The answer to misleading information about USSR had issues feeding its population. source : https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5
The answer to misleading information about USSR had issues feeding its population. source : https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5
I always say, true communism isn’t possible without true democracy. Leaders must be elected in elections that actually matter.
It’s likely not something that is possible with first past the post voting, or any ordinal voting system. A cardinal voting system could do it. My current favorite is STAR.
No election should be anything other than proportional. Even better is sortition. However you need an apparatus very different from a liberal democracy to make it work, which is good, we need to stop making governments that look like liberalism. Which is a core part of the failure of the soviet union and communism to date, that saying you’re doing socialism isn’t enough, we need novel organization of people.
The massive issue with proportional elections is that if you have a very unpopular incumbent, and 5 seats up for election, you need more than 80% of the population to vote against that incumbent to get rid of them.
The other issue is that the current popular proportional voting system is STV, which has some serious flaws. There are proportional versions of things like Score which are much better.
The solution I tend to favor, though, is tiny districts. For the US, there should be far more than 435 districts. I’ve seen different numbers bandied about, but 1400+ is a good place to start. I’ve seen proposals for 6500~ districts.
Why would some fraction of seats be up for election?
Yes, many systems exist and stv is meh, that’s not really a point against a proportional system unless you think fptp is a point against single winners and in that case the proportional systems looks a lot better.
Districts are arbitrary and abusable, just sample the will of the population and build bodies that look like the population. You can get tiny districts by forcing choices at the smallest level possible.
A proportional system will have multi-member districts. That’s the point. Unless you think that a national election can account for the needs and desires of a local population.
You don’t want to have someone from LA speaking for the needs of people in Kansas. Hell, you wouldn’t want people in LA speaking for the needs of people in Sacramento.
That’s where districts come in. To solve the issues with districts, you have two choices, either multi-member proportional districts, or shrink the districts down to the point where any resident can voice their opinion to their representative and expect a response.
Right now, the US has districts with more than 1 million residents. If even 1 in 1000 people have concerns that they voice, their representative will just ignore it all, because tens of thousands of voices are impossible to listen to.
That’s why smaller districts are key, even if you have multi-member proportional districts. No more than maybe 100k people per district.
A smaller district is also much harder to pack, crack, or otherwise gerrymander.
There is no downside, unless you have a favorite political party that only exists due to the current broken system.
Pedantry corner: Communism’s goal is to achieve a communist society, which is defined by being stateless. In a true communist society there would be no need for elections nor government. Now, how to actually get there… is where people disagree, especially anarchists and marxists.
Back on topic, I think the electoral system Cuba and Vietnam use are already a better starting point. There are no parties (parties are allowed to exist but they don’t run in elections, not even the Communist Party), every candidate is independent and they cannot self-nomimate or be placed by someone higher-up, they must be nominated by their community, and everyone gets an equal opportunity to run their campaign.