town/city and county levels, participation in unions and other groups like ethnic advocacy groups etc, and participation in the CPPCC, and protests directed over over real issues instead of broad colour revolution tier nonsense, to name a few avenues.
May have moved left at home (if you ignore the rising austerity, racism and general shifting right they are experiencing alongside the rest of Europe) but they are more than happy to join in imperialism and neocolonialism abroad to finance what little compromises remain.
Could you please define this. As it stands authoritarian is the thought terminating cliche of choice for the unintelligent and uneducated to avoid having to investigate and reckon with the questions of substance such as class content of the state, state form, satisfaction of the people with the government etc.
Normally I don't respond to low level comments like this, but the intellectual laziness here is mind boggling. Dictionaries exist for a reason.
-Wikipedia
-Britannica
-Cambridge dictionary
-Merriam-Webster
So which definition did you mean? Or did you have your own definition? Or is it possible that you now can see how it is such a broadly defined term as to be largely meaningless outside of thought terminating cliche? You incredibly smug shithead.
"No, I can't define it"
...I really, really hope that you are being deliberately obtuse here in refusing to acknowledge that they are asking what you mean by the term to further the conversation. The other option is that you think there's some context where asking a person you disagree with for some kind of objective definition makes sense, and that really, really doesn't speak highly of your reasoning ability. Different people have wildly different understandings of "authoritarian".
Words have definitions for a reason, and authoritarianism is pretty well defined. And all definitions posted pretty much boil down to the same thing. At this point it's just sealioning.
"Authoritarianism" is extraordinarily ill-defined.
uh huh.
...you don't think that the existence of a capitalist ruling class is part of the definition of capitalism? Why are liberals always so happy to lecture people on the basis of What I Reckon Sounds About Right Probably...
Capitalism is not some mysterious being, its a phenomenon and it is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. If the workplace was democratized then you would not have capitalism.