I heard elections don't matter in Cuba because only one party is allowed, or at least any candidate has to be approved by the party, and all the representatives get elected anyway, so it's pointless. It does seem like if you don't know the names and opposition candidates don't run, like the elections for judges or whatever in my local elections, people will just end up picking everybody. They also don't allow international observers. Afraid of spies from the US messing with the process maybe?
In Cuba, no political party, including the Communist party, nominates or campaigns for candidates for office- all candidates run as independents. Political parties under socialist systems play a different role than under Liberal capitalist systems. Parties under capitalism represent the competing interests of factions of the Bourgeois ruling class, while parties under socialism ideally (not always in practice, unfortunately) represent the interests of the whole of the working people and society. Socialist states also typically take the position that the process of democracy doesn't stop with elections and voting, but is a continual process whereby the people are consistently engaged and participating in their government. That is why this post emphasizes the role of various mass organizations in Cuban democracy- these are the democratic institutions of the country, not just political parties. You can contrast that to a bourgeois system, whereby two or more bourgeois parties run mass advertising campaigns, rendering the vote as essentially a consumer choice analogous to picking political representatives like choosing between Coke and Pepsi, while the people have little actual say in some of the most important parts of their lives.
Thanks! So this is what people mean by alternatives to liberal bourgeois democracy. Because I've always wondered what possible alternative to liberal democracy there could be that isn't just authoritarianism, which just sounds plain worse.
I seem to be in the minority whenever I bring it up, but I do like the idea of essentially removing political parties (because those seem to be terrible in the states) and channeling organizing through different ways instead of a limited set of private company cliques. As long as the mass organizations are democratic themselves and offer education and avenues for change, that's a good thing. Only thing is you need to have an idea of what the candidates will do when elected since you can't just rely on the trust of a political party who's ideals you believe in. Do the little notice boards they put out during elections in Cuba have their voting history, or just like their personalities and jobs? I've been meaning to look more into if democracy without political parties is possible.
Tbh, this seems similar to the US if they outlawed campaigning, political parties, and PAC's. They already have various organizations that endorse candidates (NRA, unions, ACLA, AIPAC, NAACP, churches, etc), so I guess those would be like the mass organizations or does that analogy not work?
So this is what people mean by alternatives to liberal bourgeois democracy. Because I've always wondered what possible alternative to liberal democracy there could be that isn't just authoritarianism,
Often times what you've been told is "authoritarianism" by socialists is actually a different organisational structure of democratic institutions that fundamentally produces a more democratic outcome than the liberal democracy you're familiar with. The problem for socialists is that it's very easy to slander a system nobody fully understands, and it takes a considerable amount of learning and investigating to learn that the system is actually good and provides more democracy, not less, DiEM standing for democracy in europe movement. This is in fact the angle that one of the main multi-country European socialist coalitions are pushing at the current moment in time, more democracy, not less. The point is that liberal democracy doesn't produce democratic outcomes and that is because it is structurally designed not to.
The Cuban system you are currently learning about here is actually a slight variant on the Soviet system.
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China also uses a variant, with their own differences, as does Vietnam and several other socialist countries. Each have their peculiar differences, what's important to understand is that liberal democracy doesn't come in one flavour, it is adapted and different in every country, the same applies to socialist democracy as well.
This can be a lot to take in and a very deep rabbit hole to go down. I'm quite happy to answer any questions.
So the part I don't get is how a lot of these countries end up with the same leaders for life? You think if they were so democratic that they'd change out occasionally. I know the USSR changed leaders a few times after Stalin and not sure what's happening with Cuba now, I think they just put in term limits, but before that there was Stalin for decades, Fidel Castro for decades, Mao, now Xi Jinping, etc. Keeping one leader for that long gives an opportunity for them to centralize power.
I also worry that so many representative layers dilutes the people's will from the bottom to the top, but to be honest, I have no idea of that's true or just a gut feeling. I'd have to see some study, like the one that showed that popular will doesn't seem to affect whether something happens in the US unless rich people are also for it lol.
Other than that, it sounds pretty good. I definitely have to do more research in that European democracy movement. We could definitely do with some more democracy in the US (less gerrymandering, no electoral college, etc.). Thanks for the explanations!
So the part I don't get is how a lot of these countries end up with the same leaders for life? You think if they were so democratic that they'd change out occasionally
Typically it's because to win the election in the first place, you need to be pretty popular. There are cases of unpopular leaders who, while they did some things right, had such massive problems that they were tossed out -- Khrushchev is the perfect example of that, but if someone proves that they are good at what they are doing, as Stalin did, as Fidel Castro did, and so on, people are going to generally support that person. Even when someone has a real decline in the quality of leadership (see Mao, though I think the issue is overstated beyond sheer senescence right at the end), if they were involved in something like personally saving the party and leading the revolution to victory while overseeing a doubling in life-expectancy and an end to the vast majority of colonial occupation and reactionary practices like footbinding, spread in literacy and healthcare, etc. etc.
Each of those individual things can completely change someone's life for the better, so you get a whole lot of good will you need to burn through by fucking up before people abandon you.
An example of this perspective can be seen in part of a talk Michael Parenti gave:
spoiler
You can look at any existing socialist country - if you don’t want to call them socialist, call them whatever you want. Post capitalist- whatever, I don’t care. Call them camels or window shades, it doesn’t matter as long as we know the countries we’re talking about. If you look at any one of those countries, you can evaluate them in several ways. One is comparing them to what they had before, and that to me is what’s very compelling. That’s what so compelling about Cuba, for instance.
When I was in Cuba I was up in the Escambia, which is like the Appalachia of Cuba, very rugged mountains with people who were poor, or they were. And I said to this campesino, I said, “Do you like Fidel?” and he said “Si si, with all my soul.” I remember this gesture, with all our souls. I said “Why?” and he pointed to this clinic right up on the hill which we had visited. He said, “Look at that.” He said “Before the revolution, we never saw a doctor. If someone was seriously ill, it would take twenty people to carry that person, it’d go day and night. It would take two days to get to the hospital. First because it was far away and second because you couldn’t go straight, you couldn’t cross the latifundia lands, the boss would kill you. So, you had to go like this, and often when we got to the hospital, the person might be dead by the time we got there. Now we have this clinic up here with a full-time doctor. And today in Cuba when you become a doctor you got to spend two years out in the country, that’s your dedication to the people. And a dentist that comes one day a week. And for serious things, we’re not more than 20 minutes away from a larger hospital. That’s in the Escambia. So that’s freedom. We’re freer today, we have more life.” And I talked to a guy in Havana who says to me “All I used to see here in Havana, you call this drab and dull, we see it as a cleaner city. It’s true, the paint is peeling off the walls, but you don’t see kids begging in the streets anymore and you don’t see prostitutes.” Prostitution used to be one of the biggest industries. And today this man is going to night school. He said “I could read! I can read, do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read?”
I remember when I gave my book to my father. I dedicated a book of mine to him, “Power and the Powerless” to my father, I said “To my father with my love,” I gave him a copy of the book, he opened it up and looked at it. He had only gone to the seventh grade, he was the son of an immigrant, a working-class Italian. He opens the book and he starts looking through it, and he gets misty-eyed, very misty-eyed. And I thought it was because he was so touched that his son had dedicated a book to him. That wasn’t the reason. He looks up to me and he says ‘I can’t read this, kid” I said “That’s okay dad, neither can the students, don’t worry about that. I mean I wrote it for you, it’s your book and you don’t have to read it. It’s a very complicated book, an academic book. He says, “I can’t read this book.” And the defeat. The defeat that man felt. That’s what illiteracy is about, that’s what the joy of literacy programs is. That’s why you have people in Nicaragua walking proud now for the first time. They were treated like animals before, they weren’t allowed to read, they weren’t taught to read.
So, you compare a country from what it came from, with all it’s imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they go up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms? The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless. Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And that’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified. And the Reaganite government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger, that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition.
If someone taught me to read when I grew up illiterate, gave me a hospital where before the nearest one was many hours away, gave my family a way to safely make a living, I'd probably be grateful to him for the rest of my life, too.
Now, there's the matter of what should happen, because term limits are principally reactionary (money has no term limit, so it ends up controlling elections that have them), but age limits* are necessary and part of the reason for the customary term limits in China after how old Mao got. We have yet to see what Xi will do or how long he will seek re-election for, but the thing keeping him there is that he has transformed people's lives by the tens of millions and improved lives by the hundreds of millions, so they believe in him.
Damn that's a powerful passage. Thanks for that. It reminds me of the Jon Oliver segments where they interview normal people affected by terrible US policies or lack of regulation. So it's the same thing that probably would've allowed FDR to keep running if he hadn't died. Although that was scary enough that the US immediately put in term limits afterwards.
you want office holders to develop leadership in subsequent generations rather than blocking it, and you don't want people making decisions who won't have to live with the consequences. age limits or a lifetime service limit are probably a better way to do that than term limits since someone spending 20-30 years in congress and then having three or four senate terms starting in his 60s is not actually addressing the problem of gerontocracy in US politics.
The tendency towards long-term political figureheads comes down to a few root causes generally:
The leader/figurehead is an extremely popular figure in that country, generally due to being a revolutionary hero, and thus is popular enough to remain in a high position of authority or prominence for most of their life. This is your Kim Il Sungs, Fidel Castros, Lenins, etc.
The communist party within that country wants a sense of stability that having a long-term figurehead provides. I keep using leader and figurehead interchangeably here as quite often what happens is that powers and responsibilities shift downwards over time, so while the leader may remain the same they actually have less authority within the system than you would think at a glance. A combination of this and #1 is what has happened with the Kims in North Korea; Kim Jong Un is still head of the communist party but is not the leader of government, which is split between what is effectively a prime minister and a head of the legislature. Each successive Kim has held less and less power within the government.
The late stage Soviet system did have issues with this sort of thing, less so because those at the top were consolidating power and more because they weren't investing in the party and recruiting new blood into their ranks, which resulted in the same party members remaining in power for decades and contributed to the eventual collapse of the union later on as the common Soviet was less a devoted Marxist and more a person living within a Marxist society.
I've never actually learned this stuff, I'm reading through this thread and I'm still not getting some things that maybe should be obvious. What is the role/function (both ostensibly and in practice) of both the communist party itself and their leader more specifically?
The answer largely depends on the specific country/party; socialism is a scientific ideology, after all, and often experiments with new ideas or processes depending on the specific conditions of that country and its needs.
Generalizing though, the party is an ideological animal whereas the government/state is a practical one. The latter concentrates on day-to-day issues like infrastructure, education, the economy, etc while the former acts to guide the state towards the goals of socialism. As a practical example, the government may be working to expand light industry to create more luxury goods for its people while the party would be working to ensure the long-term benefits of such go to the working class and not get consolidated into the hands of a wealthy minority. Both the party and the state are tightly integrated to ensure that this isn't just a bunch of armchair Marxists reading theory and yelling at a government that largely ignores them, so you'll often find that party membership is essentially required to get into the state in the first place (though there are, contrary to popular belief, multiple parties within typical ML governments. China, North Korea, Cuba, etc all have multiple parties, just with a very dominant communist party, so there is some wiggle room here).
The confusion around long-lived leaders generally boils down to this separation of party and state: a populist figure like the Kims might start off as both head of state and head of party, but gradually shift duties more towards the latter until they completely abandon the head of state position. Since the party still has massive influence this means they still have quite a lot of sway, but they're not making the day-to-day decisions directly anymore.
Thanks for the good explanation. That last part is a problem I could see, too. I know I heard an issue the USSR had is that their bureaucracy class got too entrenched and separated from the people. No idea how to solve that, though, as I'm obviously still learning about this in general. This has been such an interesting thread lol.
So the part I don't get is how a lot of these countries end up with the same leaders for life? You think if they were so democratic that they'd change out occasionally. I know the USSR changed leaders a few times after Stalin and not sure what's happening with Cuba now, I think they just put in term limits, but before that there was Stalin for decades, Fidel Castro for decades, Mao, now Xi Jinping, etc. Keeping one leader for that long gives an opportunity for them to centralize power.
The structure of the system generally results in a meritocratic (actually serious) result. Everyone in the system has started at the lowest council level, and then at each council they have been voted up based on actual ability to produce results to represent that council at the next tier. This process of each council selecting someone to represent the council at the next tier up continues all the way to the supreme congress.
Think of it this way... If you put a thousand extremely competent highly skilled carpenters in a room together and ask them to select the best person among them for the job, they're going to select someone who is an incredible master. Now wait 4 years and ask yourself whether they're going to select a different person, is someone else going to magically be a better master carpenter? Not likely. Quantity of experience plays a large role in ability, and the person with the highest quantity of that experience is still that master.
Stalin, was one of the most effective administrators of any government in history. This is just a simple fact, as leader he took a country without industry, a feudal backwater with no technology that was still doing horse-and-cart agriculture let alone any kind of industrial production, and in his time they defeated the nazis and literally went to space... in under 40 years. Mao? Mao was a hero revolutionary, the leader that freed the country. The average life expectancy was 33 when he started the revolution, and it was 60 when he died. This man has been villified to an absolutely ridiculous degree when literally any metric of comparison (before/after the revolution) you use demonstrates why he was kept. Were there dumb mistakes? Yes. But even with some mistakes things like ending the practice of foot-binding which affected near 50% of all working class women and 100% of all rich women is all-by-itself justification for Mao, without anything else. Castro falls into a similar boat, he was a hero revolutionary, brought incredible levels of improvement to his people, and not only was he seen as a hero but he was charismatic as fuck, watch any video of him and he's immediately likeable, even when he aged the man's earnestness and softness shines through.
As for Xi. He's only in a third term and his total time in the role is only at 10 years lmao. That's not even notable. The last Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel was in her role for 16 years. Tony fucking Blair was PM of the UK for 12 years. I can't take Americans seriously when they talk about this shit when he's not even past well known leaders of my own country.
I also worry that so many representative layers dilutes the people's will from the bottom to the top, but to be honest, I have no idea of that's true or just a gut feeling. I'd have to see some study, like the one that showed that popular will doesn't seem to affect whether something happens in the US unless rich people are also for it lol.
There is a 3rd party Harvard study worth a read here on the Chinese system, it's the longest study of its kind (30 years long), independent, and can't be regarded as biased in favour of China (the opposite actually). It finds that 95% of the population support the government, it finds that they support the government because it has consistently improved their lives, and it finds that it's not because of "widespread propaganda" but because of real actual changes in their material lives.
The Chinese system produces results that reflect what the people actually want, partially because of one single policy - any constituency can remove its representative with a simple majority vote. I want you to consider what absolute fucking mayhem that policy would enable if it existed in your own country. How often would the local politician be getting campaigns to remove them for doing things the people don't want/like? If that policy existed right now in most western countries we could be getting rid of 90% of the politicians for their support for Israel and genocide. The very existence of this policy enforces an enormous pressure upon the representatives to actually represent the people - or else.
Contrast this study with studies you've seen of western democracies all having less than 50% support.
Don't get me wrong about this, I have criticisms too. I don't particularly like how slow the system is at bringing about cultural change, lgbt issues have moved slow as fuck toward improvement (improving more than the US which is going backwards right now) because old people are a bunch of homophobic bastards that slow the process of change down. Cuba is an exception to this because Mariela Castro, one of Fidel's family, took it upon herself to change things including changing the views of Fidel who later regretted and apologised for the mistakes of early homophobia in the country. I think it's likely that without the involvement of Castro himself the movement would have stalled or been slow there. Right now Cuba is the most progressive country in the world, with the most progressive laws for lgbt people as a result of their reforming of the family law in recent years. For reference, I am lgbt myself.
Interesting stuff. Being able to recall representatives sounds amazing. I wish the US had that. Although the UK and Australia have something similar to that Iirc and it's just lead to them speed running through prime ministers lol. Wonder what the difference there is.
Cultural issues do seem to be the weak point of this kind of populist policy making, because it's easy to convince the rmajority to hate some minority. Not sure what the solution to that is besides including strong protections in the initial Constitution of a state.
In liberal parliamentary systems like the UK (I am cursed to live here) it's just a vote of no confidence in government. It can only be performed by the elected MPs of the party currently sitting in government. It's happening frequently because FPTP voting has caused too many different political groups to join one party despite having views that would cause them to be in different parties in other countries. This results in very frequent governmental splits and rebellions. Unfortunately we have no such powers to change representatives.
Cultural issues do seem to be the weak point of this kind of populist policy making, because it's easy to convince the rmajority to hate some minority. Not sure what the solution to that is besides including strong protections in the initial Constitution of a state.
It certainly is a weakpoint, but it's also important to note that it will resolve itself in the longterm. The cultural change is happening in the young people and the older generations will filter out. The change is inevitable. Most importantly things like transgender clinics for children are now being built all over because their state actually follows scientific advice strictly. When I say things there are heading in the right direction I also firmly believe here in the UK and the US we are heading in completely the opposite direction. That's not something liberals even want to resolve either given how little opposition they mount to anything.
Another thing to note is that abortion in the US has gone backwards, with no federal opposition at all, and only token gestures from the liberals. This while under their government. That shit is never ever going to happen in China. The direction of this kind of change is firmly in ONE direction, despite the west's best efforts to provoke foreign countries into homophobia via western homonationalism. That shit has been quite successful at turning other capitalist countries more homophobic and anti-lgbt though.
I forgot that it had to be done by MP's in their own party. Ya, that is a big difference. You have my condolences about the UK lol. They're looking more and more like the US these days.
I hope you're right that it changes as the generations move forward! I'm also hoping social media makes a difference. I know it also puts people in their own bubbles, but I could also see it allowing people to get exposed to different types of people. If you're an LGBTQ person, the only one in your small town or village for example, you can connect with others and see that you're not so strange. Hell, because of the internet, my eyes have opened to the Israel-Palestine conflict recently, something I never cared about in 2018, 2015, or any year prior, thinking it was too complicated. Now I'm arguing about it all over the place, looking up what places to boycott and shit. Changes is always possible.
I guess we won't truly know until we see how time passes in places like China or Vietnam. And we have to hope rich people don't invent an immortality portion like they keep trying to lol.
I hope you're right that it changes as the generations move forward! I'm also hoping social media makes a difference. I know it also puts people in their own bubbles, but I could also see it allowing people to get exposed to different types of people. If you're an LGBTQ person, the only one in your small town or village for example, you can connect with others and see that you're not so strange. Hell, because of the internet, my eyes have opened to the Israel-Palestine conflict recently, something I never cared about in 2018, 2015, or any year prior, thinking it was too complicated. Now I'm arguing about it all over the place, looking up what places to boycott and shit. Changes is always possible.
I've spent the last 15 years being called a tankie (a label I don't care about but the other side thinks it's a slur or something) and an antisemite for relentlessly fighting for Palestine. Since you're freshly out of the liberal bubble, did you know Nelson Mandela was a communist? Liberals love to invoke Mandela while mis-educating people on his actual beliefs. If you have any doubts about your support for Palestine, revisit the words he gave in his 1993 visit to Gaza.
Lenin gave us this little passage describing the phenomenon of Liberals to steal and deradicalise heroes from the left:
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
Applies to MLK, Mandela, Einstein, even Malcolm X to a lesser extent. And countless others.
And we have to hope rich people don't invent an immortality portion like they keep trying to lol.
Won't save them from China lmaoooo all-time billionaire execution record holders.
Are you familiar with what a primary election is? In the electoral process here in the US, one where there is "democracy", the parties have primary elections and then each put forward a candidate for the general. You can call the primary "intraparty competition" and the general "interparty competition" in this case.
In the upper offices (I think Cuba, like most AES states, is tolerant of other parties in lower offices), there is no interparty competition, so the election that decides the winner, the equivalent of the general in the US, is intraparty.
For all intents and purposes, this is mainly a difference on a formal level. In either case, you have a collection of candidates and you vote on them. If you want to run for a high office in China, say, and we are imagining everyone had to be a member of the one party, just join the Communist Party of China and engage in intraparty competition with the other Communist Party members.
It's more complicated in Cuba, but it's more complicated in the direction of being more permissive.
A much more substantial argument is required to make a plausible case that there is anything wrong with a process like this. Are you worried that the Communist Party of China in that earlier hypothetical won't let you join or run under them and you want the freedom to make your own party? First of all, that's absurdly idealist to claim is substantially different -- if you look at the US senate, the only third parties that are tolerated (a single independent and a single libertarian) are comfortably within the D and R voting blocs, respectively, and do not in any way represent a substantial political force, just empty gestures at being peace doves.
Secondly, I will repeat to you that even this distinction is basically just one of procedure. What parties have rights and what gets you on watchlists or having a tank drive up to your house is not in the jurisdiction of a single party's arbitrary will, correct (except on the state level, where that often is exactly the case), it is in the jurisdiction of the arbitrary will of two parties that mostly agree with each other except on culture war issues and as a matter of cynical opportunism. There is still no useful difference established here between having one party and two.
I will furthermore say that the basic type of entity that the Communist Party of Cuba is -- as an organ of the government itself -- should be much more agreeable even to a left-ish liberal than the DNC and the RNC, because those two groups are private entities for who don't answer to anyone! So much of US politics is not just controlled by private entities (by merit of campaign finance, etc.) but the entire goddam platform consists of private entities! Do you know why those interparty debates that the circus of election coverage pivoted on stopped happening? Those were also run by a private entity that just decided not to because negotiations broke down. It's pathetic, and don't get me started on how the DNC just skipped the primary process this time because they won't accept Joe being replaced.
Anyway, this is all very separate from the conditions in Cuba, but that's because most of the objections people make are grounded in hazy generalities that don't even hold together internally, much less survive contact with the target of their criticism. I'll let other people who are more educated on Cuba itself handle those aspects, which I admit are somewhat more important.
Just wanna say it's always a real nice feeling when federated users come and have a goodwilled, open conversation in hexbear. I'd kill for a hundred-fold more users being open to conversations like this.
Aawww thanks! Not gonna lie, I always thought hexbear was super annoying and hostile in other threads like other Lemmy users, but this one has been filled with such good conversations and educating answers without too much berating me about not knowing stuff that it definitely has made me re-think my original attitudes. I still disagree with ya'll about other issues, like attitudes towards the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but it doesn't mean we can't still have great conversations and I appreciate that 💙
You know, Cuba is a good gateway into socialism ideas in general now that I think about it, especially without a Castro brother there as an old authoritarian scapegoat to point at. The "authoritarian" label doesn't really hold up as well when it's some new guy whose name the public doesn't even know. Scare mongering like the kind done with China doesn't work, because they're not really a threat and they're too poor to affect our markets by buying companies or whatever. Now the only criticisms left are one party rule, the word "communism" is scary, and lack of press freedoms, and this graphic helps with the first one.
Hexbear is only hostile when someone is clearly not willing to engage in good-faith or is completely closed up. Can't force a horse to drink. The hostility serves as a means of people avoiding wasting their time engaging uselessly, as you know how much time we can spend pumping out walls of text by now.
Hexbear may come off as hostile but it's generally in response to people actively poking the bear, as it were, or otherwise espousing politics we find noxious, like blind acceptance of neoliberalism as objective truth.
only one party is allowed, or at least any candidate has to be approved by the party, and all the representatives get elected anyway, so it's pointless
This is functionally the same as any major American city, and a lot of solid blue or red states.
You don't have to read very far in this fact sheet to see that there are contested elections in Cuba, anyway. See the "Municipal Assembly" section.
Afraid of spies from the US messing with the process maybe?
Are they afraid of interference from the country that's invaded them, tried hundreds of times to assassinate their leaders, sponsored terrorist attacks on their soil, and runs an illegal torture camp in Guantanamo Bay? I wonder.
Observers from other countries don’t come to Cuba because no one who knows what they are talking about thinks Cuban elections are “rigged”. Literally YOU, Shyfer, can be an observer if you really want to. The ballots are counted publicly in full view, and anyone can watch it all happen. Seriously, if you want to question it you - even as a foreigner - can just go there and watch it all happen yourself for some local election.
Haha I'd love to, but the has US made it harder to travel there unless you have a specific reason. Plus
tourists can't go to government hotels or buy from government shops. But that would be fun to go during an election year and stop by and just blow the minds of friends and family by saying all this stuff.
Opposition groups, primarily outside of Cuba, had encouraged voters to stay home in protest, saying the election had no meaning in a one-party system with no formal opposition or international oversight.
I read it and it's a good summary I'm just trying to wrap my head around it, and reconcile it with the criticism I've heard before about Cuban elections being a sham, such as in that linked article or on Wikipedia.
Political scientists characterize the political system of Cuba as a single-party authoritarian regime where political opposition is not permitted.[7][8][9] There are elections in Cuba, but they are not considered democratic.[10][11]
Are these the same "opposition groups" the U.S. trained to conduct terrorist attacks in Cuba? I'm skeptical of what they might have to say, especially when we don't even have a name of the group or some sort of Cuban law we can point to.
When the U.S. designates a country a state enemy, you see all sorts of stuff made up about it, along with all sorts of muddled half-truths, exaggerations, and misleading spins. You just saw an example of this -- the half (at best) truth that Cuban elections are not contested. You can't take this sort of "Bad Country" mythos at face value.
I heard elections don't matter in Cuba because only one party is allowed, or at least any candidate has to be approved by the party, and all the representatives get elected anyway, so it's pointless. It does seem like if you don't know the names and opposition candidates don't run, like the elections for judges or whatever in my local elections, people will just end up picking everybody. They also don't allow international observers. Afraid of spies from the US messing with the process maybe?
In Cuba, no political party, including the Communist party, nominates or campaigns for candidates for office- all candidates run as independents. Political parties under socialist systems play a different role than under Liberal capitalist systems. Parties under capitalism represent the competing interests of factions of the Bourgeois ruling class, while parties under socialism ideally (not always in practice, unfortunately) represent the interests of the whole of the working people and society. Socialist states also typically take the position that the process of democracy doesn't stop with elections and voting, but is a continual process whereby the people are consistently engaged and participating in their government. That is why this post emphasizes the role of various mass organizations in Cuban democracy- these are the democratic institutions of the country, not just political parties. You can contrast that to a bourgeois system, whereby two or more bourgeois parties run mass advertising campaigns, rendering the vote as essentially a consumer choice analogous to picking political representatives like choosing between Coke and Pepsi, while the people have little actual say in some of the most important parts of their lives.
Thanks! So this is what people mean by alternatives to liberal bourgeois democracy. Because I've always wondered what possible alternative to liberal democracy there could be that isn't just authoritarianism, which just sounds plain worse.
I seem to be in the minority whenever I bring it up, but I do like the idea of essentially removing political parties (because those seem to be terrible in the states) and channeling organizing through different ways instead of a limited set of private company cliques. As long as the mass organizations are democratic themselves and offer education and avenues for change, that's a good thing. Only thing is you need to have an idea of what the candidates will do when elected since you can't just rely on the trust of a political party who's ideals you believe in. Do the little notice boards they put out during elections in Cuba have their voting history, or just like their personalities and jobs? I've been meaning to look more into if democracy without political parties is possible.
Tbh, this seems similar to the US if they outlawed campaigning, political parties, and PAC's. They already have various organizations that endorse candidates (NRA, unions, ACLA, AIPAC, NAACP, churches, etc), so I guess those would be like the mass organizations or does that analogy not work?
Often times what you've been told is "authoritarianism" by socialists is actually a different organisational structure of democratic institutions that fundamentally produces a more democratic outcome than the liberal democracy you're familiar with. The problem for socialists is that it's very easy to slander a system nobody fully understands, and it takes a considerable amount of learning and investigating to learn that the system is actually good and provides more democracy, not less, DiEM standing for democracy in europe movement. This is in fact the angle that one of the main multi-country European socialist coalitions are pushing at the current moment in time, more democracy, not less. The point is that liberal democracy doesn't produce democratic outcomes and that is because it is structurally designed not to.
The Cuban system you are currently learning about here is actually a slight variant on the Soviet system.
China also uses a variant, with their own differences, as does Vietnam and several other socialist countries. Each have their peculiar differences, what's important to understand is that liberal democracy doesn't come in one flavour, it is adapted and different in every country, the same applies to socialist democracy as well.
This can be a lot to take in and a very deep rabbit hole to go down. I'm quite happy to answer any questions.
So the part I don't get is how a lot of these countries end up with the same leaders for life? You think if they were so democratic that they'd change out occasionally. I know the USSR changed leaders a few times after Stalin and not sure what's happening with Cuba now, I think they just put in term limits, but before that there was Stalin for decades, Fidel Castro for decades, Mao, now Xi Jinping, etc. Keeping one leader for that long gives an opportunity for them to centralize power.
I also worry that so many representative layers dilutes the people's will from the bottom to the top, but to be honest, I have no idea of that's true or just a gut feeling. I'd have to see some study, like the one that showed that popular will doesn't seem to affect whether something happens in the US unless rich people are also for it lol.
Other than that, it sounds pretty good. I definitely have to do more research in that European democracy movement. We could definitely do with some more democracy in the US (less gerrymandering, no electoral college, etc.). Thanks for the explanations!
Typically it's because to win the election in the first place, you need to be pretty popular. There are cases of unpopular leaders who, while they did some things right, had such massive problems that they were tossed out -- Khrushchev is the perfect example of that, but if someone proves that they are good at what they are doing, as Stalin did, as Fidel Castro did, and so on, people are going to generally support that person. Even when someone has a real decline in the quality of leadership (see Mao, though I think the issue is overstated beyond sheer senescence right at the end), if they were involved in something like personally saving the party and leading the revolution to victory while overseeing a doubling in life-expectancy and an end to the vast majority of colonial occupation and reactionary practices like footbinding, spread in literacy and healthcare, etc. etc.
Each of those individual things can completely change someone's life for the better, so you get a whole lot of good will you need to burn through by fucking up before people abandon you.
An example of this perspective can be seen in part of a talk Michael Parenti gave:
spoiler
If someone taught me to read when I grew up illiterate, gave me a hospital where before the nearest one was many hours away, gave my family a way to safely make a living, I'd probably be grateful to him for the rest of my life, too.
Now, there's the matter of what should happen, because term limits are principally reactionary (money has no term limit, so it ends up controlling elections that have them), but age limits* are necessary and part of the reason for the customary term limits in China after how old Mao got. We have yet to see what Xi will do or how long he will seek re-election for, but the thing keeping him there is that he has transformed people's lives by the tens of millions and improved lives by the hundreds of millions, so they believe in him.
*Or cognitive assessments
Damn that's a powerful passage. Thanks for that. It reminds me of the Jon Oliver segments where they interview normal people affected by terrible US policies or lack of regulation. So it's the same thing that probably would've allowed FDR to keep running if he hadn't died. Although that was scary enough that the US immediately put in term limits afterwards.
That's true, but scary for who?
Do you have a link to that talk, or just that quote in particular?
https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/d8evq0/a_transcription_of_michael_parenti_on_the_cuban/
Thank you!
you want office holders to develop leadership in subsequent generations rather than blocking it, and you don't want people making decisions who won't have to live with the consequences. age limits or a lifetime service limit are probably a better way to do that than term limits since someone spending 20-30 years in congress and then having three or four senate terms starting in his 60s is not actually addressing the problem of gerontocracy in US politics.
The tendency towards long-term political figureheads comes down to a few root causes generally:
The late stage Soviet system did have issues with this sort of thing, less so because those at the top were consolidating power and more because they weren't investing in the party and recruiting new blood into their ranks, which resulted in the same party members remaining in power for decades and contributed to the eventual collapse of the union later on as the common Soviet was less a devoted Marxist and more a person living within a Marxist society.
I've never actually learned this stuff, I'm reading through this thread and I'm still not getting some things that maybe should be obvious. What is the role/function (both ostensibly and in practice) of both the communist party itself and their leader more specifically?
The answer largely depends on the specific country/party; socialism is a scientific ideology, after all, and often experiments with new ideas or processes depending on the specific conditions of that country and its needs.
Generalizing though, the party is an ideological animal whereas the government/state is a practical one. The latter concentrates on day-to-day issues like infrastructure, education, the economy, etc while the former acts to guide the state towards the goals of socialism. As a practical example, the government may be working to expand light industry to create more luxury goods for its people while the party would be working to ensure the long-term benefits of such go to the working class and not get consolidated into the hands of a wealthy minority. Both the party and the state are tightly integrated to ensure that this isn't just a bunch of armchair Marxists reading theory and yelling at a government that largely ignores them, so you'll often find that party membership is essentially required to get into the state in the first place (though there are, contrary to popular belief, multiple parties within typical ML governments. China, North Korea, Cuba, etc all have multiple parties, just with a very dominant communist party, so there is some wiggle room here).
The confusion around long-lived leaders generally boils down to this separation of party and state: a populist figure like the Kims might start off as both head of state and head of party, but gradually shift duties more towards the latter until they completely abandon the head of state position. Since the party still has massive influence this means they still have quite a lot of sway, but they're not making the day-to-day decisions directly anymore.
Thanks for the good explanation. That last part is a problem I could see, too. I know I heard an issue the USSR had is that their bureaucracy class got too entrenched and separated from the people. No idea how to solve that, though, as I'm obviously still learning about this in general. This has been such an interesting thread lol.
The structure of the system generally results in a meritocratic (actually serious) result. Everyone in the system has started at the lowest council level, and then at each council they have been voted up based on actual ability to produce results to represent that council at the next tier. This process of each council selecting someone to represent the council at the next tier up continues all the way to the supreme congress.
Think of it this way... If you put a thousand extremely competent highly skilled carpenters in a room together and ask them to select the best person among them for the job, they're going to select someone who is an incredible master. Now wait 4 years and ask yourself whether they're going to select a different person, is someone else going to magically be a better master carpenter? Not likely. Quantity of experience plays a large role in ability, and the person with the highest quantity of that experience is still that master.
Stalin, was one of the most effective administrators of any government in history. This is just a simple fact, as leader he took a country without industry, a feudal backwater with no technology that was still doing horse-and-cart agriculture let alone any kind of industrial production, and in his time they defeated the nazis and literally went to space... in under 40 years. Mao? Mao was a hero revolutionary, the leader that freed the country. The average life expectancy was 33 when he started the revolution, and it was 60 when he died. This man has been villified to an absolutely ridiculous degree when literally any metric of comparison (before/after the revolution) you use demonstrates why he was kept. Were there dumb mistakes? Yes. But even with some mistakes things like ending the practice of foot-binding which affected near 50% of all working class women and 100% of all rich women is all-by-itself justification for Mao, without anything else. Castro falls into a similar boat, he was a hero revolutionary, brought incredible levels of improvement to his people, and not only was he seen as a hero but he was charismatic as fuck, watch any video of him and he's immediately likeable, even when he aged the man's earnestness and softness shines through.
As for Xi. He's only in a third term and his total time in the role is only at 10 years lmao. That's not even notable. The last Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel was in her role for 16 years. Tony fucking Blair was PM of the UK for 12 years. I can't take Americans seriously when they talk about this shit when he's not even past well known leaders of my own country.
There is a 3rd party Harvard study worth a read here on the Chinese system, it's the longest study of its kind (30 years long), independent, and can't be regarded as biased in favour of China (the opposite actually). It finds that 95% of the population support the government, it finds that they support the government because it has consistently improved their lives, and it finds that it's not because of "widespread propaganda" but because of real actual changes in their material lives.
The Chinese system produces results that reflect what the people actually want, partially because of one single policy - any constituency can remove its representative with a simple majority vote. I want you to consider what absolute fucking mayhem that policy would enable if it existed in your own country. How often would the local politician be getting campaigns to remove them for doing things the people don't want/like? If that policy existed right now in most western countries we could be getting rid of 90% of the politicians for their support for Israel and genocide. The very existence of this policy enforces an enormous pressure upon the representatives to actually represent the people - or else.
Contrast this study with studies you've seen of western democracies all having less than 50% support.
Don't get me wrong about this, I have criticisms too. I don't particularly like how slow the system is at bringing about cultural change, lgbt issues have moved slow as fuck toward improvement (improving more than the US which is going backwards right now) because old people are a bunch of homophobic bastards that slow the process of change down. Cuba is an exception to this because Mariela Castro, one of Fidel's family, took it upon herself to change things including changing the views of Fidel who later regretted and apologised for the mistakes of early homophobia in the country. I think it's likely that without the involvement of Castro himself the movement would have stalled or been slow there. Right now Cuba is the most progressive country in the world, with the most progressive laws for lgbt people as a result of their reforming of the family law in recent years. For reference, I am lgbt myself.
Interesting stuff. Being able to recall representatives sounds amazing. I wish the US had that. Although the UK and Australia have something similar to that Iirc and it's just lead to them speed running through prime ministers lol. Wonder what the difference there is.
Cultural issues do seem to be the weak point of this kind of populist policy making, because it's easy to convince the rmajority to hate some minority. Not sure what the solution to that is besides including strong protections in the initial Constitution of a state.
In liberal parliamentary systems like the UK (I am cursed to live here) it's just a vote of no confidence in government. It can only be performed by the elected MPs of the party currently sitting in government. It's happening frequently because FPTP voting has caused too many different political groups to join one party despite having views that would cause them to be in different parties in other countries. This results in very frequent governmental splits and rebellions. Unfortunately we have no such powers to change representatives.
It certainly is a weakpoint, but it's also important to note that it will resolve itself in the longterm. The cultural change is happening in the young people and the older generations will filter out. The change is inevitable. Most importantly things like transgender clinics for children are now being built all over because their state actually follows scientific advice strictly. When I say things there are heading in the right direction I also firmly believe here in the UK and the US we are heading in completely the opposite direction. That's not something liberals even want to resolve either given how little opposition they mount to anything.
Another thing to note is that abortion in the US has gone backwards, with no federal opposition at all, and only token gestures from the liberals. This while under their government. That shit is never ever going to happen in China. The direction of this kind of change is firmly in ONE direction, despite the west's best efforts to provoke foreign countries into homophobia via western homonationalism. That shit has been quite successful at turning other capitalist countries more homophobic and anti-lgbt though.
I forgot that it had to be done by MP's in their own party. Ya, that is a big difference. You have my condolences about the UK lol. They're looking more and more like the US these days.
I hope you're right that it changes as the generations move forward! I'm also hoping social media makes a difference. I know it also puts people in their own bubbles, but I could also see it allowing people to get exposed to different types of people. If you're an LGBTQ person, the only one in your small town or village for example, you can connect with others and see that you're not so strange. Hell, because of the internet, my eyes have opened to the Israel-Palestine conflict recently, something I never cared about in 2018, 2015, or any year prior, thinking it was too complicated. Now I'm arguing about it all over the place, looking up what places to boycott and shit. Changes is always possible.
I guess we won't truly know until we see how time passes in places like China or Vietnam. And we have to hope rich people don't invent an immortality portion like they keep trying to lol.
I've spent the last 15 years being called a tankie (a label I don't care about but the other side thinks it's a slur or something) and an antisemite for relentlessly fighting for Palestine. Since you're freshly out of the liberal bubble, did you know Nelson Mandela was a communist? Liberals love to invoke Mandela while mis-educating people on his actual beliefs. If you have any doubts about your support for Palestine, revisit the words he gave in his 1993 visit to Gaza.
Lenin gave us this little passage describing the phenomenon of Liberals to steal and deradicalise heroes from the left:
Applies to MLK, Mandela, Einstein, even Malcolm X to a lesser extent. And countless others.
Won't save them from China lmaoooo all-time billionaire execution record holders.
I'm not sure I can answer your questions in detail, but this video might help you:
How Democracy Works in Cuba
Thanks!
Are you familiar with what a primary election is? In the electoral process here in the US, one where there is "democracy", the parties have primary elections and then each put forward a candidate for the general. You can call the primary "intraparty competition" and the general "interparty competition" in this case.
In the upper offices (I think Cuba, like most AES states, is tolerant of other parties in lower offices), there is no interparty competition, so the election that decides the winner, the equivalent of the general in the US, is intraparty.
For all intents and purposes, this is mainly a difference on a formal level. In either case, you have a collection of candidates and you vote on them. If you want to run for a high office in China, say, and we are imagining everyone had to be a member of the one party, just join the Communist Party of China and engage in intraparty competition with the other Communist Party members.
It's more complicated in Cuba, but it's more complicated in the direction of being more permissive.
A much more substantial argument is required to make a plausible case that there is anything wrong with a process like this. Are you worried that the Communist Party of China in that earlier hypothetical won't let you join or run under them and you want the freedom to make your own party? First of all, that's absurdly idealist to claim is substantially different -- if you look at the US senate, the only third parties that are tolerated (a single independent and a single libertarian) are comfortably within the D and R voting blocs, respectively, and do not in any way represent a substantial political force, just empty gestures at being peace doves.
Secondly, I will repeat to you that even this distinction is basically just one of procedure. What parties have rights and what gets you on watchlists or having a tank drive up to your house is not in the jurisdiction of a single party's arbitrary will, correct (except on the state level, where that often is exactly the case), it is in the jurisdiction of the arbitrary will of two parties that mostly agree with each other except on culture war issues and as a matter of cynical opportunism. There is still no useful difference established here between having one party and two.
I will furthermore say that the basic type of entity that the Communist Party of Cuba is -- as an organ of the government itself -- should be much more agreeable even to a left-ish liberal than the DNC and the RNC, because those two groups are private entities for who don't answer to anyone! So much of US politics is not just controlled by private entities (by merit of campaign finance, etc.) but the entire goddam platform consists of private entities! Do you know why those interparty debates that the circus of election coverage pivoted on stopped happening? Those were also run by a private entity that just decided not to because negotiations broke down. It's pathetic, and don't get me started on how the DNC just skipped the primary process this time because they won't accept Joe being replaced.
Anyway, this is all very separate from the conditions in Cuba, but that's because most of the objections people make are grounded in hazy generalities that don't even hold together internally, much less survive contact with the target of their criticism. I'll let other people who are more educated on Cuba itself handle those aspects, which I admit are somewhat more important.
GOOD post, comrade
Just wanna say it's always a real nice feeling when federated users come and have a goodwilled, open conversation in hexbear. I'd kill for a hundred-fold more users being open to conversations like this.
So take some dang love
.
Aawww thanks! Not gonna lie, I always thought hexbear was super annoying and hostile in other threads like other Lemmy users, but this one has been filled with such good conversations and educating answers without too much berating me about not knowing stuff that it definitely has made me re-think my original attitudes. I still disagree with ya'll about other issues, like attitudes towards the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but it doesn't mean we can't still have great conversations and I appreciate that 💙
You know, Cuba is a good gateway into socialism ideas in general now that I think about it, especially without a Castro brother there as an old authoritarian scapegoat to point at. The "authoritarian" label doesn't really hold up as well when it's some new guy whose name the public doesn't even know. Scare mongering like the kind done with China doesn't work, because they're not really a threat and they're too poor to affect our markets by buying companies or whatever. Now the only criticisms left are one party rule, the word "communism" is scary, and lack of press freedoms, and this graphic helps with the first one.
Hexbear is only hostile when someone is clearly not willing to engage in good-faith or is completely closed up. Can't force a horse to drink. The hostility serves as a means of people avoiding wasting their time engaging uselessly, as you know how much time we can spend pumping out walls of text by now.
Hexbear may come off as hostile but it's generally in response to people actively poking the bear, as it were, or otherwise espousing politics we find noxious, like blind acceptance of neoliberalism as objective truth.
This is functionally the same as any major American city, and a lot of solid blue or red states.
You don't have to read very far in this fact sheet to see that there are contested elections in Cuba, anyway. See the "Municipal Assembly" section.
Are they afraid of interference from the country that's invaded them, tried hundreds of times to assassinate their leaders, sponsored terrorist attacks on their soil, and runs an illegal torture camp in Guantanamo Bay? I wonder.
Why not allow international observers from Europe or other places that aren't the US?
Observers from other countries don’t come to Cuba because no one who knows what they are talking about thinks Cuban elections are “rigged”. Literally YOU, Shyfer, can be an observer if you really want to. The ballots are counted publicly in full view, and anyone can watch it all happen. Seriously, if you want to question it you - even as a foreigner - can just go there and watch it all happen yourself for some local election.
New vacation idea just dropped!
Haha I'd love to, but the has US made it harder to travel there unless you have a specific reason. Plus tourists can't go to government hotels or buy from government shops. But that would be fun to go during an election year and stop by and just blow the minds of friends and family by saying all this stuff.
What's your source for them not allowing observers? And are you going to read what's posted ever?
It's a quote from that article I posted.
I read it and it's a good summary I'm just trying to wrap my head around it, and reconcile it with the criticism I've heard before about Cuban elections being a sham, such as in that linked article or on Wikipedia.
Are these the same "opposition groups" the U.S. trained to conduct terrorist attacks in Cuba? I'm skeptical of what they might have to say, especially when we don't even have a name of the group or some sort of Cuban law we can point to.
When the U.S. designates a country a state enemy, you see all sorts of stuff made up about it, along with all sorts of muddled half-truths, exaggerations, and misleading spins. You just saw an example of this -- the half (at best) truth that Cuban elections are not contested. You can't take this sort of "Bad Country" mythos at face value.
Can eat my ass