this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Democratic socialism just means you believe in democratically governed socialism, not that you think you can just vote capitalism into socialism. There's both reformist and revolutionary democratic socialists. I both believe in democracy and also see that the only way to overturn capitalism (at least in the US) would be through revolution. All the democratic part means is that they're opposed to monarchies or dictatorships.
Are you saying that you can have undemocratic socialism?
Yes, under a dictatorship, it's literally happened before. Are you being serious or is this supposed to be some sort of gotcha where you go "socialism can't exist without democracy so the label is pedantic"?
Socialism under one party governments have happened, that is not democracy, even if democratic elements exist within. You can't have democracy under one party, the people need the ability to form an opposition party if the need arises.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
Having a single party simply means that the society as a whole agreed on a single collective vision. There can be plenty of debate within the framework of a party on how to actually implement this vision. Meanwhile, any class society will be a dictatorship of the class that holds power. Given that socialist society would arise from an existing capitalist society, it would necessarily inherit existing class relationships. What changes is which class holds power. That's the difference between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Finally, the notion of dictatorship in a sense of a single person running things is infantile beyond belief. People who peddle this notion are the ones who should truly be ashamed of themselves. As Anna Louise Strong puts it in This Soviet World: