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Did you all notice that week or so of utter shock from federated Lemmy liberals when they saw takes to the left of themselves?
(hexbear.net)
I don't just mean outrage or regular rage, I mean shock that someone was to the left of "legal weed and free college but only for those that operate a successful business for 3 years in a disadvantaged community" 
takes.
I think federating took them by surprise, looking back. For about a week, those smug liberals were at a loss to even fathom what Hexbears were saying, and could only chant bullshit about how we're Russian/Chinese bots.
Sure they still do that but they've slightly adapted to Hexbear presence.
I think we all want democracy. And, actually, plenty of existing socialist states do have democratic processes, despite being under threat from the United States. Cuba, for example, has regular elections and a large system of citizen councils. Here’s a video about Cuban democracy
You probably can’t start a Capitalism Party in Cuba and hand out leaflets saying “We should sell our land and factories to American businesses!” — because if Cuba allowed that, America would pour a billion dollars a year into funding and training and staffing that party, insert CIA agents into the staff, publish a Capitalism Party newspaper full of slander and propaganda, engineer Cuban elections, and start to gnaw at Cuba from the inside. The party would become a beachhead for counterrevolution.
Restrictions on democracy in communist countries are a wartime measure to fend off capitalists. The more open and democratic your country is, the greater the attack surface. That doesn’t mean actually existing socialist (AES) states have no democratic processes at all, but they have to be vigilant and ensure that positions of power are occupied by committed and capable socialists.
you label the successful, presumably less democratic nations “communist,” and the failed, presumably more democratic nations “socialist,” but I would say the terms communist and socialist don’t really work that way. To be honest we mostly use the terms interchangeably lol, but I would say “Socialist” is a descriptor while “Communist” is a goal, where you aspire to be a classless, moneyless, stateless society in the future, and to survive in the meantime while keeping capitalists out of power.