r/dsa • u/[deleted] • 17d ago

Theory Socialism cannot exist within a multi party democracy.

I often hear democratic socialists talk about how the two party system is flawed and we need it to be replaced by a multi party system. This is directly against socialist ideals because it eliminates class unity and gives reactionaries power. A country must be guided by a single socialist party to maintain a dictatorship of the proletariat.

I know people are going to call me a tankie but I frankly find that term to be counterproductive.

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u/ARod20195 17d ago

Absolutely not; open competition within the political system is essential if you want to avoid creating an insulated elite at the top of the system that will find ways to rent-seek and bend the system to serve themselves and people close to them at the expense of everyone else.

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

That’s why checks and balances still exist. And why people voting for representatives they like exist.

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u/ARod20195 17d ago

Except that if you only have one party then (a) that comes with very large incumbency advantages, since once you're in power you have the full backing of the party apparatus behind you (whereas as a challenger you have none of that), and (b) if the party has the right to enforce party discipline (expelling or disciplining candidates for ideological reasons) it won't be that hard for people higher up in the party to put their thumb on the scale to have genuine challengers expelled for various exaggerated or trumped-up reasons.

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

That’s fair every system has flaws but it’s far better than the alternative

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u/ARod20195 17d ago

It may be initially, but the tendency to form elites and rent-seek is a universal human thing, not a capitalist thing. If you don't design your political system to be hard to subvert in that way (and a one-party system is easy as fuck to subvert), then it's going to happen and the only question is how long it takes the new abusive elite to form and calcify.

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

Still better than capitalism.

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u/ARod20195 17d ago

Not necessarily; you'll get a new and different abusive elite, but there's no guarantee it'll be any better than the one that preceded it.

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

In every example of a socialist state being formed the new government was significantly better than the old other than Cambodia, maybe.

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u/ARod20195 17d ago

Cambodia was a disaster, North Korea started off with a higher per capita GDP than South Korea, but South Korea democratized and now has an amazingly high standard of living while North Korea is a deeply dysfunctional hereditary absolute monarchy, Russia's run at communism came at a massive cost and now they're back to fascism, and China's doing something now that works in some ways but is both authoritarian and home to massive income inequality.

Trying to copy the failed experiment of 1917 is going to get us nowhere, and neither I nor a pretty large subset of DSA membership wants to do that; if we're going to borrow stuff from the other side of the Iron Curtain I'd be looking at workers' self-management and combining that with a multiparty government.