Well if you mean democracy as in part of the population bothering to vote every 4 years for a new face of capital, no.
According to Marxist-Leninists it was a dictatorship of the proletariat.
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Was the Soviet Union more of a Democracy than the United States ?
Was the Soviet Union more of a Democracy than the United States of America claims to be ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy
Well if you mean democracy as in part of the population bothering to vote every 4 years for a new face of capital, no.
According to Marxist-Leninists it was a dictatorship of the proletariat.
We're all disillusioned with capitalism.
No it wasn't.
But the US isn't by any means a democracy.
Democracy itself isn't true democracy.
I have read that Worker's Councils known as Soviets Elected.
I have read that Worker's Councils known as Soviets Elected the Leaders of the State if this is how it worked why is this better than American Democracy where the Citizens vote for the President Congress and the Senate is it better because the People should not have the power or the choice to go back to Capitalism ?
How was Lenin a dictator?
Answer:
Lenin is not a dictator. On November 8 , 1917, he was elected as the Chair of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Congress of Soviets. The Congress was at that time a multi-party entity (6 political parties). The Russian Congress of Soviets had power to elect and reelect. Lenin served one and a half term, total 6 years though the last 2 years he had limited influence due to his illness. Note, that American president F. Roosevelt, served 3 terms, or 12 years. Lenin was not a dictator, whose every word was obeyed. On the crucial question of signing an immediate peace treaty with Germany in 1917, Lenin was outvoted and remained in a minority until he eventually persuaded the party and Russian government to pull out of the war (in Treaty of Brest Litovsk in 1918).
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_was_Lenin_a_dictator
Democracy in Marxism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Marxist view is fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy believing that the capitalist state cannot be democratic by its nature, as it represents the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Marxism views liberal democracy as an unrealistic utopia. This is because they believe that in a capitalist state all "independent" media and most political parties are controlled by capitalists and one either needs large financial resources or to be supported by the bourgeoisie to win an election. Lenin (1917) believed that in a capitalist state, the system focuses on resolving disputes within the ruling bourgeoisie class and ignores the interests of the proletariat or labour class which are not represented and therefore dependent on the bourgeoisie's good will:
"Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty” – supposedly petty – details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.” (Lenin, State and Revolution, Chapter 5)
Moreover, even if representatives of the proletariat class are elected in a capitalist country, Marxists claim they have limited power over the country's affairs as the economic sphere is largely controlled by private capital and therefore the representative's power to act is curtailed. Essentially, minarchists (only a small minority of those supporting liberal democracy) claim that in the ideal liberal state the functions of the elected government should be reduced to the minimum (i.e. the court system and security). Hence Marxists-Leninists see a socialist revolution necessary to bring power into hands of oppressed classes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_Marxism
First of all, democracy is not a concrete system, it's a characteristic. Therefore; you can have democracy, you cannot be democracy. The United States is a Constitutional Republic, which has degrees of democracy. In my view, it isn't nearly sufficiently democratic. However; despite it's significant democratic deficits, the present-day United States is substantially more democratic than the USSR was.
[FONT=Verdana]Economic Left/Right: -7.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.13[/FONT]
"Kick over the wall 'cause government's to fall,
How can you refuse it?,
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power,
D'you know that you can use it?"-The Clash, "Clampdown"
Tell me,did the USSR ever invaded a country without the people had done anything?Or was there poverty to the extent the US have now?The USSR gets capitalist after 1965 or so.
WORKERS OF THE WORLD,UNITE!
LONG LIVE THE CUBAN REVOLUTION!
Content is more important than form. The USSR had little-to-no formal or substantive democratic content in its history (1922-1991). The revolutionary soviet republic that existed following Red October degenerated into a single-party dictatorship by the end of 1918, with the soviets subordinated to the Bolshevik party and all political opposition or independence within them purged. After this point organized public political opposition to state policy was essentially impossible, and Soviet political culture rapidly evolved into palace intrigue within the ruling circles.
In his bid to outflank his conservative political opponents, Mikhail Gorbachev and his reform backers did move to allow semi-free multi-candidate elections in 1989, and political debate. The collapsing Soviet edifice simply accelerated in its implosion in the face of a real public political sphere, until the Soviet coup attempt in August 1991 failed.
On the other hand, the United States, while for much of its history at the bleeding edge of democratic forms (particularly in terms of restraints on open state repression), has frequently found itself in one or another way subverting the formality with essential content. The United States from 1800 til the 1960s could in many ways been considered a Herrenvolk, or master race, democracy, though there were attempts to change the content, as in the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction, in the extremely violent (again belying the difference between ostensible freedoms and real content) labor movement, and struggles of the black population. In fact, despite more overt repression in Europe, examining all modern economic areas where industrialization matured in the 19th century, the U.S. has about the highest body count in terms of labor struggles. The effusive, generalized, racial violence, intended to keep the racial caste division of labor in the Southern planter economy also bears notice. As does the enormous expansionist conquistador violence and aggression imposed by the Herrenvolk on the indigenous population, so that the landmass of North America might be completely accessible to capital accumulation and Herrenvolk colonization. And it continues to this day, as we live in a very militarized society compared to others, and compared to our own history, and this manifests itself in the mass bloodletting of American imperialism, both the millions of Southeast Asians murdered by American bombs, bullets, and chemicals, and the millions of Latin Americans and other dying of deprivation.
For most of both countries' history, there has been more formal state restraint, and more practical ability to organize, however tenuously or weakly it may able to build it, in defense of one's own interests in the United States than the USSR. Perhaps in the fall of 1917 in many ways Russia may have been the freest place on Earth. But almost immediately after the seizure of power, devolved upon the Bolshevik party, political repression against opponents emerged and was highly controversial, and I mean among the pro-soviet quarters. Paradoxically, the sources of power in the United States are much stronger and institutionalized than those which developed following the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent Civil War. Therefore the violence they wield is often accepted as legitimate and thereby easily proceduralized and generalized. Contrariwise, the Soviet state had little besides the stick to rely upon; its primary means of constraining the workers was police power. The Soviet reliance on capricious ideological violence belied its weakness.
Last edited by Jose Gracchus; 18th October 2011 at 17:34.
I agree thanks for your answers.
I agree thanks for your answers.
Correction: We are not a Democracy. We are a Republic.
Correction: We are not a Republic. We are a Capitalist (where corporate interests are weighed more heavily in the minds of the government than the citizens) police-state with a highly top-down political structure whereby the people have democratic control over very nominal, unimportant issues. A republic denotes rule by law, and presently the federal government blatantly flaunts the fact that it detests such constitutional barriers for the sake of domestic security (which is really just a means towards eliminating internal dissent before it can garner imperial control abroad).
I was going with the more classical term of what is our government type. USSR and USA were Republics.
"A constitutional republic is a state in which the head of state and other officials are representatives of the people and must govern according to existing constitutional law that limits the government's power over all of its citizens. Because the head of the state is elected, it is a republic and not a monarchy."
From Wikipedia
Dictionary.com
"re·pub·lic [ri-puhb-lik] Show IPA
noun
1.
a state in which the supreme power rests in the body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by representatives chosen directly or indirectly by them."
Maybe de jure.
In reality, the USSR was just as Fascist (Totalitarian) as Nazi Germany and Stalin is responsible for more deaths than Hitler ever was. In the case of the United States, it is so far gone from the original writing that it's laudable to even consider it a Federal Constitutional Republic.
It's like calling the PRC a Republic. Until recently (the past thirty years or so) there were no laws on the books and people were convicted on some trumped up charges of being counter-revolutionary or whatever. You can hardly call that a Republic, but yet Republic in the name remains.
FFS,read about what Fascism is so that you don't post such rubbish in the future.
Fascism is not the same as totalitarianism, even though they share characteristics.
Well, they both claim/claimed that they are/were democracy when they really aren't/weren't, so..
...Dok je uprava gore, dronjav žitelj dolje, a vojska grdna zvijer na tankom lancu, bit će buna i pohara...
- Derviš Sušić
Since you're relatively new I understand where you're coming from. However, fascism refers to something very specific and can't be applied to whoever you don't like. Fascism is a victory of the counter-revolution. And no Stalin didn't kill more people than Hitler. Don't assume that everything that you're told by your teachers is true. If he did kill more than Hitler I would like to see the breakdown of those numbers.
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” Charles Bukowski, Factotum
"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining... We demand this fraud be stopped." MLK
-fka Redbrother
They were both different forms of bourgeois dictatorship.
I'm not sure how important it is, though.
[FONT="Courier New"] “We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Revolution and of the new order of life. ”
― Felix Dzerzhinsky [/FONT]
لا شيء يمكن وقف محاكم التفتيش للثورة
Hitler started the second World War, therefore he's responsible for far more deaths than Stalin. And this is coming from someone who believes that Stalin committed atrocious acts as dictator of the USSR.
First off the USSR was democratic/non-democratic to a wildly different extent depending on the period.
Secondly while for the majority of its existence the USSR was superficially more authoritarian, under the hood the US was on the same level.
If we go outside of simple formalised decision making, the realities of life in the USSR were in certain aspects more free and egalitarian than in the US (although the reverse is also true) - especially as pertaining to social mobility and general economical security.
This in turn created a society that was more social and friendly, and less exclusive and hostile, especially on the level of individual attitudes.
It should also be noted that even while formally there was nothing comparable to open elections, nevertheless through its educational system the regime assured that all economical benefits (housing, food, education, healthcare, utilities, transportation, etc.) promised as part of the communist ideology were never questioned until the very end, unlike the Western democracies, where as soon as any external and internal pressure abated all the gains achieved by the workers started to get dismantled immediately.
Last edited by aristos; 23rd October 2011 at 22:55.
The evil empire was never more democratic then our glorious union of states.
