• asg101 [none/use name, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    any functioning democracy

    Neither functioning, nor a democracy. The usa has ALWAYS been an oligarchy, rule by rich white males is written in the Constitution. But I guess if you realize it’s real function is to transfer wealth from the working class to the oligarchs, then yeah, it is functioning as designed.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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      9 months ago

      That’s where class analysis becomes important. Every state is a democracy for the class that holds power in society, and capitalist states are democracies for the capital owning class. As Lenin famously put it:

      In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favorable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave owners.

      • FreudianCafe@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        This is aka dictatorship of the burguergeois. Tbh nowdays i dont think its a democracy even between them. Things are rapidly degenerating into pure barbarism

      • davel@lemmygrad.ml
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        9 months ago

        I don’t think Hartmann is ever going to get there: he’ll never stop believing in liberal democracy. It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it — Upton Sinclair

  • It was a shock to me how I actually had a better quality of life and standard of living in Saudi Arabia, which is why after 10 years in the US I decided to leave. The US does have more freedoms, specially the individualist kind, but in the day-to-day life I found myself more concerned catching up to bills than exercising any freedoms. In Saudi Arabia it was the opposite, I could think about what freedoms I was lacking because materially I had no worries.