kravietz 🦇 on Nostr: npub1d7jhh…lu8xc North Korea or Russia aren’t democratic because the political ...
npub1d7jhhvfqxd3j0x38yc9m4eam7qf588dlkgh0gmshd3p09wwpztks4lu8xc (npub1d7j…u8xc)
North Korea or Russia aren’t democratic because the political science definition of democracy is quite clear and unambiguous, and none of these institutions exist in either of them. In other words, there’s a shared reference frame against which we can assess their compliance with the definition.
In reality, these countries usually resort to some kind of semantic manipulation, by using their private definitions of these terms, “democracies with adjectives”, such as “people’s democracy” or “directed democracy”. Which gave birth to the old Soviet jokes like “what’s the difference between a chair and an electric chair”.
In case of communism however you simply do not have such a shared reference frame, as nearly everyone is using their private definitions and usually without any adjectives.
Some people use “communism” as a simple synonym for “socialism” e.g. as proposed by SPD (at which point Marx is turning in his grave). Then you got endless fractions like Menshevik, communist anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Eurocommunists etc etc. Some would then argue that USSR wasn’t really communist, others would then go and say that Marxism wasn’t really communist either because it was putting too much focus on violent revolution. At which point we should stop and ask ourselves what is the informative value of a statement like “Communist Manifesto wasn’t communist”.
It’s all about reference frame…
npub1k4f8uusq737u7pvve52ydk783c4kf542vzee66dznzs4j3qplqkqyqhjgz (npub1k4f…hjgz) npub1hu8l24dhksw5vkg20ke4hhc4nf98xfmu6z9amjumv5xx3z2y0thspy39su (npub1hu8…39su) npub10nf7rr0a8mqp3ul4zjggry0mpjnq6zx8jyswpjlczdxzak9zyeuq770km0 (npub10nf…0km0)
North Korea or Russia aren’t democratic because the political science definition of democracy is quite clear and unambiguous, and none of these institutions exist in either of them. In other words, there’s a shared reference frame against which we can assess their compliance with the definition.
In reality, these countries usually resort to some kind of semantic manipulation, by using their private definitions of these terms, “democracies with adjectives”, such as “people’s democracy” or “directed democracy”. Which gave birth to the old Soviet jokes like “what’s the difference between a chair and an electric chair”.
In case of communism however you simply do not have such a shared reference frame, as nearly everyone is using their private definitions and usually without any adjectives.
Some people use “communism” as a simple synonym for “socialism” e.g. as proposed by SPD (at which point Marx is turning in his grave). Then you got endless fractions like Menshevik, communist anarchists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Eurocommunists etc etc. Some would then argue that USSR wasn’t really communist, others would then go and say that Marxism wasn’t really communist either because it was putting too much focus on violent revolution. At which point we should stop and ask ourselves what is the informative value of a statement like “Communist Manifesto wasn’t communist”.
It’s all about reference frame…
npub1k4f8uusq737u7pvve52ydk783c4kf542vzee66dznzs4j3qplqkqyqhjgz (npub1k4f…hjgz) npub1hu8l24dhksw5vkg20ke4hhc4nf98xfmu6z9amjumv5xx3z2y0thspy39su (npub1hu8…39su) npub10nf7rr0a8mqp3ul4zjggry0mpjnq6zx8jyswpjlczdxzak9zyeuq770km0 (npub10nf…0km0)