Communism

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.

The liberal vote goes like this: here’s the question, you can answer yes or no, knock yourself out.

And that's the ideal of liberal democracy. In real one you get one referendum per decades and the rest of the time you only get to check one or more boxes on the card which may or may not have any impact over who will be the middlemen between the value stolen from you and people stealing it. And all of the above could as well get just ignored if it went not as the latter people wanted, then it's coups, martial laws, invasions etc.

Why are libs downvoting shit in c/communism? Absolutely deranged behavior

In contrast with liberal "democracies" we can see how they treat referendums as this random thing done with a year or two of preparation, and that whatever is the outcome is the will of ~~God~~the people, which is immutable and can only be tested once in a generation, so long as they benefit the ruling class. Brexit got voted for, therefore it must happen no matter what, but the indyref didn't get the 50% so better wait until all Scots die of old age. And when the result of the referendum goes overwhelmingly against the ruling class interest, like in Donetsk/Luhansk or even in Catalunya, then it must've been stuffed ballots, and it was illegal, and no we won't redo the referendum to test that hypothesis.

Consensus decision making is baller as hell. We've been using it in our commune for about 3 years now and have noticed massive improvements across the board.

As well, the end result of the "yes or no" answer style "democracy" is that you're given two options and have to choose between those options.

Nice to hear you trying out some democratic centralism on ProleWiki. Would you say it's smooth? If it is ever 9:1, does the 1 ever convince everyone else?

I watched an interview with Roland Boer where he talks about democratic centralism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjHNn31Vwt0 Interesting stuff. He explains one of the flaws of the USSR was the belief that DC must be implemented within the party but cannot, for whatever reason, be implemented more widely. China, however, has tried to do both.

Boer talks about the consultation process built in to the socialist rule of law. Whereas liberal democracies do as you describe, laws only make it near the rolls after a long DC consultation process. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people contribute millions of characters to a discussion about what the law should be. Only then can an idea for a law be enacted. As you say, there's no question of 'voting no' because all the disagreement has substantially been resolved. Similar with appointments, I believe. While liberal democracy involves the people (demos) in the choice, socialist democracy involves the people in the process, from the beginning. When it comes to voting, it's less of a choice and more of a confirmation that the process has achieved what it was supposed to achieve.

I like punch yourself analogy because we go further into how they get people to then vote to punch themselves. It's less so "punch yourself" and it's just you voting, it's more like "punch your neighbor" and it's the whole neighborhood voting. To go further it's "punch someone in another neighborhood" and it's the whole county voting. Growing up to state and then national. They don't point out that if every votes to punch someone else, you also get punched, because in liberal voting, it's all about you, you, and you, not the collective, never the collective.

ProleWiki is a very interesting movement, and for documentation purposes I hope to see more of it. For brevity though, could you link an example of a similar vote that you described in the OP?

Another aspect is that in general, liberalist states vote for people and parties, and even most referendums and policies are usually coded to side with one party or the other. In America this usually boils down to: tax goes up -> democrats, tax goes down -> republicans, or it's related to some political hot topic that has already been nationally polarized by the news.

I don't think it's really said enough, but there is a fundamental problem with republic democracy, in that when you're voting for people and not for ideas, the only winning metric is how 'convincing' they are. This inevitably leads to a certain type of person getting an edge, and honesty is usually detrimental to their success. People generally know this, but when 50% is all you need to clear, then that's all you're gonna care about. Policy and ideology get moved further and further away until they're boiled down to talking points that can rile up a base, and now you got yourself another corrupt country.

Democracy definitely works in small groups or settings where good faith debate can take place with a reasonably educated and inclusive group, but outside of that, it has problems. I think people are conditioned even more-so than capitalism to believe that democracy is a golden ideal to achieve, but the shortcomings are pretty blatant when you stop to look at it. Better than authoritarianism, sure, but once personality is thrown into the mixture, that's what you'll end up with anyway.