The new state structure instituted under the Socialist Constitution will allow the workers, peasants, soldiers and working intellectuals to take a more active part in state affairs and state administration and enable state organs to serve the people’s interests better and push ahead more vigorously with the revolutionary struggle and work of construction by improving their functions and role.
Our organs of power are composed of representatives of the workers, peasants, soldiers and working intellectuals; they protect the interests of the working people and fight for the people’s freedom and welfare.
The new state structure is built in such a way that the activities of administrative bodies are always supervised and controlled by the popular masses. Under the new state structure, unlike the old one, the people’s committees are separated from administrative bodies, and the former which are composed of representatives of the workers, peasants, soldiers and working intellectuals are to perform the function of exercising day-to-day supervision and control over the latter’s activities, so that officials of the administrative bodies will be able to do away with bureaucracy in their work and serve the people better.
-LET US FURTHER STRENGTHEN THE SOCIALIST SYSTEM
OF OUR COUNTRY: Speech Made at the First Session of the Fifth Supreme People’s Assembly of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
What's interesting is this system directly evolved from the 1945-1946 popular revolution over the whole Korean peninsula which was suppressed by force by the US Army and allowed to freely flourish by the USSR. Here's a book review of a moderately interesting book about it:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/elich260314.html
One of the strengths of the North Korean system is its democratic character. Or at least its popular roots in the struggle for democracy in the wake of Japanese imperialism and against US fascism which directly translated into the government forms we see today. For example people who know anything about NK wonder why the Worker's Party is actually a coalition of parties, one of which is an unusual religious party while others is a social-democratic party that seems obsolete under socialism. One of the great strengths of the Kim Il-sung faction was to harness the revolutionary but disorganized energy of the Korean people and turn it into a stable, historically legitimized Korean socialist state, particularly since Kim Il-sung had almost nothing to do with this movement initially (people like Yo Un-hyong. Cho Man-sik and Pak Hon-yong were far more influential). Not to say Kim Il-sung hijacked the movement, a charge made my more sophisticated propagandists. It's just that the initial founding of a socialist system of democracy is contentious and many ideologies struggle and Kim Il-sung clearly was able to stabilize the democratic system of the People's Republic period (45-46) into something real where other factions were not.
COINTELBRO posted:First off, Marxists uphold authoritarianism. This is a principle that Engels established well with the excellent On Authority. Due to the fact that we're liberal subjects in the 21st century, we hold authoritarianism as a sleazy word instead of a valid political concept. Pro-authoritarianism wasn't just something that cranky Stalinoids held—Trotskyists, left-communists, all of them defended centralism, the Red Terror, Cheka, the need for martial law, banning pro-capitalist parties under communism like how pro-slavery is banned under liberal democracy, etc; the disagreements with Stalinism usually were against the 3rd International's popular fronts, "socialism in one country," Stalin's monolithic Party not allowing factions, etc., rather than against authoritarianism itself.
With that out of the way, yes, as you said the USSR carried all the features of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois elections that we currently hold "democracy" to mean. A truer definition of democracy that you didn't touch on is sortition, but that's probably for another thread.
The comparison between brutal policing is interesting. We can say that Soviet prisons from the mid-1950s to the 80s were at least no worse than western ones. However, I think you downplay the brutality of the Gulag: while anticommunist propagandists like Conquest like to overstate deaths to the point of stating that more people died in Kolyma than ever were in Kolyma in the first place according to all records, it is undeniable that the Gulag was very brutal—with about a quarter of inmates dying or being killed; endemic disease; ubiquitous torture. While much of the Soviet legacy can be defended on fair grounds, understating the brutality of Kolyma, Stalin's ethnic cleansing of Chechens, Koreans, Crimeans etc., and intra-party killings shouldn't be part of it.
Is it useful to define soviet Russia as a democracy & if so why.
Keven posted:(pointing at the D in JDPON on my Hat) Do you think this stands for Democratic-socialist anarchist-communial self governing citystates
(pointing at the P on your hat) Look right there after the D. Its the P. D of the P. Of the P Keven.
Ufuk_Surekli posted:I do think that there are possible stopping-off points between "the DPRK is perfectly free and its democratic processes are infallible" and "the DPRK literally exists to please one person, and everyone pretends in agonising detail that they are participating in routine elections, for no particularly obvious reason and to the benefit of literally nobody".
I agree that the truth is in the middle.
http://gothamist.com/2016/04/19/twice_as_many_brooklyn_democrats_we.php
http://gothamist.com/2016/04/19/primary_ny_open_purge.php
http://gothamist.com/2016/04/19/ny_primary_live_updates.php
http://gothamist.com/2016/04/19/comptroller_will_audit_nyc_board_of.php
http://gothamist.com/2016/04/19/brooklyn_boe_court.php
http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv11n2/darcy.htm
I had the privilege of observing the nominations and elections in the district in which I lived and worked from beginning to end. The particular election which I referred to was the All-Union elections for selecting of delegates to the All-Union Soviet Congress, that being equivalent of our choosing of members of the United States House of Representatives in Washington. Each institution in the congressional district in which I resided and worked held meetings of the people to nominate candidates. Meetings were held in factories. The Moscow university, which was in this district held a meeting. The Great Lenin Library held a meeting of its staff to put forward candidates. So did all of the cooperative stores associations that operated there. So did the trade union organisations, the Communist Party, the youth organisations, etc. etc. A great many candidates were put forward in each meeting. The procedure for each candidate was to stand up and give a brief biography of his life and reasons why he should or should not be nominated. It was considered a lack of civic responsibility for a candidate to decline out of hand. If he thought he should not be elected it was has duty to take the platform, provide a brief biography of his life, and give the reasons why he should not be accepted. Two whole weeks were set aside for this procedure. Some organisations met every night for the entire period and examined thousands of people who were put forward as candidates there. Each candidate had to submit to questions from the floor. At the end of that time one or more nominees were put in nomination for the entire district with the endorsement of the body choosing him or her.
In addition to putting forth nominees each group chose a number of delegates on a proportional representation basis to a congressional district conference. The congressional district conference also met for a period of about two weeks. The nominations were put before that body. The same procedure was gone through there, each nominee was examined, his or her qualifications weighed against other nominees and finally a vote taken by the delegated body for the final choice.
Frequently the body decided to accept not one nominee but two or three or even more. These nominees, after this thorough process of distillation were then submitted to the electorate for final voting. And the electorate thus, by popular majority, judged one of the candidates in that congressional district they desired to have represent them in the All-Union Soviet Congress.
From this it can be seen that far from lacking in democracy this process is a very democratic one in that it gives the common people a very direct hand in who is nominated and we know from our own electoral system that in the last analysis the selection of the nominee is the critical thing in any election.
In the election which I witnessed I saw nominees ‘put through the mill’ in a manner which would be very wholesome if applied to our own country. Their contributions and social service, their own interest in public affairs, their record of unselfish service, their own schooling and education and the degree to which they took advantage of self-improvement and social betterment were all gone into. Men of bad personal and moral conduct who offered themselves as candidates had their neighbours, friends and fellow workers who knew them well, discuss them right on the floor. It was in some respects our New England Town Meeting used on a colossal national scale covering an election in which 170 million peop1e were involved. It is this process which provides the incentive for social service and social striving and interest in the public welfare by people throughout their country. In that election, for example, about half of the previous members of the All-Soviet Congress were not reelected. Many a smug big-wig including numerous Communists were surprised at the end of that election campaign to find themselves unwanted and many a person who was not even a member of the Communist Party who had given no thought to politics but who had served the public weal well out of sheer devotion to the people in their own professions or occupations or in some volunteer organisation found themselves members of the highest governing body, the new Congress of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. It is a new type of democracy and I would say it serves them very well.
Ufuk_Surekli posted:On which note bhpn you're right, the big backlash to what I was saying on this of all websites was a massive surprise haha, but it's cool I'm happy to answer for my inflammatory statements. Just glad I didn't post this on SomethingAwful dot com, I think it would have gone down a bit worse somehow
to me the fact that even communists have had their minds poisoned to reflexively accept that every socialist society was a monstrosity reminds me a bit of how slaveowners projected their sexual perversions onto african men (while those slaveowners were raping african women ubiquitously) ... so even if you are an anti racist today you will still have to get over the pervert brainwashing you received since you were a child
thanks capitalism!
