Quote:
Originally Posted by Sun Tzu
I don't think asking the ruling class to give up their power is a viable strategy. It has to be taken from them and it seems important that the dictatorship of the proletariat actually be of the proletariat, which means it has to be democratic enough to not replace one ruling class with another.
The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" as defined under Leninism and its variants are not democratic in any sense as understood by a modern democracy, it explicitly gives control of the state to a single party. The exact mechanism differs a bit depending on the variant, but the result are similar.
It does use the term "democratic centralism". Basically it gives control of of the outcome or the choices in general elections to the ruling party, which renders them irrelevant. The actual voting is then limited to the central committee ("party parliament"), politburo ("party cabinet") and general / first secretary ("party leader").
The relationship between these institutions change over time and country, but the typical pattern is that it is very easy for power to shift to the seat of the general / first secretary. This happened under Stalinism in Soviet, in Cuba under Castro (where it is called the the first secretary) and is currently the status quo in China.
An easy equivalent is to imagine a modern democracy consisting of one party which would have the power to decide if other parties could stand in elections, which candidates they can run and which votes were valid. A very important characteristic is that it is the party, not the state, which control the armed forces, courts, police and intelligence services. The Communist party under Leninism effectively becomes "the de facto state", the country it controls might superficially have many of the bells and whistles of a free country, but they are rendered moot by the party's control.
Last edited by tame_deuces; 06-24-2021 at 03:32 AM.