Matty_UK
24th July 2007, 21:30
Could someone explain in detail the concept of the permanent arms economy and capitalism's role in starting ww1+2?
And I need a good solid explanation of how Capitalism is preventing solutions to global warming.
On facebook I'm working on a series of notes entitled "Why I Became A Communist," basically setting out to promote Communist ideas to my friend in easily accessible terms. I've talked about how we're exploited, how socialism will be beneficial, why Stalinism isn't an inevitable consequence of a revolution, how capitalism keeps back developing countries and how our democracy is phoney.
Have a read through what I've posted on facebook so far, tell me if you think it would be agreeable to someone who isn't a commie, but is instinctively left wing(most of my friends):
I've recently made a decision to dedicate at least some of my life to the goal of worldwide communist revolution; those closest to me know that I've been flirting with these ideas for some time, but it's only recently my growing understanding of economics, history, politics, and humanity has made me confident enough in my beliefs to be willing to seriously act on them.
I know that it's self indulgent to expect you to care about my political views particularly as I'm going to write something quite long, but I feel the need to justify myself to people who don't know what communism is and associate it with the USSR etc.
Socialism is nothing to do with the USSR; this is what Socialism is;
In every industry, the boss is kicked out and the workplace is occupied. Each different industry is ran democratically with workers councils to make decisions and elected managers.
Each industry will form one big union, from which all it's decisions are democratically decided bottom-up by the workers.
The State will be a federation of different industries, and would have elected leaders from each union, who are instantly recallable and must represent the wishes of the majority of the workers who they represent.
Industry would be run not for profit, and although more skilled works may be paid more there would be no boss who rips off the workers by systematically paying them less than their market value. (see below) Instead of the economy being entirely based upon what can make a handful of capitalists even richer, it would be based upon a planned economy where production in it's democratic form would be based upon what was best for society.
This is not idealistic fantasy, this description of socialism is based on how workers in real life; from the Paris Commune, to the early days of the USSR, to the Spanish Civil War and today to Oaxaca, Mexico; tried to run things after overthrowing their Capitalist overlords.
Communism is supposedly the next step after socialism, where currency ceases to exist and only distribution is used, where the state ceases to exist and all decisions are made through mass-participation, and the concept of property disappears; but even if this is not true, socialism in itself is still worth fighting for.
The following is 2 of the main reasons I decided Socialism is necassary, possible, and desirable;
1) I Now Understand How Profit And Billionaires Are Created; Our Exploitation.
Take a medieval market, where artisans and peasants meet in a town square to sell the fruits of their labour and use the money to buy the fruits of someone else's. It's pretty much impossible to accumulate wealth in this situation. Why?
Well say it takes an artisan 5 days to make commodity X and 1 day to make commodity Y. Commodity X isn't going to willingly be sold at the same price as commodity Y for obvious reasons; why work for 5 days to get the same profit some other guy got for working 1 day? So labour time, as the one similarity between all different commodities, acts as a yardstick for price as people aren't willing to sell for less than the market value of their labour time, and competition prevents them from charging more.
Of course, it's possible for the price to be lower or higher than what is suitable; what is described above is value, which acts as a magnet for price.
Then along comes Capitalism; wealthy merchants who made money from selling foreign goods where there isn't any competition start giving landless peasants enough money to live on in exchange for their servitude. As the propertyless peasant has no choice but to sell his labour, he can't argue that he isn't being paid enough; if he does, there will always be another landless peasant desperate enough to work. So the wage isn't as much as the market value of his labour, but the value of his labour is still present in the market place; but most of the profit from this goes to wealthy merchant.
The wealthy merchants accumulated enough money to build factories and became Capitalists. (people who spend money to make money)
The landless peasants became Proletarians, who own nothing productive and must sell themselves to survive. (that's us!)
If profit doesn't come from labour, then where does it come from? A factory owner could buy all the parts for a product that are then assembled in his factory. But if he pays for all the seperate parts seperately, how is the result more than the sum of it's parts? In other words, why can he charge more than simply the cost of all the different components added together?
The answer is because people pay extra for assembly; it is the labour time involved that adds the extra value.
So we're being exploited, and I'm not at all happy with some asshole who does no real work living in luxury off the backs of me and my fellow worker. You guys who complain about paying tax.....at least the tax is helping some people who need it! Why aren't you complaining about these ****s who routinely rob you every hour you're at work?
2: I Can See That Capitalism No Longer Plays A Progressive Role In Society.
The competitive nature of Capitalism has played some role in created a society wealthier than that of Feudalism; Capitalists must constantly find ways to improve the efficiency of production in order to undercut their competitors by having less labour involved in production, (i.e. laying people off) and therefore they're able to charge a lower price but still make the same profit. Simply producing huge outputs to benefit society doesn't make sense to the Capitalist, as doing that would cheapen the commodity and damage his takings.
Karl Marx predicted a socialist revolution would be started as a consequence of this; Capitalism would make a socialist society possible by advancing industry enough to make it possible for everyone to have more than enough, which would involve laying off workers as production advanced but in doing so shooting itself in the foot as labour is the source of the Capitalist's profit. (see above)
However even Marx underestimated the full absurdity of the Capitalist economy; Capitalism responded to the decline of productive, progressive, industrial work by creating huge numbers of useless service jobs to exploit labour from.
You might think, "job creation, good!" Why is this good? Would it not be better, rather than creating useless jobs, (i can make my own cup of coffee thank you Starbucks) to simply divide up the work that needs to be done so people can have more free time? If a household buys a dishwasher, no-one is complaining; they are pleased there is less work to be done. But in Capitalism no matter how much technology develops we have nothing but a future of eternal servitude and long hours.
A socialist revolution, where industry is ran not for profit but for useful purposes, could expand industry to produce huge surpluses, and ultimately work towards the automation of all industry and near abolition of non-intellectual work, bringing mankind to a new age of enlightenment and free time.
And part 2:
Contined from "Why I Became A Communist"
3, 4 and 5: Stalinism Won't Happen In An Industrialised Country, A Planned Economy Is More Efficient Than A Market Economy, And Global Capitalism Hinders The Development Of Countries That Weren't Part Of The Imperialist Clique
The "socialist" states of the last century are portrayed by the powers that be as "experiments," as a divergence from normal Capitalist development that they later abandoned. This is a great lie, and no historian with any integrity (so not many) could accept this.
Context:
Our world has been shaped by imperialism, a necassary side effect of Capitalism's need to constantly grow and exploit new markets. The first countries to develop from feudalism into capitalism made up the bloc of imperialist countries, and the effect of these on the development of all countries in the world was tremendous.
(a) The imperialist's capacity for mass production destroyed the local industries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa with an influx of cheap goods ensuring that indigneous industries could not take off on a large scale.
(b) Surplus capital in imperialist countries was invested in non-imperialist countries; but only in sectors that were complementary, rather than competitive, with imperialist interests. It is the domination of foreign capital over these countries that makes them specialise in foodstuffs. The state in these countries, even if not directly controlled by imperialist powers, is still strongly tied to western interests and unwilling to defend national industry; and when they do, they are generally deposed by military/terrorist action or a coup. (Guatemala 1954, Nicaragua's CIA co-ordinated terrorist campaign throughout the 80s, Iran 1953, Chile 1973, El Salvador 1980s, and many more)
Consequently, industrialisation cannot be carried out and must abide by the wishes of capitalists in the imperialist countries.
© The domination of foreign capital over the economy creates a situation where old feudal ruling classes are linked to imperialist capital and therefore consolidated by the state, meaning many developing countries remain semi-feudal, semi-capitalist, and the capitalists are unwilling to radically overthrow the feudal aristocracy as happened in the developed capitalist imperialist nations.
These are the conditions surrounding the "socialist" revolutions.
As an example, let's take China; each socialist country has slightly different origins and achievements, but what happened in China can generally be applied to the USSR, to Vietnam, to Cuba, etc.
At the end of 1911, China had the Wuchang Uprising lead by Dr. Sun Yat Sen; a rebellion attempting to emulate the ideals of the French Revolution, overthrowing the feudal state and replacing it with a Capitalist Republic.
It failed. As most of the nation were still peasants, the proletariat was too small for industrial capitalism to work; now warlords ravaged the countryside outside of state control, acting exactly like an aristocracy taxing peasants who worked on "their" land.
Fast forward to 1949; Sun Yat Sen's Kuomintang (nationalist) Party had become completely corrupt; torture and famine were widespread and massacres of political opponents were common. They were desperate to cling to power but were not guiding the country in any progressive direction and the economy continued to be dominated by foreign capitalists, feudal landlords and warlords.
The point here is that, a revolutionary bourgeoisie could not develop to create a Capitalist Republic as happened in Western Europe and North America.
Then the Communists took power; foreign domination of the economy was ended, and the state had direct control of industry. Through a planned economy, the Chinese Communist Party in the space of 20 years doubled life expectancy, increased industrial output 1300%, irrigated more than half of farmland, doubled the amount of railway and roads; this could only be achieved by policies of land collectivisation, as seen in the Great Leap Forward. Despite bourgeois historians claiming the Great Leap was a disaster and caused mass famine, (it's true it was badly organised; but bad weather, natural disasters, and soviet withdrawl of aid contributed more than poor organisation) bear this in mind; China annually had great famines, and after the Great Leap which industrialised agriculture these famines ended.
The Chinese Revolution had unintentionally created an industrial base necassary for a functional modern capitalist state to develop from.
It's important to note although China had a planned economy, it still was a capitalist country; the Party acted as a collective bourgeoisie, directing the expansion of capital and making a living by exploiting the surplus value produced by the proletariat.
What we can conclude from this; the "socialist" revolutions were a consequence of the inability for a conventional competitive bourgeoisie to develop and industrialise the country as happened in the west. These countries lacked a working class being dominated instead by a peasantry, and so political leadership could not be based on the rule of the revolutionary working class so state/military power was the only option.
In an industrialised nation where the proletariat makes up the majority of the population, they will be capable of mass democratic political leadership, and Stalinism is by no means an inevitable consequence of revolution no matter what the cliched "human nature" arguments that people parrot without thinking about say.
6: Our Democracy Is A Lie
In the UK, popular myth says we have a free and objective press and a state that represents the people. This is easily refuted.
We elect Parliament. The State is much, much bigger than Parliament. The military is ultimately where the power lies, and that is intrinsically linked to the ruling elites. (in the UK, look at how many Generals have titles like "Sir") We also have a permanent, unelected civil service whose leaders have similar ties to elites; and finally we have the most ignorant, bigoted, reactionary scum of the Earth; the House of Lords. These institutions almost always oppose working class interests; if you are dubious of this, ask why even though Socialist political parties were democratically elected in every western European country throughout the 50s and 60s, but failed to do much more than create a mild welfare state despite promising to hand production over to the working class? Those parties have now taken that radical part out of their manifesto and become completely bourgeois. In fact, it's commonly accepted that a coup by military and business leaders was planned against Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
All "democratic" countries have similar safeguards to ensure the interests of the ruling class aren't threatened, by it an Electoral College or a Congress or whatever.
If you are skeptical of what I'm saying, there are countless examples throughout history of reactionary parts of the state overthrowing the elected part; famously on September 11th 1973 General Pinochet (with help from the CIA) lead a military coup against democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende, and murdered him and countless of his working class supporters, rounding them up in a football stadium and having them massacred.
More recently, in 2001, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was overthrown in a coup lead by the military, a private TV channel, and an entrepreneur who wished to make himself dictator. Within days, the poor of Venezuela had marched into Caracas and overthrown the military dictatorship.
What is curious about this, is it reveals a lot about our media. Why was Chavez, a popularly elected leader, portrayed by the mass-media as a dictator and the military coup against him hailed as a return to democracy?
And furthermore, when Chavez expelled members of Venezuela's unelected congress, full of viciously reactionary and racist white elites who vetoed his every move, and reordered it to make it reflect the popular vote, was he condemned by the media as being dictatorial and "filling congress with his supporters?"
This is because the media is the mouthpiece of the capitalists, and it is objectively the enemy of the working class.
Think about it. If someone in a social situation says that "capitalism sucks" it won't be particularly controversial or unusual, and probably reflects the sentiments of a great deal of people. Yet capitalism is never criticised in the media. If I was a journalist working for The Sun, or The Times, do you think I could get away with blaming unemployment on Capitalism? Hell no! Rupert Murdoch wouldn't allow that. And even if he did, the richest 1% control 95%+ of shares in newspapers, and upsetting them would damage the newspapers. Therefore any awkward questions are avoided, and instead of blaming working class problems on capitalism, they are full of racist propaganda blaming foreigners.
The media likes to pretend capitalism is synonymous with democracy; not so. Capitalist revolutions established democracy ONLY for capitalists, to those who had income high enough to be friendly to capitalist interests. Universal suffrage, however superficial, has only ever been conceded in an attempt to appease radical working class political movements; and since then political power has gradually shifted outside Parliament towards the executive.
Capitalism creates democracy insofar as it creates a proletariat with the political will to create democracy to get their voices heard. "Democracy is the road to socialism"-Karl Marx
And above all; it is ludicrous to believe that a situation where the entire economy is ran by a small unnaccountable elite purely for their own interests and profit can be democratic in any way, shape or form.
And I need a good solid explanation of how Capitalism is preventing solutions to global warming.
On facebook I'm working on a series of notes entitled "Why I Became A Communist," basically setting out to promote Communist ideas to my friend in easily accessible terms. I've talked about how we're exploited, how socialism will be beneficial, why Stalinism isn't an inevitable consequence of a revolution, how capitalism keeps back developing countries and how our democracy is phoney.
Have a read through what I've posted on facebook so far, tell me if you think it would be agreeable to someone who isn't a commie, but is instinctively left wing(most of my friends):
I've recently made a decision to dedicate at least some of my life to the goal of worldwide communist revolution; those closest to me know that I've been flirting with these ideas for some time, but it's only recently my growing understanding of economics, history, politics, and humanity has made me confident enough in my beliefs to be willing to seriously act on them.
I know that it's self indulgent to expect you to care about my political views particularly as I'm going to write something quite long, but I feel the need to justify myself to people who don't know what communism is and associate it with the USSR etc.
Socialism is nothing to do with the USSR; this is what Socialism is;
In every industry, the boss is kicked out and the workplace is occupied. Each different industry is ran democratically with workers councils to make decisions and elected managers.
Each industry will form one big union, from which all it's decisions are democratically decided bottom-up by the workers.
The State will be a federation of different industries, and would have elected leaders from each union, who are instantly recallable and must represent the wishes of the majority of the workers who they represent.
Industry would be run not for profit, and although more skilled works may be paid more there would be no boss who rips off the workers by systematically paying them less than their market value. (see below) Instead of the economy being entirely based upon what can make a handful of capitalists even richer, it would be based upon a planned economy where production in it's democratic form would be based upon what was best for society.
This is not idealistic fantasy, this description of socialism is based on how workers in real life; from the Paris Commune, to the early days of the USSR, to the Spanish Civil War and today to Oaxaca, Mexico; tried to run things after overthrowing their Capitalist overlords.
Communism is supposedly the next step after socialism, where currency ceases to exist and only distribution is used, where the state ceases to exist and all decisions are made through mass-participation, and the concept of property disappears; but even if this is not true, socialism in itself is still worth fighting for.
The following is 2 of the main reasons I decided Socialism is necassary, possible, and desirable;
1) I Now Understand How Profit And Billionaires Are Created; Our Exploitation.
Take a medieval market, where artisans and peasants meet in a town square to sell the fruits of their labour and use the money to buy the fruits of someone else's. It's pretty much impossible to accumulate wealth in this situation. Why?
Well say it takes an artisan 5 days to make commodity X and 1 day to make commodity Y. Commodity X isn't going to willingly be sold at the same price as commodity Y for obvious reasons; why work for 5 days to get the same profit some other guy got for working 1 day? So labour time, as the one similarity between all different commodities, acts as a yardstick for price as people aren't willing to sell for less than the market value of their labour time, and competition prevents them from charging more.
Of course, it's possible for the price to be lower or higher than what is suitable; what is described above is value, which acts as a magnet for price.
Then along comes Capitalism; wealthy merchants who made money from selling foreign goods where there isn't any competition start giving landless peasants enough money to live on in exchange for their servitude. As the propertyless peasant has no choice but to sell his labour, he can't argue that he isn't being paid enough; if he does, there will always be another landless peasant desperate enough to work. So the wage isn't as much as the market value of his labour, but the value of his labour is still present in the market place; but most of the profit from this goes to wealthy merchant.
The wealthy merchants accumulated enough money to build factories and became Capitalists. (people who spend money to make money)
The landless peasants became Proletarians, who own nothing productive and must sell themselves to survive. (that's us!)
If profit doesn't come from labour, then where does it come from? A factory owner could buy all the parts for a product that are then assembled in his factory. But if he pays for all the seperate parts seperately, how is the result more than the sum of it's parts? In other words, why can he charge more than simply the cost of all the different components added together?
The answer is because people pay extra for assembly; it is the labour time involved that adds the extra value.
So we're being exploited, and I'm not at all happy with some asshole who does no real work living in luxury off the backs of me and my fellow worker. You guys who complain about paying tax.....at least the tax is helping some people who need it! Why aren't you complaining about these ****s who routinely rob you every hour you're at work?
2: I Can See That Capitalism No Longer Plays A Progressive Role In Society.
The competitive nature of Capitalism has played some role in created a society wealthier than that of Feudalism; Capitalists must constantly find ways to improve the efficiency of production in order to undercut their competitors by having less labour involved in production, (i.e. laying people off) and therefore they're able to charge a lower price but still make the same profit. Simply producing huge outputs to benefit society doesn't make sense to the Capitalist, as doing that would cheapen the commodity and damage his takings.
Karl Marx predicted a socialist revolution would be started as a consequence of this; Capitalism would make a socialist society possible by advancing industry enough to make it possible for everyone to have more than enough, which would involve laying off workers as production advanced but in doing so shooting itself in the foot as labour is the source of the Capitalist's profit. (see above)
However even Marx underestimated the full absurdity of the Capitalist economy; Capitalism responded to the decline of productive, progressive, industrial work by creating huge numbers of useless service jobs to exploit labour from.
You might think, "job creation, good!" Why is this good? Would it not be better, rather than creating useless jobs, (i can make my own cup of coffee thank you Starbucks) to simply divide up the work that needs to be done so people can have more free time? If a household buys a dishwasher, no-one is complaining; they are pleased there is less work to be done. But in Capitalism no matter how much technology develops we have nothing but a future of eternal servitude and long hours.
A socialist revolution, where industry is ran not for profit but for useful purposes, could expand industry to produce huge surpluses, and ultimately work towards the automation of all industry and near abolition of non-intellectual work, bringing mankind to a new age of enlightenment and free time.
And part 2:
Contined from "Why I Became A Communist"
3, 4 and 5: Stalinism Won't Happen In An Industrialised Country, A Planned Economy Is More Efficient Than A Market Economy, And Global Capitalism Hinders The Development Of Countries That Weren't Part Of The Imperialist Clique
The "socialist" states of the last century are portrayed by the powers that be as "experiments," as a divergence from normal Capitalist development that they later abandoned. This is a great lie, and no historian with any integrity (so not many) could accept this.
Context:
Our world has been shaped by imperialism, a necassary side effect of Capitalism's need to constantly grow and exploit new markets. The first countries to develop from feudalism into capitalism made up the bloc of imperialist countries, and the effect of these on the development of all countries in the world was tremendous.
(a) The imperialist's capacity for mass production destroyed the local industries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa with an influx of cheap goods ensuring that indigneous industries could not take off on a large scale.
(b) Surplus capital in imperialist countries was invested in non-imperialist countries; but only in sectors that were complementary, rather than competitive, with imperialist interests. It is the domination of foreign capital over these countries that makes them specialise in foodstuffs. The state in these countries, even if not directly controlled by imperialist powers, is still strongly tied to western interests and unwilling to defend national industry; and when they do, they are generally deposed by military/terrorist action or a coup. (Guatemala 1954, Nicaragua's CIA co-ordinated terrorist campaign throughout the 80s, Iran 1953, Chile 1973, El Salvador 1980s, and many more)
Consequently, industrialisation cannot be carried out and must abide by the wishes of capitalists in the imperialist countries.
© The domination of foreign capital over the economy creates a situation where old feudal ruling classes are linked to imperialist capital and therefore consolidated by the state, meaning many developing countries remain semi-feudal, semi-capitalist, and the capitalists are unwilling to radically overthrow the feudal aristocracy as happened in the developed capitalist imperialist nations.
These are the conditions surrounding the "socialist" revolutions.
As an example, let's take China; each socialist country has slightly different origins and achievements, but what happened in China can generally be applied to the USSR, to Vietnam, to Cuba, etc.
At the end of 1911, China had the Wuchang Uprising lead by Dr. Sun Yat Sen; a rebellion attempting to emulate the ideals of the French Revolution, overthrowing the feudal state and replacing it with a Capitalist Republic.
It failed. As most of the nation were still peasants, the proletariat was too small for industrial capitalism to work; now warlords ravaged the countryside outside of state control, acting exactly like an aristocracy taxing peasants who worked on "their" land.
Fast forward to 1949; Sun Yat Sen's Kuomintang (nationalist) Party had become completely corrupt; torture and famine were widespread and massacres of political opponents were common. They were desperate to cling to power but were not guiding the country in any progressive direction and the economy continued to be dominated by foreign capitalists, feudal landlords and warlords.
The point here is that, a revolutionary bourgeoisie could not develop to create a Capitalist Republic as happened in Western Europe and North America.
Then the Communists took power; foreign domination of the economy was ended, and the state had direct control of industry. Through a planned economy, the Chinese Communist Party in the space of 20 years doubled life expectancy, increased industrial output 1300%, irrigated more than half of farmland, doubled the amount of railway and roads; this could only be achieved by policies of land collectivisation, as seen in the Great Leap Forward. Despite bourgeois historians claiming the Great Leap was a disaster and caused mass famine, (it's true it was badly organised; but bad weather, natural disasters, and soviet withdrawl of aid contributed more than poor organisation) bear this in mind; China annually had great famines, and after the Great Leap which industrialised agriculture these famines ended.
The Chinese Revolution had unintentionally created an industrial base necassary for a functional modern capitalist state to develop from.
It's important to note although China had a planned economy, it still was a capitalist country; the Party acted as a collective bourgeoisie, directing the expansion of capital and making a living by exploiting the surplus value produced by the proletariat.
What we can conclude from this; the "socialist" revolutions were a consequence of the inability for a conventional competitive bourgeoisie to develop and industrialise the country as happened in the west. These countries lacked a working class being dominated instead by a peasantry, and so political leadership could not be based on the rule of the revolutionary working class so state/military power was the only option.
In an industrialised nation where the proletariat makes up the majority of the population, they will be capable of mass democratic political leadership, and Stalinism is by no means an inevitable consequence of revolution no matter what the cliched "human nature" arguments that people parrot without thinking about say.
6: Our Democracy Is A Lie
In the UK, popular myth says we have a free and objective press and a state that represents the people. This is easily refuted.
We elect Parliament. The State is much, much bigger than Parliament. The military is ultimately where the power lies, and that is intrinsically linked to the ruling elites. (in the UK, look at how many Generals have titles like "Sir") We also have a permanent, unelected civil service whose leaders have similar ties to elites; and finally we have the most ignorant, bigoted, reactionary scum of the Earth; the House of Lords. These institutions almost always oppose working class interests; if you are dubious of this, ask why even though Socialist political parties were democratically elected in every western European country throughout the 50s and 60s, but failed to do much more than create a mild welfare state despite promising to hand production over to the working class? Those parties have now taken that radical part out of their manifesto and become completely bourgeois. In fact, it's commonly accepted that a coup by military and business leaders was planned against Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.
All "democratic" countries have similar safeguards to ensure the interests of the ruling class aren't threatened, by it an Electoral College or a Congress or whatever.
If you are skeptical of what I'm saying, there are countless examples throughout history of reactionary parts of the state overthrowing the elected part; famously on September 11th 1973 General Pinochet (with help from the CIA) lead a military coup against democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende, and murdered him and countless of his working class supporters, rounding them up in a football stadium and having them massacred.
More recently, in 2001, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was overthrown in a coup lead by the military, a private TV channel, and an entrepreneur who wished to make himself dictator. Within days, the poor of Venezuela had marched into Caracas and overthrown the military dictatorship.
What is curious about this, is it reveals a lot about our media. Why was Chavez, a popularly elected leader, portrayed by the mass-media as a dictator and the military coup against him hailed as a return to democracy?
And furthermore, when Chavez expelled members of Venezuela's unelected congress, full of viciously reactionary and racist white elites who vetoed his every move, and reordered it to make it reflect the popular vote, was he condemned by the media as being dictatorial and "filling congress with his supporters?"
This is because the media is the mouthpiece of the capitalists, and it is objectively the enemy of the working class.
Think about it. If someone in a social situation says that "capitalism sucks" it won't be particularly controversial or unusual, and probably reflects the sentiments of a great deal of people. Yet capitalism is never criticised in the media. If I was a journalist working for The Sun, or The Times, do you think I could get away with blaming unemployment on Capitalism? Hell no! Rupert Murdoch wouldn't allow that. And even if he did, the richest 1% control 95%+ of shares in newspapers, and upsetting them would damage the newspapers. Therefore any awkward questions are avoided, and instead of blaming working class problems on capitalism, they are full of racist propaganda blaming foreigners.
The media likes to pretend capitalism is synonymous with democracy; not so. Capitalist revolutions established democracy ONLY for capitalists, to those who had income high enough to be friendly to capitalist interests. Universal suffrage, however superficial, has only ever been conceded in an attempt to appease radical working class political movements; and since then political power has gradually shifted outside Parliament towards the executive.
Capitalism creates democracy insofar as it creates a proletariat with the political will to create democracy to get their voices heard. "Democracy is the road to socialism"-Karl Marx
And above all; it is ludicrous to believe that a situation where the entire economy is ran by a small unnaccountable elite purely for their own interests and profit can be democratic in any way, shape or form.