Democracy - What Does It Mean, Do You Value It?

[Oswy]

Just wondering if there's a variety of views about democracy.

[wigsa]

I certainly value it.I would only support a socialist revolution if the majority of the population wanted it.Anything else would be taking a leaf out of fascism and forcing people to comply with a nation/world which they don't want.Obviously there will never be 100% support for any form of politics but I feel very strongly that the will of the people be adhered to.

It's up to us to work on making sure that the view of the people is a left wing view.

[Kukulofori]

Socialism is the purest democracy there is. Therefore, it is impossible to have a socialist revolution the people don't want.

[apathy maybe]

Democracy is an essentially contested concept. You will never get a definition that all people will agree upon.

Not only that, there are different "sorts" of democracy. "Direct democracy", "representative democracy", "consensus democracy", "demarchy", and many more are all called "democratic" (or "democracy").

Considering just one of the above, "representative democracy". Most political scientists (at least of the "bourgeois" sort, and I apologise for the label, but I don't know what else to call them), classify them all together. But they range from multi-member proportional representation systems, to first-past-the-post systems.

Democracy, to put it briefly, means whatever you want it to mean. (Another word in this category is terrorism. Except that democracy can actually be usefully used by leftists in my opinion.)

[JimmyJazz]

It's more or less the best way of making decisions which must be made collectively.

However, democracy gets abused quite frequently when it is applied to things which were never collective problems to start. Whether homosexuals should be allowed to marry is, obviously, not something that has any right to be decided collectively and should be a decision only for the parties involved.

Also, a simple 50-percent majority vote can leave 49 percent of people miserable. So generally speaking a democracy that requires 90% agreement is better than one that requires 75% is better than one that requires 60% and so on.

As far as valuing it, of course I do. In 1917 Russia introduced universal suffrage a few years before women in America got the same right.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Democracy is an essentially contested concept. You will never get a definition that all people will agree upon.

Not only that, there are different "sorts" of democracy. "Direct democracy", "representative democracy", "consensus democracy", "demarchy", and many more are all called "democratic" (or "democracy").

Considering just one of the above, "representative democracy". Most political scientists (at least of the "bourgeois" sort, and I apologise for the label, but I don't know what else to call them), classify them all together. But they range from multi-member proportional representation systems, to first-past-the-post systems.

Democracy, to put it briefly, means whatever you want it to mean. (Another word in this category is terrorism. Except that democracy can actually be usefully used by leftists in my opinion.)

Indeed. Soviet democracy is, at its most basic concept, another form of representative democracy:

Besides the Erfurt Programme, the principal text for my reconstruction of Kautsky's outlook is Parliamentarism (1893), cited directly by Lenin in WITBD as an authority for some of his key arguments. This book really has been totally forgotten (the copy I read was one of the hardest to obtain and most decrepit of the text I consulted for this commentary) [...] We should not anachronistically see Kautsky defending parliamentary democracy as opposed to, say, soviet democracy. What Kautsky means by "parliamentarism" in the 1890s is essentially representative democracy. As such, it cannot really be opposed to soviet-style democracy, itself a form of representative democracy.

(Lars Lih)

Even demarchy is a form of representative democracy (the statistical concept of being "representative to the population").

[not_of_this_world]

I have never experienced Democracy and I was born in America 67 years ago and things were pretty rough then. Racism was rampant and no one owned a home. You rented or you were old and had an old house. Everyone worked some kind of menial job for peanuts. Then we as a country started killing for democracy, to protect it from the onslaught of communism/socialism the root of all evil. Of course everyone bought it, we seemed better off than most or so we were told on the radio. It was not until the Viet Nam war that I knew Democracy was pure jingoism and was a tool to lure people into war. Now, as a retired slave wage laborer I know the lie that is called Democracy and I refuse to participate in the process. It is redundant and futile. I feel I am being held prisoner in my own home as crime soars and the right to bear arms has been stripped from all Americans. The police state has arrived and they call it democracy! I think not. :(