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Its a workers state in the sense that America is a democracy. Was it a dictatorship? Yes, not nearly as much as the US would like to portray it as, especailly after Stalin.
Uh, I don't get what your saying here. Are you seriously trying to compare the US political system with the Soviet Union's? That's pretty funny. The Soviet Union was a worker's state because the state was created by a worker's revolution where the means of production were seized and the capitalist class expropriated. It's really as simple as that.
All states are dictatorships, dictatorships of
classes.
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The question is akin to "Is America a democracy or A capitalist ptutocracy," well its both, it can be said to have elements of the former, but is mainly the latter. Soooo, all in all, dumb question.
Again, why are you even bothering comparing the two? It makes little sense.
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Originally Posted by TomK
The issue here as I understand it is that Russia at the time of the Revolution didn't have much of a proletariat. It' had millions of peasents, but they are not quite the same thing--they have different needs and wants and don't fit into the Marxist scheme so easily.
Well on the surface, your absolutely right.
Except the overwhelming majority of small and medium peasants were more than willing to form an alliance with the proletariat in order to take their land back from the land lords and kulaks. It was difficult to satisfy both classes early on in the worker's republic, but after rapid industrialization the proletariat had the means to improve their living standards, and agricultural industry had developed which made collective peasant farms much more productive. The goal essentially, was to abolish the distinction between the two altogether (the abolition of the difference between town and country) and great advances were made in this respect, but they only got so far.
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Actually that seems to be a problem with most Communist revolutions, they seem to happen in undeveloped countries like Russia and China and not developed countries like Germany of France.
The ones in Germany, Hungary, France, Spain, and Finland all failed. What you mean to say is, the only successful communist revolutions happened in countries like Russia and China.
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I guess too that "take over" Revolutions like when the SU took over East Germany didn't work well because it wasn't something that came from the people themselves--though what I'm saying leads one to think that Communist might be nationalistic--which isn't the case.
You say "take over", I say "liberate from fascism". Mind you that the majority of people welcomed the Red Army as liberators, and many actually participated with them in partisan activity; in some cases, eastern European revolutions were done with little help from the Red Army (Yugoslavia, Albania).