Is because communists seek consensus, not just majority.
Voting in liberalism (the ideology of capitalism) is like everything else you experience in capitalism; it’s alienating and alienated.
We’ll focus on the alienated part. The liberal vote goes like this: here’s the question, you can answer yes or no, knock yourself out.
They don’t care about anything else. They don’t care if you’re educated or not about the question, or the reasons you might have to be voting one way or the other. All they care about is the box checked on the ballot, and then whichever option gets the most votes, even if it’s one single extra vote, wins.
The communist vote goes like that: here’s the question, why do you want to vote yes or no?
We build consensus. Build is the keyword here: consensus is not reached by random luck or letting enough time pass, it’s a conscious effort that you have to make.
We educate people about the question and their choices, we try to understand why they lean one way or the other, and then we talk with them to give them all the facts they need to make an informed decision.
It’s something we naturally started doing on ProleWiki, we try to reach a consensus for most decisions (the most common ones being account requests). If someone votes no, we want to know their arguments for it, and that’s why most account requests end up with a pure 9-0 result or similar; we talk and convince people to reach one decision or the other. We motivate our own decisions as well; whether you vote yes or no, you’re encouraged to explain why – votes are not yet anonymous in our case.
But there is debate happening, which is healthy and helps reach a better solution.
It’s also what Cuba did for their new constitution. The way these votes happen in liberal democracies is, again, they give you the question, they give you the changes that would happen, and they ask you yes or no and that’s it. The way Cuba did it was to first talk with communities and their citizens, before any vote even took place. Then they refined a proposal based on these discussions, submit drafts for auditing by the population, and then finally the vote happened.
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.
We’re generally all in agreement one way or the other and it’s very rare to have more than 2 votes the other way. Only time we’ve cut it very close (something like 5-4) the administration pulled their right of veto and explained why we felt that prospective editor would not be a good fit yet, but should try again in a few months.
If we’re in such a situation, we ask the minority why they voted the way they did before we grant the account, but usually it all goes pretty smoothly although there is a lot of discussion around most account requests; we take them seriously and it can take up to two weeks to get your account approved. But at the end of the day most everyone votes, even if they sometimes need a reminder lol
Yeah, the Soviets also did that. By the time you had to vote to confirm Stalin as Chair of the CPSU for example, it had been pretty well debated who should be on the ballot (Chair was voted on by the central committee, so a smallish section). It was really just to confirm and make it official because by that point, they had talked about all their options – it wasn’t a thing where you would announce yourself as a candidate or someone would announce you, they would essentially pick you to be a candidate and there was only one candidate because all others had been rejected before the official vote.
It’s also how most small NGOs and other orgs work, but funnily enough libs don’t have a problem with that method when it happens in those.
There’s also a different case that happened where at the lower levels, they would elect people not by approval but by disapproval. Citizens would register someone they knew on the ballot (you couldn’t register yourself, it’s still the case in Cuba that 2 people need to register you in elections), and the vote was not about who to elect, but who not to elect. They’d remove candidates like this round after round until there was only one left. If the last candidate was also rejected, they would start the process over again.
And of course instant recallability if the elected officials failed to perform their tasks.