Three Terms Communists Redefined to Subvert Society
https://newdiscourses.com/2022/09/three-terms-communists-redefined-to-subvert-society/
James Lindsay (01 September 2022)
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2. Democracy
Democracy is supposed to be “rule by the people,” something America’s Founding Fathers had the good sense to realize was a bad idea (not least because they were watching the Democratic French Revolution descend into murderous terror as they wrote the Constitution). Rule by the people means
all of the people, and Communists have seized upon this idea to redefine “democracy” and stoke resentment about supposed structural disenfranchisement for over a century.
In
The State and Revolution, written in 1917, Vladimir Lenin explained that what we think of as “democracy” in capitalist societies is, in fact, “bourgeois” democracy—rule by the empowered minority in the bourgeoisie. “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society,” he wrote.
n capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority. Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy, and the more complete it is, the sooner it will become unnecessary and wither away of its own accord. (Lenin, The State and Revolution, chapter 5)
Lenin explained, using critique, that democratic voting in a capitalist society isn’t truly democratic because it only serves the bourgeois minority. Democracy will only be genuine when everyone is equal, which only occurs under Communism. In the meantime, under Socialist rule in the USSR, a dictatorship of the proletariat will simulate true democracy by elevating the masses and suppressing the “exploiters.”
In modern parlance, what Lenin is describing would be—in fact, is—called “inclusive democracy,” and it utilizes the exact same trick on the definition of “inclusion” to achieve its aims. The underlying belief is that society is exploitative of certain groups (who are in the majority), and thus those people aren’t equal participants in the democratic process. They have to be made equal (the contemporary term for this adjustment of enfranchisement, opportunity, and privilege is equity; the term in Lenin’s day, which still has major purchase was Democratic Socialism).
When we hear players in politics or the media say that open discussion threatens to create “misinformation” that threatens “our democracy,” this is very likely to be what they are talking about. (Never mind that we live in a republic, not a democracy.) They view their democracy—the only legitimate democracy—as “inclusive democracy” and thus one that must adjust shares, i.e., discriminate and suppress, in order to achieve its aims. As Lenin pointed out, it’s not that they want to be unfair; it’s that they have to be in order to get their way so that their evils can “wither away of their own accord” when they’re no longer needed anymore (when Communism arrives). (Spoiler: Communism never arrives; it’s fake.)
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