EPGAH writes:
Members of the right party or the right school get the goldmine, and everyone else gets the shaft.
This was never really true. Yes there was a nomenklatura, but so what? Isn’t a bit rich that US conservatives, capitalists and rich people attacked the USSR for having a class system? They should have been happy that the USSR had a class system.
Anyway, with anti-Communist critics, they want to have it both ways.
First they attack Communists for supposedly making everyone equal and paying everyone the same rate and thereby destroying initiative.
Then they have the gall to attack Communism for having a class system in which some people made more money than others.
You can’t win!
First you are bad because you pay everyone the same, and then you are bad because some people make more money! What a preposterous argument.
Yes there was a nomenklatura in the USSR, and they did live somewhat better than your average person. But they did not live dramatically better. Yes, were differentials between the nomenklatura and the ordinary people, but they were not dramatic differentials, and they were nothing like the wildly insane inequality you see under capitalism.
Yes, much was made of the fact that the nomenklatura had vacation dachas in the countryside, but the truth is that 50% of the urban population in the USSR had a dacha vacation home in the countryside. Incidentally most people grew their own food in the gardens of these dachas.
Even after Communism fell in the USSR, in modern Russia, everyone who had a dacha in the USSR got to keep it, so most Russians have a dacha even to this day, and they still use them to grow crops just like under the USSR. In fact, fully 50% of the harvest in Russia today comes from these small family gardens! Some people also keep livestock, and they were allowed to keep some pigs or chickens even during the USSR.
I believe that the dachas of the nomenklatura may have been significantly fancier than the average person’s dacha, but the USSR upper class did not live in anything like the preposterous mansions that no one needs that the rich have in capitalist countries.
Also it’s not true that some people lucked into a goldmine by being Communist party members or going to the right school, and it’s not true that ordinary people got the shaft either.
Ordinary people lived decent lives where they had most everything they needed, so they didn’t get shafted, and although the privileged did get to live somewhat better lives, it wasn’t a goldmine.
Anyway, those born into the right circumstances or who go to the right school get a goldmine and else gets the shaft is pretty much the way it goes in most capitalist countries, right? So if it was like that in the USSR (and it wasn’t) why would that even be a bad thing? If that statement were true, it would mean that the USSR operated under a privileged system similar to that of capitalist countries, and why would it be a critique to say that the USSR was similar to capitalist countries? Is that supposed to be an insult? I do not get it.