This isn't just clickbait.
I mean it kind of is but hear me out.
Go Google the full name of North Korea.
What does it say?
Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
and you might be like,
Wait isn't North Korea the one with Kim Kong Un
and the whole communist regime?
Don't worry you're not wrong and neither is Wikipedia.
In fact it isn't just North
Korea that's doing this other communist
states like Lao People's Democratic
Republic also call themselves Democratic
This might sound like a sick joke,  I mean
we are literally talking about the
country at the bottom of any measure of
democracy.
To understand this, you would have to
first understand a little bit about
communism.
Communism evolved from Marxism,
which was first conceived by Karl Marx
in the Communist Manifesto in 1848 yeah
That book.
Although communism is an
impossibly complicated topic with
economic and political implications calm
Marxist it boils down to one simple concept: Abolition of Private Property.
In contemporary media communism has been demonised as a system where everyone has
to surrender all that poverty to an
oppressive corrupt government that
controls each and every action of a
citizens but this couldn't be further
from the central ideology of communism
in his manifesto he argues that he only
wants to do away with this appropriation
under which labor lives merely to
increase capital and is allowed to live
only insofar as the interest of the ruling class requires.
Its intentions
were never to take away the material goods that average working class had.
It was only an equaliser.
He believed that the abolition of private property will allow working class proletariats take back
political and economic power from the
capitalistic bourgeois which have been
tyrannising the working class.
Ultimately, communism is a revolution by the working
class to raise the proletariat to the
position of ruling class to win the
battle of democracy. Now let's take a
look at what democracy is.
Everyone probably has a vague idea of what it is
but it's one of those concepts that many
people find it hard to explain or put
their finger on.
Well the term democracy comes from two greek words demos, the people
and Kratia, power. And it was first
introduced in greece.
No surprise here. However this early form of democracy is hardly a democracy.
Limited to men born in Athens, excluding woman and those not of Athen descent.
This was what democracy was for a long time.
Even America which is
seen as a champion for democracy has
only allowed Universal woman suffrage and voting rights for minorities in the 20th Century.
I'm not saying we should all
adopt the communist regime now. It is very flawed.
However, capitalistic democracies have revealed itself as full of cracks as well
Thus, there is a need to go back to what
it really means to be democratic.
Stubbornly insisting that our current path is the
only way ahead is myopic.
Imagine how
radical gender and racial suffrage must
have been for the Athenians who first
introduced democracy but can you imagine
in any other way now?
To quote Winston
Churchill: no one pretends that democracy
is perfect or all wise. indeed it has
been said that democracy is the worst
form of government except all those
other forms that have been tried from time to time
So, the best we can do is to
keep trying
I guess?
