While we're on the subject of how to best frame leftist ideas, the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" should be retired. It produces exactly the sort of confusion you describe: unless your audience is read up on ML theory, it sounds like you're calling for a literal dictatorship. This is doubly true when you consider how decades of American propaganda have invariably portrayed socialist leaders as dictators.
The phrase immediately poisons the well. Unless you very carefully explain the theoretical background before uttering it, your audience unthinkingly rejects it, and now you're playing defense and getting into semantics instead of making a positive case for how a leftist state should be run. And the phrase adds nothing besides a link to other theory (that your audience hasn't read) -- something like "proletarian democracy" conveys the exact same idea without any of the baggage.
If the choice is between sticking to verbatim quotes from century-old texts or rephrasing the ideas to maximize their appeal to a modern audience, that's a no-brainer. Lenin himself (and Mao, and others) didn't just stick to what had been written before them; they rephrased the fundamental ideas to better communicate them in their time and place. We should follow suit.
Power imbalance reversal. Democratization of the working class. Working class full participatory democracy (?) Socializing (or socialization of) democracy (i always liked this one cause it subverts democratic socialism a bit). Workplace democracy.
While we're on the subject of how to best frame leftist ideas, the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" should be retired. It produces exactly the sort of confusion you describe: unless your audience is read up on ML theory, it sounds like you're calling for a literal dictatorship. This is doubly true when you consider how decades of American propaganda have invariably portrayed socialist leaders as dictators.
The phrase immediately poisons the well. Unless you very carefully explain the theoretical background before uttering it, your audience unthinkingly rejects it, and now you're playing defense and getting into semantics instead of making a positive case for how a leftist state should be run. And the phrase adds nothing besides a link to other theory (that your audience hasn't read) -- something like "proletarian democracy" conveys the exact same idea without any of the baggage.
If the choice is between sticking to verbatim quotes from century-old texts or rephrasing the ideas to maximize their appeal to a modern audience, that's a no-brainer. Lenin himself (and Mao, and others) didn't just stick to what had been written before them; they rephrased the fundamental ideas to better communicate them in their time and place. We should follow suit.
Power imbalance reversal. Democratization of the working class. Working class full participatory democracy (?) Socializing (or socialization of) democracy (i always liked this one cause it subverts democratic socialism a bit). Workplace democracy.