this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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I mean I've voted for a candidates in municipal, health care area, parliamentary and European Parliament elections. Hell, even in church elections. I've had friends as candidates, seen stuff get through from a single person's suggestion through to reality through what I'd call democratic means and action, I've worked with different campaigns and parties and have seen change happen through that.
If that doesn't count as democratic then not sure what you consider democratic tbh because that's the stuff I think of when I think of democracy.
It just seems to clash with the common definition of the word, is all. If democracy isn't that sort of stuff then I wonder what it is and where you might find it, if anywhere.
Okay. I'll give it to you - Finland allows it's population more democracy-like privileges than you'd find in most other countries, and it probably isn't even the only one that does that.
But tell me this... how many of the corporations Finnish people work for is democratically run?
I mean it's not like we haven't fought for those. Can't expect someone to just give you these privileges. But more to the point, when I think of democracy it's all those things that make up the whole. Citizen participation, citizen ability to affect things, free and fair elections, freedom of the press and so on. And I don't mean those as absolute terms yes/no but rather as sliders that you'd use to gauge not if a country was straight up democratic or not but rather how democratic/how not democratic it is. And I'd say Finland is far enough into the democratic side that I'd say we do have democracy here.
I mean a very significant chunk of workforce and economy works through cooperatives. And those have elections. Our biggest chain of shops is a cooperative, one of the biggest banks is also, there's energy and forestry and so on. Out of 5,5 million people over 4 million are members of a cooperative. So not sure how many that's numerically out of all corporations but when you consider the size and impact of them, it's a big portion. Of course there's the factor that we're also heavily unionized and unions have both a very strong foothold and legal status. And those have elections ofc. But it's different from cooperatives where you vote for stuff, if that's what you were asking about.
It's all just the sort of stuff I'd say made up democracy. Saying there's nothing democratic about Finland just feels weird and wrong. If we have nothing democratic, who does??