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Many countries include 'Democratic' or 'People's' in their names, even though they are not democratic and do not serve their people. Examples: Democratic People's Republic of Korea Lao People's Democratic Republic People's Democratic Republic of Algeria Democratic Republic of the Congo And German Democratic Republic (East Side) in 1949–1990. None of these states are democratic, power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a small ruling elite. Who are they fooling with these names?
This makes zero sense. If power is concentrated, then it doesn't represent workers interests. If it represented all workers interests, then power would be diffused.
How are these one-party governments, gauging the interests of their workers? How are they doing this without democracy and voting? Afaik these countries don't even ask their citizens for feedback
The person you're responding to's description is slightly wrong. A "People's Republic" defines a Socialist state who's government is made up of an alliance of parties, rather than a single communist party, and that United front government might have parties intended to represent sections of the national bourgeoisie. So there's a nominal Power sharing element here.
That said, I'm not sure how it logically follows that a state which represents the interests of workers must therefore be decentralized in some way? These places often end up with centralized political systems (though the list of States OP gave is full of a whole lot of variety in their institutions and political cultures), because of outside influence.
The DPRK is like that because some white guys drew a line across a country, and them bombed it until pilots complained there were no more targets to bomb, and civilians began living in caves. The DPRK (and the ROK for that matter lbr) has been something of a basket case ever since. But that's because power centralization is a response to material conditions, not a result of what someone named the country.
People's Democracies are defined by the presence of multi-party systems, like I explained earlier. Though these secondary, non-Socialist, parties have greater or lesser degrees of importance depending on what country we're discussing.
That said, there are all kinds of institutions by which a people's democracy gauges the interests and feedback of the workers and other represented classes.
I'm going to talk about China, even though it wasn't referenced in the OP, because it's a People's Republic, and I can speak to its institutions with the most confidence:
One way class interests are gauged by the state is through the party system. This doesn't matter so much in the primary legislature, the National People's Congress, because the allied parties have a small fraction of the seats, but the NPC is historically a rubber stamp for the much more vibrant, body, The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (where the communist party only has 97 seats out of 2,169), where various sectors of society are represented, including parties, ethic and religious groups, organisations in the arts and sciences, mass organizations that represent women or young people, trade unions, etc.
In all state owned enterprises as well as in large parts of the private sector, there are a network of Workers Congresses which allow workers to engage in firm management.
There are also Party Committees in many workplaces, where the communist party itself plays a role in firm governance. These institutions make sure private companies follow the five year plans set out by the state.
There are also trade unions, which represent workers interests in other ways, and have representation in government.
There are also an extensive amount of Worker, Consumer, and Agricultural Cooperatives in China you might find this interesting, as it speaks to your concerns about decentralization. Between State Owned Enterprises, and the private sector that the state is always trying to reign in, co-ops straddle the line between these, by being worker owner and run firms, more independent of state power, and not beholden to the interests of capital like a private corporation.
People are often (sometimes rightly) critical of the privatization of the Reform and Opening up period. But that capital inflow has allowed China to turn around and invest in a domestic cooperative sector that rivals private capital. Huawei is the largest telecoms company in the world, for instance, and it is a worker co-op.
So there are lots of ways that's workers interests are guaged and turned into an economic plan that will benefit them. Obviously, these institutions have been more or less effective at different times, or in different parts of the country. And a the Chinese system isn't universal (The DPRK or former East Germany looked a fair bit different to this. While modern Vietnam or Laos modeled a lot of their own reforms off of China), but hopefully it gives you some insight.
There's another comment in this discussion that talks about how the closest Chinese word for "people's republic" is 民主 and means government which works for the benefit of the people. So their definition includes a benevolent dictator.
And that seems to align with what you've said too. Sure, there may be commissions for gauging the interests of the people. There may be co-ops. But ultimately the CCP holds all power. They can dissolve the commissions if they want to. They can take over the co-ops if they want to. If the people make demands or raise complaints, the CCP can just ignore them.
I think China is unquestionably lucky that the CCP does seem to actually care about the people. But this amount of authoritarianism does not seem to work as well in many other countries.
And if you genuinely think that what North Korea has right now is the best they can do for their people (even despite the turmoil caused by other countries), then we'll just have to agree to disagree.
I mean, I guess? I don't know enough Mandarin to speak on that.
Look, I'm not trying to argue with you. I'm just answering your questions, and explaining to you what those institutions look like in China. You're more than welcome to do your own research and come to your own conclusion, but I think you should go into it with a sense of curiosity about the world, rather than trying to get in sick dunks on the internet.
And look, I have my qualms about China's system too. But they eliminated absolute poverty. Tf are you talking about?
I mean, the DPRK's ongoing 20x10 regional development policy is using its new influx of Chinese and Russian capital to improve economic development and living standards outside of Pyongyang. So that's certainly an improvement.
But that can only to so far when the Korean war never ended. If you actually care about the wellbeing of the Korean peninsula, you'd want the war to end, the US to leave and lift all sanctions, and for there to be an internationally mediated peace negotiation that would decide what peaceful future between North and South Korea might look like. Perhaps an EU style arrangement with open borders between the two countries, and shared economic interests, while each gets to retain their respective political and economic systems, as they see fit.
I'm an ardent socialist. I think the cult of personality around the Kim's is weird and unhelpful. But my opinion is meaningless in the face of the material reasons why that personality cult exists, and the material solutions that need to be implemented in order to bring peace and prosperity to the Korean peninsula.
And I'm simply sharing what I've learned from my research on the subject. Not entirely a direct response to your comment, sure, but relevant enough that I felt like sharing, not just to you but other readers.
Or Kim could give up power and reform the government to a more western style of democracy. That would naturally end the war as well, and probably improve relations with South Korea considerably.
If pressure on North Korea is released, there's no telling if the authoritarian government would change their ways at all. In fact that pressure might be necessary to push them to change.
Ah yes, just like all the other countries that democratically voted for their own people’s interests. Those were all totally left alone by the US.
You mean like America, which invaded and destroyed 80% of Korean infrastructure and killed over 3 million civilians? That kind of western democracy? You are the exact same type of chauvinist that caused the Korean war in the first place.
This misunderstands International Relations. You can't negotiate a settlement like this by going to one of the parties and telling them to give up everything. That's simply a non starter. Part of negotiating a peace like this, requires guarantees that each side will get to retain a degree of sovereignty in the peace (in this case, their political and economic systems), and that concessions made by either side will be beneficial for both parties in the long term (in my previous example, this might be something like giving up border controls between the two countries to facilitate trade, travel, etc, in a Shengen-style arrangement. Or unifying under a single currency).
Further, why would that "naturally end the war" South Korea isn't at war with North Korea because the north is a dictatorship or something. South Korea has been a dictatorship for much of its post war history. Then continuation of the Korean war has more to do with US interests in the region, than anything else at this point. Eliminating the US presence is the keystone to any meaningful peace mediation.
That pressure has been on them for 76 years. It clearly isn't going to change anything.
If they're opened up to the world, they're actually incentivized to engage on the global market. We have a very clear cut case study here:
If we compare the DPRK to Vietnam, the former is a country chopped in half, diplomaticlly isolated, sanctioned to hell and back, and locked in a forever war. Of course it looks the way that it does.
But compared to Vietnam, a country which was also chopped in half by the US, under similar circumstances and eventually unified, it didn't develop the same kinds of power centralization as the DPRK. Vietnam today is a modern, cosmopolitan, Socialist country that's highly integrated into the world system.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Soviet_Democracy
They do have democracy and voting and the actions of their government are far more aligned with the expressed will of their people than any Liberal Democracy (which are all just Oligarchies with a veneer of democracy).
https://act.represent.us/sign/usa-oligarchy-research-explained
The first link above is for the USSR, but the soviet (small 's') form of democracy has been used by many communist democracies that the West decries as authoritarian helholes (which generally just means they refuse to bow to the international capitalist order).
The second is for the US but the only difference of you did the same research for any Liberal Democracy would be a question of degree not of substance.
North Korea has democracy and voting? That's news to me. They definitely don't have very much. So you don't think North Korea is authoritarian?
Virtually every country in the world has some form of elections, outside of a handful of literal monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. What's more debatable is how legitimate they are and which metrics we use to evaluate that.
Often a country is considered undemocratic if it doesn't allow international observers, but of course that requires a degree of trust, as it gives those observers the power to delegitimize the elections. Furthermore, the idea that observers from country A would be legitimate and that country B should be expected to let them in already carries a whole bunch of presumptions about which countries are and are not democratic, which winds up being circular. The US, for example, is never expected to invite international observers to legitimize it's elections.
If you really stop and think critically about how to evaluate elections from the outside, without just assuming the answer based on vibes and presumptions, it's a very challenging and complicated question. An American may take it as a given that China isn't democratic while their system is, but a Chinese person could easily feel the opposite. Without establishing clear metrics, it would be impossible to evaluate who is correct from a neutral and objective standpoint. Even if a metric is agreed on, people might have different assessments based on looking at different information.
Personally, when possible I prefer to avoid arguing over it when possible because without establishing a metric it's impossible to discuss productively, and if you try to establish a clear metric, people will just immediately call you a tankie or red fascist because of course everyone knows bad country is bad, and how dare you try to examine things from a neutral point of view instead of agreeing with what "everyone" already "knows." I've also found that it's better not to talk shit about random countries I've never been to and which don't really affect my life in any meaningful way.
Having said that, if you're actually interested in learning more about the subject in good faith, you might be interested in this Luna Oi video where she discusses how the government of Vietnam actually functions and collects feedback from regular people, or the one where she describes how elections work.
Luna’s videos have been so informative and interesting. Honestly they kind of make me want to go to Vietnam someday.
This sounds like a great way to erase the definitions of all words. Most times when we use words, we understand that rarely anything is absolute. For example, we call western nations capitalist even though they all have some degree of socialism. Just because there aren't clearly defined lines, doesn't mean that all words lose meaning.
The fact that some nations have opaque elections, is actually a strong sign that they are authoritarian. Because suppression of information is authoritarian.
When the US refuses to invite Chinese election observers to oversee it's elections, is that "suppression of information?" That's nonsense.
The reason that a country wouldn't invite observers isn't that they're trying to suppress information, it's that they don't want to give another country the authority to delegitimize them.
What's actually far more authoritarian is this idea that every country in the world needs to bend the knee and allow the West to come into their country and declare whether they are a legitimate democracy or not.
Suppose there's a country that's a legitimate democracy, but they have such valuable and plentiful natural resources that any major power they invited in would seek to delegitimize them in order to seize control of said resources. Because you assume that they're "authoritarian" for not inviting in a major power to oversee their elections, you are ruling out the possibility that such a state could exist.
What this means in practice is that you're giving the West a justification for aggression towards any country on the planet. If they refuse to invite observers, they must be authoritarian and illegitimate, but if they do invite observers, then those observers can simply declare the government illegitimate anyway.
What that works out to in practice is nothing short of chauvanism, imperialism, and world domination. It isn't a real, objective metric, because it's only obfuscating the real metric which is just how well a country gets along with the West. A country being on bad terms with the West does not definitionally make it undemocratic, but by your standards it would be.
Opaque elections are a sign for information supression, but not the only sign.
However if I wanted North Korea to be considered democratic, I would first ask that voting be implemented such that voters can't be identified and punished for voting against a candidate (source)
I have little reason to weigh in on the DPRK specifically because it makes no difference to my positions in practice. Even if retired US army lieutenant-colonel Roger Cavazos' allegations are true, my stance is the same: just leave them alone.
The US government has a very long record of orchestrating regime change in countries across the globe, but I'm not familiar with any case where the result was actually an improvement for the people who live there. It's also incredibly inconsistent and hypocritical for the US to take such an aggressive stance against the DPRK while buddying up to countries like Saudi Arabia which make absolutely zero pretence of being a democracy. If I were going to entertain the notion that US policy is in any way driven by benevolence and promoting democracy, then obviously step 1 would be to not actively give weapons and military support and even perform military attacks on behalf of a literal monarchy.
Why is it that the DPRK and Saudi Arabia are treated so differently? Because the Saudis provide the US with access to their country's natural resources, while the DPRK doesn't. This is a far more consistent through-line that explains US foreign policy much better than any concern with "human rights" or "promoting democracy." When they do talk about promoting democracy, it's opportunistic, it's just because someone who is standing in the way of the expansion of the empire can plausibly be labeled as undemocratic.
Even in cases like Afghanistan, which is controlled by Al Qaida and clearly undemocratic, I see no reason to support sanctions or other forms of aggression towards them, because I have no interest in supporting imperialistic expansionism. If a country is just trying to be left alone, why would I support going there and fucking with it?
I think "authoritarian" is a meaningless designation that only really means "geopolitical adversary of the current hegemon".
The term came into common usage during the Cold War as a way of conflating communist countries with fascist ones in the minds of Western Liberals.
Authoritarian simply indicates how much power the government has. There's not a perfectly precise boundary, but you'd have to be crazy to say North Korea has the same degree as France. This sort of "all sides" argument is reductive and problematic.
The DPRK doesn't put people in prison for having weed and does put people in prison for exploiting other citizens. Both governments have near absolute power, the main difference is how that power is used.
Every state is Authoritarian by that soft definition. That just leaves the question of who weilds the authority and who benefits from it.
The "reductive and problematic" argument here is the pro-fascist talking point that the dictatorship of capital is freedom and anything else is "authoritarian".
The DPRK absolutely puts people in prison for having weed, are you a teenager trying to be contrarian? Every time you MLs talk you just turn more people off to socialism.
Meanwhile weed is legal in my state, despite the US federal government having "absolute power" according to you.
.https://koryogroup.com/travel-guide/faq-is-marijuana-legal-in-north-korea
If there is no reasonable way for a citizen (as in, somebody not currently part of the government) in the DPRK to influence the laws, then that is what makes it authoritarian. It's about governance not capital.
North Korea has a really fucking weird political system but luckily it is not the only country that calls itself socialist. The USA are also undemocratic but you don't seem to judge all parliamentary "democracies" by one especially bad example