[TEASER] China Pt. 3: Bourgeois Democracy vs Socialist Democracy w/ Vijay Prashad

Upstream

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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It’s a difficult task to compare bourgeois democracies to socialist democracies—and not just because it’s difficult to be living in the belly of the beast as it enters into its death spiral all while watching social and technological advancements take place in what we’re told are “authoritarian” communist “regimes”—but because in many ways the democratic experiments of the Atlantic world originated in an entirely different context as the socialist democratic experiments in places like China—and they have almost entirely different aims. What are those aims? And how are they—and are they not—being advanced?

To explain the differences to us, we’ve brought back onto the show Vijay Prashad. Vijay is a journalist, political commentator, and executive-director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He’s the author of many books, including Washington Bullets: The History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations, and Red Star Over the Third World.

In this conversation, Part. 3 of our China series here on Patreon, we explore the differences between bourgeois and socialist democracies more broadly before taking a deep dive into specific examples comparing China and the United States. We dispel a number of myths about Chinese society, ask Vijay to share his perspective on what is taking place with the Uyghers, the role of Western propaganda in destabilizing communism, and much more.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick note before we jump into this Patreon episode.
0:03.8	Thank you to all of our Patreon subscribers for making upstream possible.
0:08.4	We genuinely couldn't do this without you.
0:11.2	Your support allows us to create bonus content like this and provide most of our content for free
0:17.2	so we can continue to offer political education media to the public and help to build
0:22.6	our movement. Thank you, comrades. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
0:56.0	Oh, ah. In China, the principle coordinate of freedom, as I said, of democracy is deprivation has to be removed. And that's Chinese democracy.
0:59.0	That is what it is.
1:00.0	You first have to deal with the question of getting rid of poverty, getting rid of illiteracy, getting rid of hierarchies,
1:08.0	and then you build institutions of representation, democracy and so on.
1:14.2	And so that was the sequencing of their idea of democracy.
1:18.4	And I think it's rather unfortunate when I read people saying, well, the authoritarian Chinese
1:23.1	versus the Democratic West, I mean, it's a total orientalist way of looking at China. It's also completely
1:29.2	uneducated because you're not trying to understand what was the Chinese conversation around
1:35.0	freedom from deprivation or freedom from this, freedom from that. You're listening to upstream.
1:41.8	Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society
1:47.3	that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan.
1:53.5	And I'm Robert Raymond. It's a difficult task to compare bourgeois democracies to socialist democracies.
2:01.1	And it's not just because it's difficult to be living in the belly of the beast as it enters
2:05.6	into its death spiral, all while watching the social and technological advancements take place
2:11.2	in what we're told are authoritarian communist regimes.
2:15.2	But because in many ways, the democratic experiments of the Atlantic world
	...

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