June 3, 1968 was a beautiful late Spring day in Belgrade. The school year was just about to end, and, for me the best days were about to begin: until the mid-July when many of my friends who had either relatives in the village or second homes on the seaside would go on vacation and I would not see them for two months. But now, during the beautiful, clear June days with long sweet evenings we could stay out in the streets seemingly forever, play soccer, tell tall stories and talk about the girls.
How similar our experiences are. Yours in Belgrade, mine in New York City in April and May of the same year at Columbia University. Some of the specifics are different, but the base is the same. We, like others in cities around the world, were protestng against the unfillfileed promises of our country's leaders, the ideals they supposedly espoused, in some contained in founding documents. In my case, after participating in the protests, I dropped out of Columbia. The real world beckoned with such force I could no longer remain in what to me was a world of theory, much of it hypocrictical, not the reality of experience. It was a good decision. I learned much more than I would have if I'd stayed. Your great work, based on emprical evidence, which exposes the contradictions we saw in 1968's spring and much more, is a testament to this. As always, thank you.
China's governing elite has not been based on wealth based or inheritance for 1500 years.
It has gradually reduced the proportion of officials with relatives in government from 63% in 600 AD to 6%-7% today. Those who get in endure a 25-year trial by ordeal, as has been the case for a millennium.
re Slezkine's "House of Government" — I haven't read it, but it sounds a lot like one of the most bitter, merciless and brilliant novellas of the Soviet era, Trifonov's "House on the Embankment". It sounds like Slezkine wrote about the same building. A good friend of mine lived there in the 1990s, but that's another story. Trifonov's novels, the ones I've read, are very much about new and old Red elites. The Glenny translation of House on the Embankment also includes an even better novella, "Another Life", about the bitter struggle of a Moscow academic intellectual in the 1970s against the very familiar guild-world of insulated academic mediocrity. I think Trifonov was never recognized enough in the West because his novels presented inner Soviet life as far too familiar to western readers, who were looking for something antithetical, orwellian-fright-porn, not hopelessly familiar. https://www.amazon.com/Another-House-Embankment-European-Classics/dp/0810115700
Very interesting. I'm not well-informed about Yugoslavia's societal formation.
The original Bolsheviks were already aware of a cultural differentiation between the members of the Politburo of the USSR and the rest of the people and already saw that as dangerous to Soviet security. For example, the members of the Politburo had the privilege to take holidays (a privilege even Trotsky used and abused during the Triumvirate era of the USSR). Lenin also had those privileges but, since he was very ill from the very beginning of the Revolution and died shortly after, people saw it more like a well-deserved end-of-life care for their founding father than a privilege.
However, it is important to highlight that, although there was a differentiation of material well-being, and that this differentiation was, to a good extent, hereditary, it was never nowhere near the chasm that separates the capitalist societies. For example, the members of the original Soviet elite ate frugally, and, although their children had access to the best universities and the like, they don't seem to have inherited their power, that is, being a son of a member of the Politburo didn't entitle him to be a member of the Politburo -- that kind of heredity definitely didn't exist in the USSR (that's why we don't see Stalins, Krushchevs, Brezhnevs or even Gorbachevs as oligarch families in modern Russia or Ukraine).
True power in the USSR was in the Politburo -- whose privileges were not inheritable --, and the very logic of its mechanism was allergic to heredity, because it was based on the structure of the Western-originated political party. Most of the readers of this blog are not party members, but talk to someone who is (even a traditional, Western, center-left party) and he/she will talk to you that what's decisive in a party is seniority and the amount of votes one has among the registered base, not the family or wealth a member has. That explains why the USSR only had one general-secretary who was born after October 1917: the very last one, Gorbachev.
But maybe Yugoslavia was different. Maybe it was, from the very beginning, much more capitalist-oriented than the USSR.
The big fat question remains, though: why was the generation that commanded 1968, apparently being so against social/class inequality, suddenly being so OK with the capitalist restoration (and thus much starker inequality) of the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet world. My take is the fall of the socialist world in the Slavic sphere (remember: it still survives in Asia and Cuba) was, first and foremost, the exhaustion of the Soviet Socialist mode of production and, second, a coup d'Etat of a very specific strata of the managerial class (red managers) and people who were at the right place, right time, when it fell. Almost all of the modern-day Russian oligarchs come from such background.
We should really try direct democracy by sortition - and a solid oversight system of the professional/managerial class, bureaucracy and executive, etc. The way we demand cameras on the police, to also have cameras and audio recording of any officials on duty.
How similar our experiences are. Yours in Belgrade, mine in New York City in April and May of the same year at Columbia University. Some of the specifics are different, but the base is the same. We, like others in cities around the world, were protestng against the unfillfileed promises of our country's leaders, the ideals they supposedly espoused, in some contained in founding documents. In my case, after participating in the protests, I dropped out of Columbia. The real world beckoned with such force I could no longer remain in what to me was a world of theory, much of it hypocrictical, not the reality of experience. It was a good decision. I learned much more than I would have if I'd stayed. Your great work, based on emprical evidence, which exposes the contradictions we saw in 1968's spring and much more, is a testament to this. As always, thank you.
China's governing elite has not been based on wealth based or inheritance for 1500 years.
It has gradually reduced the proportion of officials with relatives in government from 63% in 600 AD to 6%-7% today. Those who get in endure a 25-year trial by ordeal, as has been the case for a millennium.
No mention of Milovan Djilas, The New Class??
re Slezkine's "House of Government" — I haven't read it, but it sounds a lot like one of the most bitter, merciless and brilliant novellas of the Soviet era, Trifonov's "House on the Embankment". It sounds like Slezkine wrote about the same building. A good friend of mine lived there in the 1990s, but that's another story. Trifonov's novels, the ones I've read, are very much about new and old Red elites. The Glenny translation of House on the Embankment also includes an even better novella, "Another Life", about the bitter struggle of a Moscow academic intellectual in the 1970s against the very familiar guild-world of insulated academic mediocrity. I think Trifonov was never recognized enough in the West because his novels presented inner Soviet life as far too familiar to western readers, who were looking for something antithetical, orwellian-fright-porn, not hopelessly familiar. https://www.amazon.com/Another-House-Embankment-European-Classics/dp/0810115700
Very interesting. I'm not well-informed about Yugoslavia's societal formation.
The original Bolsheviks were already aware of a cultural differentiation between the members of the Politburo of the USSR and the rest of the people and already saw that as dangerous to Soviet security. For example, the members of the Politburo had the privilege to take holidays (a privilege even Trotsky used and abused during the Triumvirate era of the USSR). Lenin also had those privileges but, since he was very ill from the very beginning of the Revolution and died shortly after, people saw it more like a well-deserved end-of-life care for their founding father than a privilege.
However, it is important to highlight that, although there was a differentiation of material well-being, and that this differentiation was, to a good extent, hereditary, it was never nowhere near the chasm that separates the capitalist societies. For example, the members of the original Soviet elite ate frugally, and, although their children had access to the best universities and the like, they don't seem to have inherited their power, that is, being a son of a member of the Politburo didn't entitle him to be a member of the Politburo -- that kind of heredity definitely didn't exist in the USSR (that's why we don't see Stalins, Krushchevs, Brezhnevs or even Gorbachevs as oligarch families in modern Russia or Ukraine).
True power in the USSR was in the Politburo -- whose privileges were not inheritable --, and the very logic of its mechanism was allergic to heredity, because it was based on the structure of the Western-originated political party. Most of the readers of this blog are not party members, but talk to someone who is (even a traditional, Western, center-left party) and he/she will talk to you that what's decisive in a party is seniority and the amount of votes one has among the registered base, not the family or wealth a member has. That explains why the USSR only had one general-secretary who was born after October 1917: the very last one, Gorbachev.
But maybe Yugoslavia was different. Maybe it was, from the very beginning, much more capitalist-oriented than the USSR.
The big fat question remains, though: why was the generation that commanded 1968, apparently being so against social/class inequality, suddenly being so OK with the capitalist restoration (and thus much starker inequality) of the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet world. My take is the fall of the socialist world in the Slavic sphere (remember: it still survives in Asia and Cuba) was, first and foremost, the exhaustion of the Soviet Socialist mode of production and, second, a coup d'Etat of a very specific strata of the managerial class (red managers) and people who were at the right place, right time, when it fell. Almost all of the modern-day Russian oligarchs come from such background.
Liberal bourgeois western pseudo democracy and its meritocracy is an enticing trap - it is justification for both inequality and the class system
We should really try direct democracy by sortition - and a solid oversight system of the professional/managerial class, bureaucracy and executive, etc. The way we demand cameras on the police, to also have cameras and audio recording of any officials on duty.
Democracy is domination.