Before the era of mass literacy and mass media, peasants had no sense of nationalism or national identity. They'd be stuck on a plot of land and spend most of their lives in the same village. The only time they would meet outsiders besides at festivals and markets was people like landlords and tax collectors. Today we get our identities from media and live half of our lives as part of real and imagined communities.
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The leaders of the Russian Revolutions of February and October 1917 sought to establish socialism: a deeply democratic economic and political system where the employee/employer relationship is abolished, and where workers control their workplaces, the means of production and the government via the “free association of the producers”.
Instead the revolutions resulted in the establishment of the Soviet Union: an authoritarian state where the government became the sole employer and the state controlled the workers instead of the other way around.This then became the model for “communist” countries around the world.
Why did the Soviet Union fail at socialism?
What can we learn about this failure to apply to our political struggles in the present and future?
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