Love seeing Richard Wolff getting some love
Yeah, he’s been doing amazing work making Marxism accessible to regular people.
/r/Communism was pretty critical of this article
Yeah I saw that, it may be a bit sensational with the title. However, having grown up in USSR I find the position relatable. We were taught Marxism as well, but most people didn’t really think too hard about it. It was seen as nothing more than a chore by most people.
I imagine a similar situation was happening in China because when you live in a particular system you tend to take it for granted. When capitalism was introduced, it brought a big boom along with it, and most people saw it as a net positive. It looks like now people are starting to see the problems associated with capitalism because they’re experiencing the negative effects first hand.
Luckily for China they didn’t flat out abandon communism the way we did in USSR. They still have a path back that doesn’t require having a revolution. Communism is still the state ideology and it’s actively promoted by the party. I think that young people becoming radicalized against capitalism will hopefully lead to further nationalization and eventual dismantling of the capitalist system there.
I know this is off-topic, but what was it like growing up there?
I grew up in Moscow, so my perspective might be a bit skewed by that. That said, I really liked my life during the soviet times. People were generally happy, and there wasn’t a lot of stress. Nobody worried about losing their job or not being able to retire. Nobody I knew worked overtime, and people generally had a lot of time off.
The city was very safe, and people let their kids out completely unsupervised and didn’t think twice about it. The neighborhoods were really well planned in my opinion. You’d have a bunch of apartment buildings around a central park with schools, hospitals, and grocery stores all within walking distance. You had everything you needed within walking distance from where you lived. Everybody lived in the same mixed housing, mechanics, plumbers, physicists, etc. all lived together.
Public transit was excellent, subways, trams, and buses were running at all times, and you never even had to think about it. You just go to a stop and something will come by in a 5-10 minutes.
Technology was less advanced. My family had a black and white TV without a remote, we used rotary phones even in the late 80s, and computers were rare. There was no personal computing to speak of, but schools were starting to have them right around the time of the collapse.
My overall memory of the time was of mostly being happy and optimistic about the future. Then the collapse happened and life went to shit real fast. Gorbachev and Yeltsin are motherfuckers.
I imagine a similar situation was happening in China because when you live in a particular system you tend to take it for granted
I’ve got a Chinese friend and this is kinda the impression I got talking to her about socialism. She was surprised to learn I was interested in socialism, but also didn’t really have much of an opinion on it or the Chinese government or any of that stuff, cause it’s just not something she’s thought about that much. Something she was taught about in school and then moved on from.
Yeah, and that’s just normal human behaviour. We tend to focus on things that are going wrong, and take things that are going well for granted. The reason there’s a resurgence of genuine interest in socialism in the West is because capitalism is failing huge numbers of people. People are seeing their material conditions degrading before their eyes, and they’re starting to wonder what went wrong.
Michael Parenti raises this point when he discusses the collapse of the Soviet Union. He talked to one of his pro-capitalist Russian academic colleagues about it, asking “what about the free high quality education, the job guarantees, the universal healthcare and the housing?” to which the Russian responded “that’s funny, no one ever talks about those”.
Yeah, he talks about this problem in detail in Blackshirts and Reds. Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
I’d have expected Chinese schools to teach it.
They do.
