alt Hacker NewsDuring 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.
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> 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?
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.
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.
> "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.