Many countries include ‘Democratic’ or ‘People’s’ in their names, even though they are not democratic and do not serve their people. Examples: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Lao People’s Democratic Republic People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria Democratic Republic of the Congo And German Democratic Republic (East Side) in 1949–1990. None of these states are democratic, power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a small ruling elite. Who are they fooling with these names?
Some have “United”.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Fascists, and by extension authoritarians, hate education and vocabulary, so they use the language to lie as much as they can.
Marxist-Leninist theory judges democracy by class content, not procedure. The key question is “democracy for which class?” Liberal democracies are seen as formally free but substantively controlled by capital (bourgeois democracy), while one-party socialist states claim to be “people’s democracies” because the state (in theory) represents the working class/peasantry against capitalist and landlord classes. Popular will, in this framework, isn’t expressed through multiparty competition but through the party as the organized vanguard representing proletarian class interests — elections, if held, ratify this rather than allow contestation between competing class programs.
This is in contrast to Liberal democracy defines democracy procedurally: competitive multiparty elections, freedom of speech/press/association, checks on power, peaceful transfer of power. By this standard, one-party states with suppressed opposition and concentrated power fail regardless of their self-description.
So on the naming question, This is genuinely contested. Two views exist:
Official/Marxist-Leninist justification: These states claim genuine “people’s democracy” precisely because it excludes bourgeois parties and concentrates power to defend workers’ interests against capitalist restoration — so from their own theoretical framework, the name isn’t false, it’s just a different definition of democracy.
Critical/liberal view (widely held in the West and by many scholars): The names are propaganda — legitimizing branding for authoritarian, often personalist or elite-controlled, rule with little actual popular participation or accountability.
Which framing is “correct” depends on which definition of democracy you accept as valid — that’s ultimately a normative/philosophical dispute, not a factual one.
thanks for the explanation
Love it when someone asks why socialists do something, then reject the socialists’ own explanation for the capitalist propaganda explanation.
You shouldn’t be getting downvoted, you are literally just explaining the differences in how democracy is viewed by socialists.
They fool nobody. They’re taking the piss.
US uses that radical leftist “United” word though.
Same for the USSR, which Putin is desperately trying to reform, despite the former soviets being staunchly opposed to Russian imperialism.
Hey get this, evil people lie. On purpose
Phony legitimacy
Same reason as OpenAI, Microsoft, Fox News, etc
Faux News is correct tho
Microsoft is actually Bighard?
Bloatware
Same reason nazis put socialist in name but promptly killed off socialists and trade unions.
There was a point where the National Socialist Party was actually socialist. But Hitler and his ilk saw a party with popular momentum, joined it, co-opted it, and betrayed the socialist ideals.
Is this Stephen miller or Anton lavey
Yes
Any entity involved with food which explicitly claims to be gourmet is objectively not.
Authoritarians love nothing more than to deny others the correct language to make progress and to write history.
They’re fraudsters.
Feat of mental gymnastics. They consider themselves a looser sense of democratic that isn’t a liberal multiparty democracy with competitive elections. With a twist of idealization, they rationalize that their dictatorship of the proletariat headed by a one-party leader serves the people: their bottom-up hierarchy of councils culminates to their single-party leadership whose final decisions (that close discussion and demand absolute obedience) somehow reflect the collective/people. They might call it democratic centralism or dress it up in more elaborate pseudotheoretical jargon.
Can’t believe you’d ask this question and leave out the People’s Republic of China.
Tbf I’m not excusing the CCP but they seem to be a lot better about practicing democracy / voting in council and ability to advance in politics than the others on the list, as long as your Han Chinese. Still authoritarian though.
I’m Chinese. There is a difference between what Chinese people call democracy and what traditional Western political philosophy calls democracy.
In China, democracy (民主) means government which works for the benefit of the people.
As it is defined in Western political philosophy, democracy means that the people can control the composition and decisions of their government.
This means that a benevolent dictatorship which furthers the interest of the people qualifies as democratic under the Chinese definition, even though it obviously wouldn’t in the Western definition. Conversely, a government which works only for the upper class and a select elite isn’t democratic under the Chinese definition, but it could be under the Western one as long as it had free and fair elections.
Nowhere is this clash in definitions more apparent than in Hong Kong. For one, the city has had a taste of democracy in the Western sense through the limited elections it had during British colonial rule. On the other hand, China doesn’t see free and fair elections as particularly necessary to achieve its vision of democracy. The government is democratic as long as it does what the people want, in the view of Chinese political thought. Of course, the Western-educated Hongkongers would beg to differ.
This is just a sidenote, but the Communist Party is extremely popular in China. I believe that even if they opened the elections to people of any party and then contested them under a 100% fair electoral system with no voter suppression, nor use of security forces to intimidate opposition, I think the Communists would still win in a landslide if elections were held next month.
Getting a bit off-topic, but I also wanted to take the time here to talk about the mandate of heaven (天命), an old concept of Chinese political philosophy. I think it’s a good precursor to the modern Chinese understanding of democracy and the legitimacy of governments.
The mandate of heaven is a concept that was invented to explain why imperial dynasties rise and fall. It essentially states that a dynasty has divine favour and a mandate to rule if it rules in a manner that is fair and just, and benefits the people. When a dynasty becomes corrupt and unjust in its rule, the mandate of heaven will be withdrawn and the people will revolt against it, and a new dynasty will rise up and replace it.
The concept is inherently steeped in traditional Chinese religious practices and beliefs which mostly are no longer relevant today. But I think that the mandate of heaven is nothing more than a religious way of spelling out the concept of popular sovereignty. When a dynasty rules for the benefit of the people, it enjoys the mandate from heaven. In modern political thought, we understand that a government instead derives from the people directly. But other than that, it’s the same thing.
The Communist Party claimed its mandate during the Chinese Civil War when it overthrew the old dynasty (Chiang Kai-Shek) and established a new one (Mao Zedong). And as long as it continues to enjoy popular support, it has that mandate to rule. I do note that notwithstanding all of this text, both men would have found it insulting to be referred to as the leaders of a dynasty. But what was then called a dynasty is now called a republic. The fact that the post of chief of state, be it emperor, president, or general secretary, is no longer hereditary, has no bearing on the fundamental nature of it.
Maybe people in China would know the correct definition of democracy if their “benevolent” government didn’t block Wikipedia.
Chinese people know what Westerners call democracy. And they know it’s not exactly the same as what they call “民主”. But they don’t have a word for it. Just like English doesn’t really have a word to describe what Chinese people call “民主”. I think it’s unfair to translate that term as “democracy”, as someone who speaks both Standard Mandarin Chinese and English, though neither are technically my native tongue.
If I were to coin a new term to describe it, the best I could do is “benevolent government”. But then people just accuse me of Orientalism.
And I do mean it when I say that Chinese people truly believe (whether that is a product of propaganda or not is a topic of a different discussion) that their system is superior to Western liberal democracy. For what it’s worth, I don’t agree. Living in a country that practices Western democracy doesn’t prevent people from voting in a government that does what they want, as the Communist Party reportedly does. But it does give you a choice in the event that it goes sour. And the Chinese people, as it currently stands, are kind of just relying on the Party to keep doing things that are good and popular. That’s not guaranteed to always be the case, and they can’t really do anything about it if it stops being that way.
Can you explain what those ideograms literally mean and the etymology of the word they then construct? I’m assuming it probably is “Dragon burninating the countryside” combined with “Dragon burninating all the peoples” with the characters for “bootlicker, s is for sucks and consummate V’s” but I am not an expert.
Well, that’s some blatant racism. Fascinating that Lemmy is a refuge for that. Political opponents of China, clean up your yard!
民主 comes from Classical Chinese, where it originally meant “ruler” (of a people). It was repurposed I believe in the late Qing or early republican era to mean “democracy”.
民 means “people”, i.e. the population, the public. 主 means “host”, “owner”, or “master”. So while 民主 originally combined those to mean one who was the master of the people, it now is interpreted to mean the state of affairs where the people are the masters.
There is a related term, 民權, “popular sovereignty”, and also sometimes is translated to “democracy”, but it has a subtly different meaning than 民主. It comes from 民 (“people”, as before) and 權 (“power”, “right”, “authority”). Wiktionary doesn’t have the etymology, but I’m guessing it’s possibly a calque of Ancient Greek δημοκρατία (δῆμος, “people” + κράτος, “power”), possibly through one of the many European language words for democracy which derive from that, done during the late Imperial era, which is when many modern Chinese political terms were coined.
as long as your Han Chinese.
Yeah? As long as your Han Chinese does what?
(it’s “you’re” but I’m being silly and playing with what you wrote, not attempting to correct you. I can’t resist playing with typos)
Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria would like to talk with you.
