07-03-2016, 02:20 PM
(07-03-2016, 10:44 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Marx saw ownership as the basis of power, ignoring the power of bureaucracies when those bureaucracies have no capitalists to contest them or when those bureaucracies are fully in collusion with the financiers and industrialists (as in America).
Many of us on the Left consider the Soviet regime to be State-Capitalist, the economy run as one huge corporation under the control and effective ownership of the party bosses and the bureaucracy underpinning the party bosses.
Russia had effectively no democratic tradition, it was an absolutist monarchy with a highly centralized bureaucracy. The party bosses essentially took over that bureaucracy and made it their own, and given Russia's poor level of development at the time there was very little of an actual industrial working class, let along an industrial working class with any developed traditions of participatory civil society like existed in the US, Germany, and the UK in 1917.
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