Fellas. Be honest...

Yeah, what the fuck. Disappointed.

Or, ya know, the President of the USA? The electoral college gets the final say.
In a perfect world, I'd be all for direct democracy, but in a perfect world we would have also already achieved communism. As long as we have democracy in the workplace, we're all good.

marxists.org/archive/camatte/demyst.htm

Choosing your dictator isnt democracy, choosing policy is.

What you vote for in the end is only one part of the problem. I live in a parliamentary democracy with two main competing blocs. We get to cast our ballot every four years, however, when the main two parties appoint their leadership they do it under secretive commitee behind closed doors appoint-the-pope type circumstances. Which means you have no control over who is in the ministry. There is also the fact that our two largest parties have essentially morphed into eachother and all you can really vote for is different flavours of neoliberalism. If I had a living decent say in who gets nominated I would definitely feel like that was more democratic than what we have now.

also, read Stalin

This. There's a difference between democratically making a decision together and democratically electing someone else to make those decisions for you.

How about you don’t have a de facto two party system, or better yet no parties at all.

It’s almost like the US isn’t the whole world.

Trade unions aren't democratic, they are sellouts and tools of the bourgeoisie to keep proles in line. Look at West Virginia's teacher and miner's unions.

These are the US unions, I think OP is a Holla Forumslack referring to Cuba and North Korea where the president (or equivalent) is indeed chosen by a parliament-like structure.

Here's a quick overview of the Cuban political system: cuba-solidarity.org.uk/resources/democracyfactsheet2015.pdf

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Is it really democratic if there are only two persons on the ballot (and that one candidate who is just there for the lulz because he can't win), and both are from rich families and cherry-picked by competing ruling elite groups? And some big companies just give bribes, excuse me, "donations", to both. The entire thing is riddled with fucky things: How to make sure the votes are tallied without manipulation, using a better voting method to begin with, how people get a spot as candidate on the ballot, how voters are "informed" by the media about the candidates, to what extent the elected are bound by stated programs and campaign promises (0 %), what powers they actually have when the people in administrative positions in the state apparatus the elected have to interface with have decades of experience and knowledge of unwritten rules and have seen many elected politicians come and go without making a difference.

Despite all that, voting can still make an occasional difference on a very local level or when it is about directly voting on an issue. If you ever start a political group, you really have no excuse for not investigating rules of order and voting procedures, no amount of out-of-context Marx quotations and distortions give you that.

It is if it's the People's Ballot™

It's not "obscurantist" just because you don't understand what someone is saying.

OK, tell me what the statement that Communism "is not a question of having or of doing, but of being" means.

The entire goal of socialism is evil people who failed at capitalism trying to get power. There has never been one socialist in human history who ever put somebody else before them. Compasionism is a much better system. If every leftist gave a fuck about actually helping people being exploited they would focus all of their attention on destroying monopolies/centralization of power (socialism creates one monopoly and centralizes all power into one hand, because humans have such a great track record for not being corruptible), and one of the best ways to do this is completely reforming the tax system so that all the companies like walmart who benefit from half the usa being on food stamps can't maintain a monopoly on "compassion". There are plenty of solutions for forming an unbreakable safety net, just like they did in Europe, and after that people will have some breathing room to actually pursue their political goals.

"Capitalism is evil! They get all the resources and then take away peoples rights! The answer is putting me in charge so that I can make the correct decisions for people instead of these incorrect decisions people are making for people! A slave is somebody who can't make their own decisions, but through my warped logic I will free the slaves by making them better slaves."

What the fuck?

The hippies have it right. Leave me the fuck alone, and I will collaborate with like minded people with similar endgames. Socialism will eventually make a decision that says somebody taking a few days off for a music festival to eat some LSD is bad for the majority of workers and so drugs will be banned.

I am poor as fuck, but at least I get to starve without some douchebag coming up to me to say "Hey, starving weak person, come do some labor, it will free you!". I would much rather have the current system with adjustments made to prevent greed. Nobody needs a million fucking dollars to live. A fur coat should not be a more important purchase than food and shelter for the homeless, under any fucking circumstance. The majority of people are fucking brainwashed to be against this despite the fact that they will never even make six figures. That means your choice is either war, or working on better usage of the 40% people already consent to being taken out of their paycheck.

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expalin it please

Thats cleary not democratic but that doesn't mean the USSR was.

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Someone took Atlas Shrugged a little too much to heart

lad…

This. It’s pretty telling that whenever you bring up the lack of democracy in the USSR the typical ☭TANKIE☭ response is “well America isn’t democratic either”. Yeah no shit capitalist countries aren’t genuine democracies, the whole point of socialism is to change that and create an actual democracy.

>Here's a quick overview of the Cuban political system: cuba-solidarity.org.uk/resources/democracyfactsheet2015.pdf
Thanks but do we know reasonably sure that this is what actually happens? Cuba Solidarity Campaign probably isn't the most unbiased source

You're right, let's see what the bourgeois press has to say:

economist.com/news/americas/21731689-how-castro-regime-keeps-serious-challengers-ballot-cubas-communists-bar-alternative

OOPS looks like my almonds are activating. Let's just forget about the question mmkay?

I mean those claims sound ridiculous and yeah, chances are they're fake/exaggerated, but you can't claim in all honesty that the Cuban government is not authoritarian either, or hasn't frequently imprisoned journalists that disagreed with what they did. This makes me wonder how much we can believe about what's said about the electoral process. Not to discredit all the things they achieved in other fields btw, but I don't want to be naive about them being actually democratic.

Tankies struggle to defend the USSR without whataboutisms

Everytime an actual ML explains why the USSR was democratic you people say that the bureaucrats were still in charge without any arguments, so I'd say you use similar methods

Except their explanations basically amount to “there was a legislature and it voted on stuff” without mentioning anything about the ban on factions, necessity of towing party line to get anywhere in politics, or the blatant state repression of any meaningful dissent. The Soviet legislature was a rubber stamp for the party bureaucracy.

It's a product of Soviet-era propaganda which involved pointing fingers at the West… and that was it. Short answer is, if you pound a message hard enough in, even the descendants'll still be repeating it.

Daily reminder is okay to eat shit because the guys across border drink diarrhea

Nothing to defend really, just refute liberal lies that our fellow anarchists believe in.

reddit.com/r/communism/comments/5skve6/how_soviet_citizens_shaped_the_their_constitutions/

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heh

Absolutely classic /r/communism

The "good" party, of course, being the one with the most guns who says they are they are the best

The guy who made that post, /u/HysniKapo, is Ismail from /marx/ btw.

Funny how little people want to believe you when the group you advocate has used violence against allies and then modern day defenders espouse intellectual dishonesty in the name of socialism ("critical support").
And again, even if you prove that liberals did lie, you still haven't made any positive case FOR many of the marxist states. You know that being not-capitalist isn't enough of a reason to support something?

His reddit account is a fucking goldmine of interesting stuff as is /marx/