Comment by inglor_cz
13 hours ago
During the economic transformation in the former Soviet Bloc, entire industries disappeared, and pitchforks weren't grabbed. I saw it myself, growing up in a heavy industry city that quickly turned into a rust belt city.
IDK why so many people romanticize pauper riots and try to wish them into existence. In practice, as long as people don't outright starve, they don't become violent just over losing their jobs.
All the post-1989 wars east of the former Iron Curtain were triggered by nationalism. Not a single one by a class conflict.
> "IDK why so many people romanticize pauper riots and try to wish them into existence."
They think they will be they ones leading the riots (the precariat will defer to them because they are "smart" apparently?) instead of they themselves being the ones being swarmed by rioters for visibly being just a little too well off.
> During the economic transformation in the former Soviet Bloc, entire industries disappeared, and pitchforks weren't grabbed
Wouldn't it be easy to argue that this is because there was more a social safety net to prevent said starvation and by that point people were extremely cynical about revolutionary ideas in a way that is not at all comparable?
The social safety net of a relatively poor country is not really better than the current social safety net in the US, because of the overall lower economic level that limits the amount of taxes collected.
Looking at the "hollers" in the Appalachia, the situation is quite comparable to that of the rust belts of the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe. You can buy groceries from welfare money, so you don't starve. Young people escape, old people sit and drink (or worse), but don't form a violent mob.
This is how economic decline usually looks like, including in the US. Reminds you of the poem about how the world does not end with a bang, but with a whimper.
It's cathartic to feel that your views are correct but simply suppressed by the establishment. You don't simply have a political opinion, you are ultimately correct, and the true absolution of revolution will make your opinion manifest. My family is from a developing country so the particulars are different, but yes people don't just descend into violent revolution because they lose their jobs. Unemployment is indeed a factor in revolution but is one of many.
It's one of those unfortunate aspects of internet information silos where people repeat this phrase to each other but don't really contextualize their opinions in the greater body of history and political thought.
Additionally, I think a lot of people with this opinion don't realize the vast difference in material standards we have today and what was true in the age of Communist revolution and decolonialization. It's tempting to think of material standards as relative and I think inequality is indeed a destabilizing factor in socities, but minimum material standards are true in so much of the world today that I think a class-conscious revolution is much harder in most of the developed and developing world absent other external political forces (e.g. nationalism, decolonoialism, etc)
It’s so ironic to use Soviet Union as anecdote here considering what led to its birth.
The Soviet Union isn’t exactly an outcome I’d hope for? I like the democracy option better than the pitchfork one
Massive military defeat in WWI which destabilized Russia. If the Whites were better organized, the result could easily have been a very bigoted nationalist dictatorship instead.
If Kerensky had been successful maybe Russia would have ended up with a Nordic democratic socialism model. Not that he necessarily had the wherewithal to be successful ( Ordered an ill-fated military offensive against Austro-Hungarian forces in June/July 1917 that resulted in heavy losses damaged him politically), but there was a brief shining moment prior to the Germans injecting Lenin back into Russia. The German gambit that sending Lenin into Russia would take Russia out of the war paid off much more handsomely than they could've imagined.
It was still a very bigoted nationalist dictatorship. People were sent to the gulag or killed otherwise, for instance through man made famine. Both minorities and so called enemies of the state. The most violent won. That's how one gets leaders like Stalin.
[dead]
We did grab pitchforks further East, in Romania, they were called Mineriads (the last one took place in early 1999 [1]), it's only that the Westernized elites painted that as barbarism (i.e. the miners were seen as barbarians) versus them, the Westernized elites, and with Western money on their side said elites prevailed in the end.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1999_Mineriad
Judging from your username you were from a country that ended up integrated into the EU. Good for you. But in Russia you can draw a direct line between the economical collapse and drop in living standards of the 90s and the rise of Putin as the big man who will put an end to the disruption.
Indeed I wrote about this on my Substack:
https://komando1.substack.com/p/when-the-russians-wanted-com...
But this still wasn't case of pitchforks. It was "just" an election, and the Putin regime, for the next 10 years since his election, wasn't even particularly grim.