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AFAIR "The Dispossed" assumed people will accept radically lower standard of living, if the system itself is "fair" (low inequality). Communism implemented that
by badpun 4y ago
AFAIR "The Dispossed" assumed people will accept radically lower standard of living, if the system itself is "fair" (low inequality). Communism implemented that in pratice (low inequality, but also low standard of living) and people hated it.
- int_19h 4y agoNone of the regimes that used the label "communist" in our actual history have ever implemented anything like that in practice. In USSR under Stalin, families of well-off party members (not just political elites, but valuable specialists as well) had domestic servants - not even in a wink wink nudge nudge kind of way, but all completely legal and official. Communists, and statist socialists in general, are actually represented in the book as the state of Thu. And it's implied to be just as nasty and authoritarian as the real deal.
- badpun 4y agoPolish communist apparatchiks were better off than regular Poles, but they essentially lived the life of middle class American (a house, car, maybe summer cottage, yearly vacations in Bulgaria or some other place with a sea and a lot of sun). The inequality levels were low back then. Nevertheless, people hated it.
- int_19h 4y agoThe important thing in this case isn't the absolute degree of income inequality, but rather how it is perceived. When state propaganda talks non-stop about how everybody's equal in this new paradise, yet every day you see things - even little ones - demonstrating that some animals are manifestly more equal than others, that can grate a lot more than a similar relative difference in a society that openly puts inequality on its shield. And there was no shortage of those little things. Well, I can't speak for Poland, but even in the late USSR (which was comparatively less unequal than Stalin's one, ironically), there was still blat and Beryozkas.