this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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Glances nervously at the ultra-nationalist strains
Some are more democratic than others, certainly.
It is exhausting to hear people smuggly denounce AES states as dysfunctional, by citing their trend towards nationalizarion of capital and popularization of policy. Particularly when the same folks will scream bloody murder if you don't continue to mechanically endorse their brand of corporate liberalism.
I genuinely am not really sure what you're getting at, here. I'm a Marxist-Leninist, I am stating that AES is democratic as is Marxism in general, and am saying that liberals often use the nebulous, ill-defined term of "Democratic Socialism" as an AES cudgel.
I see liberals try to equate any kind of public sector combined with a national election system as Democratic Socialism. Which gets you the Nordic Model - a collection of petrostates with an egalitarian veneer and a white supremacist underbelly - labeled "Democratic Socialism" on paper.
Meanwhile, actual social democracies in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia are denounced as authoritarian every time the Neoliberal (or outright reactionary) local politician loses an election.
Marxism is Democratic in theory. Leninism is more popular than democratic, as Leninists aren't wedded to electoralism like their liberal peers.
But the critique I see most often among liberals is that markets are democratic. And therefore every AES state that fails to sufficiently privatize the economy is definitely facto authoritarian.
That's the real definitional divide between Marxists and Liberal Democrats.