Is because communists seek consensus, not just majority.
Voting in liberalism (the ideology of capitalism) is like everything else you experience in capitalism; it’s alienating and alienated.
We’ll focus on the alienated part. The liberal vote goes like this: here’s the question, you can answer yes or no, knock yourself out.
They don’t care about anything else. They don’t care if you’re educated or not about the question, or the reasons you might have to be voting one way or the other. All they care about is the box checked on the ballot, and then whichever option gets the most votes, even if it’s one single extra vote, wins.
The communist vote goes like that: here’s the question, why do you want to vote yes or no?
We build consensus. Build is the keyword here: consensus is not reached by random luck or letting enough time pass, it’s a conscious effort that you have to make.
We educate people about the question and their choices, we try to understand why they lean one way or the other, and then we talk with them to give them all the facts they need to make an informed decision.
It’s something we naturally started doing on ProleWiki, we try to reach a consensus for most decisions (the most common ones being account requests). If someone votes no, we want to know their arguments for it, and that’s why most account requests end up with a pure 9-0 result or similar; we talk and convince people to reach one decision or the other. We motivate our own decisions as well; whether you vote yes or no, you’re encouraged to explain why – votes are not yet anonymous in our case.
But there is debate happening, which is healthy and helps reach a better solution.
It’s also what Cuba did for their new constitution. The way these votes happen in liberal democracies is, again, they give you the question, they give you the changes that would happen, and they ask you yes or no and that’s it. The way Cuba did it was to first talk with communities and their citizens, before any vote even took place. Then they refined a proposal based on these discussions, submit drafts for auditing by the population, and then finally the vote happened.
Yeah, this is another thing that liberals struggle to wrap their heads around.
Also it’s not just about building consensus, it’s about arriving at a compromise.
Take a situation where 52% of the country says “Let’s do plan X because it would benefit us in many ways”, and 48% says “if you do X that will harm us, we want to continue current implementation Y”:
Liberal democracies divide the nation over the issue and attach X and Y to parties A and B. Then you vote for A or B, and whoever wins gets to have their way and whoever loses gets a big fat bowl of “too bad, so sad.” The result? A nation divided, compatriots wishing death upon one another, partisan private media dehumanizing ‘the opposition,’ and oftentimes actual harm done to some of your people.
It gets to the point where it isn’t just about getting things your way, but people in your nation take actual pleasure in seeing other groups in their nation denied. This 👏 is 👏 by 👏 design. A brave and noble land of “Fuck you, got mine,” divided and easily ruled.
In whole-process democracy, taking an action that leaves 48% of your people completely disenfranchised (or even harmed) is completely unacceptable. It’s unacceptable to the 48%, it’s unacceptable to the government, and if it’s not also unacceptable to the 52% then you’ve failed to educate them. Instead of exacerbating any decision, a group like the National People’s Congress either tackles the issue directly or forms a committee for it. Instead of going straight to a vote they ask questions like “How is X harmful? Can we make it not harmful?” They’ll either synthesize a new plan Z at best or they’ll not change anything at worse. And then there’s a vote.
Everyone involved knows that genuine effort has been made, consulting with the best expertise the nation has available, to create plan Z. Citizens know that if they’re asked to compromise, whatever they’re asked to give up is giving to their compatriots more than it’s taking from them. If a proposal polls at a 60-40 split that doesn’t mean you push it through, it means you go back and find out how to bring more of that 40 on side. The vote is an official record of consensus; a formality in a successful and functioning government and a constitutional protection in one that has failed and become disunited.
No sentient, compassion-capable mind would choose the immediate line in the sand over the process of consensus. But that’s how fucked Western culture is, that protagonist, antagonist, conflict is seen as a better expression of government for and by the people than thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Bonus points if a ruling majority party has less than 50% of the populations votes and voter participation is super low so you effectively get 30% (if you’re lucky) of the population making decisions for the rest.
I hate liberal democracy. Long live democratic centralism!
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Actually the government response is extremely agile if it wants to be, but it absolutely will not rush social change because you literally can’t. All political power is vested in the National People’s Congress, and the NPC reflects the will of the people. The NPC or any organ of government it delegates power to serves the will of the people and that means it can’t tell the people to change their will. It can only influence through education.
But their response to COVID-19 shows how quick the government can be at responding to emergent situations. In a matter of days they were establishing quarantine rules and regularly refining them as their understanding improved, in a matter of weeks they were producing surgical masks and PPE in such vast quantities that they were exporting some, in a matter of months they had designed quarantine centers that could be built and in service in a few days.