Quote Originally Posted by Pindar
Hehe ... one aspect I am referring to would be e.g. the ownership of production assets. As a matter of fact significant parts of the US industry are indeed owned by the workers via pension funds or directly via shares that are owned by employees. I would not say that in the Stalinistic USSR the workers could really claim to own the assets. They were rather state-owned, and as (at least IMHO) in the Stalinistic USSR the State was not equivalent to the working-class (it was rather an Oligarchy), I would say that the US comes closer to the idea of the working-class owning the assets than Stalin's USSR.

Also my impression is that "smalltown-USA" were the individual citizen can (to my knowledge) influence a lot of policies is closer to the idea on "Council Communism" than the Communist Party centered approach of Stalin's USSR.

But to put you at ease - it would probably be more precise to say that Stalin's USSR was further away from the ideals of Communism that the US, that to say that the US is closer to the ideals of Communism