POLS 2100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: Proletariat, Berlin Wall, Mass Murder
Document Summary
Communism/post-communism: a communist primer, marx got a few things wrong, and one of them was where communism was likely to occur, communist states were not necessarily the most advanced states, 1. Russia was the first country where communists succeeded in taking over the state (even though it was not especially advanced industrially: russia was considered backwards compared to other european states, it was neither democratic nor industrialized. Lenin argued it needed a vanguard of the proletariat: this (cid:449)as a high dis(cid:272)ipli(cid:374)ed o(cid:396)ga(cid:374)izatio(cid:374) of (cid:396)e(cid:448)olutio(cid:374)a(cid:396)y"s (cid:449)ho (cid:449)ould seize power on behalf of the people. Lennon believed that russia could not way for revolution, or other conditions to occur before communism took over: 2. Industrial productivity was decided by bureaucrats rather than consumer demand: this meant that industries made too much or too little of certain things, slow and bureaucratic process, 2.