Steve, I read your posts. So you disagree with Tony Cliff and Max Schachtman's theories. I never said I agreed with them. You also claim that your posts deal with their theories when they obviously don't. This is clearly dishonest. I read in the journal Aufheben that "Cliff's theory has often been used by Orthodox Trotskyists as a straw man with which to refute all state capitalist theories and sustain the orthodox conception of the USSR as a degenerated worker's state." (www.geocities.com/aufheben2/6.html)
You seem to be a non-Trotskyist who wanted to use it as a strawman but didn't even get that far. The Russian revolution had inherited a poor economically backward nation, and "the revolution" obviously had to do something about it. I believe Marx used a certain term, primitive accumulation to describe this capitalist process. What sort of government does not rely on terror, Steve? I don't care if the "revolutionary government" should not have had to, they did have to! While you show signs of being less ideologically rigid than many Marxists (your words about Hungary '56), you seem to be incapable of grasping the difference between political and social revolution. Here is a note from an article I provided a link to (albeit a different link):
"Marx (notably in the 1844 article The King of Prussia and social reform, and other early works) developed a critique of politics, and opposed "political" to "social" revolution: the former rearranged links between individuals and groups without much change in what they actually do, the latter acted upon how people reproduce their means of existence, their way of life, their real condition, thus at the same time transforming how they relate to each other.

One of the very first rebellious gestures is to revolt against control over our lives from above, by a teacher, a boss, a policeman, a social worker, a union leader, a statesman... Then politics walks in and reduces aspirations and desires to a problem of power- be it handed to a party, or shared by everyone. But what we lack is the power to produce our life. A world where all electricity comes to us from mammoth (coal, fuel-oil or nuclear) power stations, will always remain out of our reach. Only the political mind thinks revolution is primarily a question of power seizure and/or redistribution." (www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/ecapfoot.html/) Steve, I believe the key to your thoughts on deformations of worker's states is that a worker's state is a deformation! I don't want to provide too many links, but there is an essay called "The continuing appeal of nationalism" that is essential to understanding these ideas in a wider context. Here's the link: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/perlman-fredy/1984/nationalism.htm Basically, you have not refuted anything I have said. Workers have to be forced to remain workers. Lenin understood that. Somehow you don't.