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Kamil Galeev Profile picture
@kamilkazani
Aug 31, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
Not quite. In Stalin's era engineers indeed could enjoy royal lifestyle compared with working masses. You could realistically hope to get Your 👏 own  👏 apartment  👏 one day  👏, while others would live in barracks forever. Absolute kings
Since 1960s however system of incentives gradually changed. First, engineers were simply overproduced. Second, Soviet village with its seemingly infinite human resources was dying out. Third, Soviet government got wary of too many engineering grads. Are they even proletarian?
By the 1970s it was absolutely normal for industrial workers to earn more than engineers, way more. Hence jokes "The more you study, the less you earn". Sounds strange, but in the late USSR it was very real. Tons of engineers took workers' jobs to earn more cash
TL;DR

Early USSR = country with "normal" socioeconomic hierarchy. Engineers earn a lot, workers may fucking starve

Late USSR = country with abnormal socioeconomic hierarchy. Workers can often earn more than engineers. Tech education is not really rewarded

And then it collapsed

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More from @kamilkazani

Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Oct 9
Yes. Behind all the breaking news about the capture of small villages, we are missing the bigger pattern which is:

The Soviet American war was supposed to be fought to somewhere to the west of Rhine. What you got instead is a Soviet Civil War happening to the east of Dnieper
If you said that the battles of the great European war will not be fought in Dunkirk and La Rochelle, but somewhere in Kupyansk (that is here) and Rabotino, you would have been once put into a psych ward, or, at least, not taken as a serious person Image
The behemoth military machine had been built, once, for a thunderbolt strike towards the English Channel. Whatever remained from it, is now decimating itself in the useless battles over the useless coal towns of the Donetsk Oblast
Read 6 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Sep 7
Yes, and that is super duper quadruper important to understand

Koreans are poor (don't have an empire) and, therefore, must do productive work to earn their living. So, if the Americans want to learn how to do anything productive they must learn it from Koreans etc
There is this stupid idea that the ultra high level of life and consumption in the United States has something to do with their productivity. That is of course a complete sham. An average American doesn't do anything useful or important to justify (or earn!) his kingly lifestyle
The kingly lifestyle of an average American is not based on his "productivity" (what a BS, lol) but on the global empire Americans are holding currently. Part of the imperial dynamics being, all the actually useful work, all the material production is getting outsourced abroad
Read 8 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Sep 1
Reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Set in southwest England, somewhere in the late 1800s. And the first thing you need to know is that Tess is bilingual. He speaks a local dialect she learnt at home, and the standard English she picked at school from a London-trained teacher
So, basically, "normal" language doesn't come out of nowhere. Under the normal conditions, people on the ground speak all the incomprehensible patois, wildly different from each other

"Regular", "correct" English is the creation of state
So, basically, the state chooses a standard (usually, based on one of the dialects), cleanses it a bit, and then shoves down everyone's throats via the standardized education

Purely artificial construct, of a super mega state that really appeared only by the late 1800s
Read 10 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Aug 9
There's a subtle point here that 99,999% of Western commentariat is missing. Like, totally blind to. And that point is:

Building a huuuuuuuuuuge dam (or steel plant, or whatever) has been EVERYONE's plan of development. Like absolutely every developing country, no exceptions Image
Almost everyone who tried to develop did it in a USSR-ish way, via prestige projects. Build a dam. A steel plant. A huge plant. And then an even bigger one

And then you run out of money, and it all goes bust and all you have is postapocalyptic ruins for the kids to play in
If China did not go bust, in a way like almost every development project from the USSR to South Asia did, that probably means that you guys are wrong about China. Like totally wrong

What you describe is not China but the USSR, and its copies & emulations elsewhere
Read 7 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 7
Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan

Everyone is trying to appropriate the rise of China for their own purposes, like it proves their theory, ideology whatever

No one, however, wants to appropriate the post-Soviets, who, by the way, also made capitalist reforms
What I am saying is that "capitalist reforms" are a buzzword devoid of any actual meaning, and a buzzword that obfuscated rather than explains. Specifically, it is fusing radically different policies taken under the radically different circumstances (and timing!) into one - purely for ideological purposes
It can be argued, for example, that starting from the 1980s, China has undertaken massive socialist reforms, specifically in infrastructure, and in basic (mother) industries, such as steel, petrochemical and chemical and, of course, power

That was almost entirely state's job
Read 4 tweets
Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Jul 1
The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:

“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry

(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)

So, yes, living under the actual communism sucks
Read 5 tweets

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