>It encouraged workers to vacation with groups of relative strangers as opposed to their friends and families.
This can actually work out well. I experienced something similar in the US while on vacation. I was traveling with someone from Glenwood Springs, CO to Denver, CO via Amtrak. We went to the dining car for lunch an since there were two of us and space is at a premium, the Amtrak policy was to seat us with one or two random strangers. We sat and had lunch with an oil executive and someone's grandmother and it was quite an interesting experience and we got to meet two strangers. It was actually a highlight of that train trip.
I feel like the experience of having unplanned social interactions with strangers is often missing in modern American life. I don't know if the Soviet style of assigning vacation groups via a worker's committee would be pleasant, but I can't help but think things would be better if we had more situations where we are "forced" to engage with strangers.
This is a very good idea for teenagers and younger adults to break them out of the online world.
For working class though, its probably best not to force people to socialize. The thing that doesn't get talked enough about in socialization is that its not all positive, and people have different tolerance to each others bullshit.
My dad had a, to teenage me, embarrassing habit of asking less-than-full tables at busy restaurants (mostly tables that looked like they'd just been seated, only drinks or maybe appetizers) if they would like some company and conversation.
It got us an invitation surprisingly often, skipping a long wait or a walk to another restaurant, and made for some interesting table talk at the same time.
funny that you say that. i just noticed that twice today in a cafe. why frankfurt of all towns? munich makes sense for this to develop because of their biergarten culture with long benches and long tables
Not too uncommon in Bavaria and Austria, if the restaurant (or especially beergarden) is quite full - the waiters will even sometimes just place you there or give you the option to leave, or wait. I wouldn't say I've seen it if there are free tables though - but I've also been to regions where this would never ever happen, where your table is yours and yours alone.
I'd say talking to the people at your table is purely optional, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
On the contrary, it might be crucial for the working class that is growing more isolated by the day and prevent a lot of the negative socialization you're referencing. Which imo stems from a lack of experience of handling conversations (we really do not get enough practice outside of people we already have lots of common ground with, ie our friends), and also an increased sensitivity from this isolation "choice".
I don't think that people are "inexperienced" in conversations nor that the negative socialization comes that much from not sharing a common ground. A lot of negative socialization can come from people not having an interesting conversation, or being too self-centered, or repetitive, or convoluted, or not knowing when to just leave the other person alone.
I am also skeptical of the fact that "the working class is growing more isolated by the day". Looking around my environment, it seems that the advent of social networks (FB, Whatsapp, Instagram, etc) has made it far easier to keep in contact and to organize meetings with people. I know that I would be socializing far less if the only means of communication we had were the phone and letters.
As long as it's a situation where you can opt out of further interactions, it's no so bad. You meet, you decide if you want to keep talking, and then move on.
Still common in many countries (where you never discuss religion or politics unless it’s after 2am and you’re all drunk).
Personally, I dislike the “bring your whole self to work” thing that companies like google encourage (used to?), where people talk about extremely polarizing topics on the company chat groups.
It can go either way in practice. If you force someone to socialize with people they don't really like, you risk conditioning them to hate socialization in general.
I really like it too. It happens more often than you think.
My wife and I went on a cruise once when we were still dating, and it was one of the ones where they assign you a table to eat. Since we were a young couple, they assumed we were newlyweds and seated us with a bunch of other newlyweds. It was fun to hear all their stories (one was a Mormon couple who had just had a very traditional Mormon wedding for example). Then 1/2 way through the cruise they switched it up and we ended up at a table with a large family from rural Oregon, who were sad at the lack of meat on the menu. Normally at home they would sit on the back porch with rifles and shoot animals that would walk by and then eat them. Which was just a really interesting thing to learn about, given that we had always been city folk.
And on another trip we stayed at a small place in Costa Rica that offered local tours each day as a planned activity. We ended up touring with a bunch of other Americans that were staying at the same place. Connected with them on Facebook and we're all still connected to this day, occasionally commenting on each other's posts.
In fact two of them were a young couple like us who were just dating and also traveling with their parents. We both ended up having kids around the same time and have even met up with them when we were in their home town.
Haga has a flagged comment pointing out the purpose of this policy, and I can't figure out why it is flagged, so I'll just quote what the article says:
"It encouraged workers to vacation with groups of relative strangers as opposed to their friends and families. They were all part of a collective and that umbrella united them. In the Soviet Union, after all, the collective—not the family—was the most important social unit."
Yes, the purpose of the policy was to dismantle the commitment to the family and establish commitment to "the collective." This is also why the children were sent elsewhere.
I remember the slogan "Family is the unit of society" and childless people had to pay a special tax. Also infidelity in marriage was frowned upon and could negatively affect the career.
This has changed from early Soviet Union to late Soviet Union.
Early Soviet Union was much more radical and utopian, with ideas almost like in Plato's republic with the goal to getting to the point where the state rather than the parents would be raising children.
This was later abolished in the 30's and 40's and more traditional family values were encouraged.
From the "I remember" I assume you lived through it. Were you per chance from "proper" soviet union, aka Moscow / Petrograd area? Because allegiance to the state and nothing else was the ideal in the "less correct" regions such as Baltics. It "got better" as time wore on, but especially after the occupation, every attempt was made to erode anything and everything else people might gather around. Forced ethnic mixing with deportations to faraway regions to dillute national identity. Pioneer movement and schoolwork that taught you to think of the union first, family second. Heck, even open encouragement to rat out your parents for "un-soviet" behavior.
It might be sovietophobic in the sense we would rather not have it repeat, to put mildly. But for the occupied regions, it was far from fiction.
This is what gets peddled across the world, but for the most part, Soviet Union eas busy creating those national identities. Sometimes it took a break when it became too inconvenient, only to resume it later. Soviet Union is who created these national states in the first place. There were no Georgia and no Uzbekistan before the USSR. In both cases there were a bunch of unaligned tribes or much smaller principalities with no real national identity.
You are right about national policy of the early Soviet Union which was promoting national identities of people of former Russian Empire [0] but you are definitely wrong about Georgia [1].
Unaligned tribes? That's... quite a thing to claim, especially about Georgia which had unified national monarchy and long dynasties since Middle Ages, only falling to endless external conquests due to being located between several large parts of the world.
I don't really understand what you claim to be the Soviet propaganda. 400 years of the unified Kingdom of Georgia founded in 11th century?.. Mingrelia was one of the pieces of a single country torn apart by Arab, Persian, Turkic, and Mongolian conquests.
A lot of ethnicities are torn apart and stay that way. Ask Kurds. Or XXI century Russians for that matter.
I am just pointing out that Soviet Union has encouraged large ethnicities to coalesce, collect their shared history and culture (often inventing large portions in process) and build a nation state on top of that. This is not something you should take for granted, but that's what you've got under Soviet rule.
Not everybody got that privilege, of course. Ethnic Russians, but also Jews and Germans, did not get to have their own nation state in USSR. Technically, Jews had one but it was a joke[1]; Germans briefly had one[2]; Russians hoped to have one after WW2, with capital in Leningrad, but were derailed (Leningrad affair[3]). RSFSR was like a one huge Washington DC in that regard, with glistering Moscow and Leningrad but it was more like Puerto Rico as you descended into Nechernozem'ye[4]. No statehood.
From what I've read, the dismantling of families was really implemented in the 1920s and perhaps 1930s. That's when a kid [1] who ratted on his own father (likely sent him to Gulags) was glorified as a huge Hero of Socialism. After that period though, Communism was gradually less about implementing its distopian ideology and more about naked power of people on top, so the destruction of families was abandoned.
Or it's just believing Marx when he wrote this in the Communist Manifesto:
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
It's more common even in the west than it seems like people realize. I've been on a bunch of vacations with strangers. From companies who offer tours of Italy, etc., bus day/overnight trips to somewhere sorta locally, cruises, etc.
I served on a jury last year and that was one of many interesting aspects of it: dealing with people from all walks of life who I ordinarily would not interact with.
I was taking my mother to hospital today. While waiting I spent my time people watching.
It's the last place in the Netherlands where your social and financial status has no value and everyone is truly equal. You see all walks of life and everyone is in it together at the mercy of science they don't understand.
Agreed. For some people, conversation takes energy. Being in a group takes energy. A vacation where you're out with complete strangers, in a group where you can't really do whatever you like and have to follow and compromise and discuss things, sounds like hell. I'd have to take a vacation from that.
I’m reminded of the last story in Buster Scruggs. The conversation had by a group of such different people. …so long as the train isn’t going to the same destination.
The point of this is to encourage atomization and discourage the formation of long term friendships, which could form a substrate for dissident networks.
Growing up in USSR, my mother would take us for a summer in some mountains/vacation destination and work there as a guide. One time in Kandalaksha gulf in White Sea near Murmansk she was a wilderness guide for a few rounds of tourists from elsewhere in Soviet Union for a 8 day hiking in mountains/sailing on the White Sea trip. We had such wide range of people - from experienced outdoors people to the elderly pensioners who were hardly mobile. It was wild, remote with sun endlessly circling and never setting, salmon fishing in rivers/herring fishing in the White Sea. I got to see a nuclear sub float by once, and we came by a remote nuclear-powered remote listening station festooned with antennas, but otherwise it was really remote.
Since then and until recently most people go to Turkey, though. White Sea was hypothermia inducing within a minute even in the height of July.
There is so much amazing beauty in the world, including the largest country on the planet, Russia - and then especially areas in China, which I would LOVE to visit, but the governments of each country kinda suck, so its not a place I'll likely go (imagine mtn biking through some of the amazing landscapes of either)
With that said, I'd love to hear Lex Fridman's opinion on all of this.
I encourage you (barring safety concerns) to travel to countries whose governments are considered illiberal. Some of my most enlightening trips were to DPRK, Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Brunei. You learn a lot about how the western media tends to exaggerate for political ends.
> Some of my most enlightening trips were to DPRK, Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Brunei. You learn a lot about how the western media tends to exaggerate for political ends.
I am not a Westerner, and I highly doubt you could get an understanding of what it is like to live in such countries by merely visiting them as a tourist.
When I went to DPRK, the entire visit was completely orchestrated - but I still got to see people go about their daily lives (even tho I had no idea who they were and had no way of interacting with them). I saw peasants carrying bundles of sticks along empty roads and witnessed how impoverished they really are. I got to kick a ball around with some kids and see locals enjoying a sunny Sunday in the park. I also looked out my hotel window at night and saw a city in darkness.
When visiting Turkmenistan, I was completely unsupervised - and it was eye-opening and completely bizarre. I actually interacted with the locals and got to hear their stories - same in China and Uzbekistan.
Absolutely enlightening, but be prepared to be made very sad by the truth about how many people actually live in illiberal countries.
Also unless you make a very concerted effort to get to know what is going on, you often will be blissfully ignorant because tourist areas are abnormally nice, and the workers in the tourist areas can be very motivated to present a happy face, and usually a language barrier.
You do get a slight feel, but what you don’t get to see is usually the part that matters e.g. why uncle Bob is dead or in jail; the difficulty in getting healthcare in Cuba; police abuse; the hidden constraints on “normal” freedoms.
No, you learn a lot about how illiberal governments treat foreign visitors from wealthy western countries, and how they leverage their power to control what you as a tourist see and hear.
The first country you list is the DPRK, who are famed for carefully stage-managing any visit by western tourists.
If you want an honest view of those places, you have to speak with people who aren’t risking their lives or livelihoods if they tell you the truth.
North Korea is an exception, since it’s pretty hard to talk to actual locals.
Having lived in one of those illiberal countries for a while (China) I could clearly see how the US media distorted everything, reduced Chinese people to a monolith, downplayed or simply ignored all of the genuinely good things happening, and took every opportunity to highlight the negatives. It is to the point where every positive, interesting, or beautiful thing is reflexively shot down and dismissed.
> US media distorted everything, reduced Chinese people to a monolith, downplayed or simply ignored all of the genuinely good things happening
The media I follow generally acknowledge that Chinese adopting capitalism led to the greatest increase of standard of living in entire human history (in terms of how quick it was and how many people were affected). That's not downplaying.
There’s always the kind of article that suggests that Chinese academic achievements are not that impressive because for some reason Chinese graduate students are just some kind of robotized academics incapable of independent thought, creativity and are just ver good order followers, which is something that everyone who has actually worked with Chinese folks know it is a stupid generalization.
That is a fairly simplified view which is very convenient for particular Western political interests but I don’t see it as a reflection of reality.
The Chinese have “capitalism” with significant public investment in infrastructure and education. Bullet trains can take you everywhere on the cheap. Few foreign companies have been successful due in some part to protectionism (but also failed business models). Their markets are highly regulated, preventing mergers and IPOs of large companies. Ant Group for example. Jack Ma was severely punished for even suggesting that bank regulators ease up. They also have strict data regulations.
On the other hand, workers’ rights are a lot more curtailed. A lot of tech works 996, and unionization is pretty rare. Getting 2 days off per week isn’t the norm like in the US. And forget about OSHA. So in that sense they are almost hyper-capitalist.
The point is, I don’t think it fits cleanly into the ideologies that many would like to apply to them.
The question is if the regulation and intervention is for the greater good, or is it because someone in the CCP took a bribe or saw an opportunity to steal the company from the rightful owner.
Maybe you should have gone to China last year or the year before to enjoy the authentic Chinese experience of living in a cage without food because grocery shopping was verboten.
This is exhibit A of how the media in the US and Europe misrepresent China. The fact that you think this is how things were perfectly illustrates the problem. If zero-CoVID had really meant endless lockdowns, Chinese people wouldn't have put up with the policy for nearly 3 years.
There were lockdowns in China, but they were limited in time, and before mid-2022, they were relatively rare (as in, nobody I knew was subject to one after CoVID was eliminated in China in March-April 2020). For most of 2020-21, life in China was more normal than in the US and Europe.
Didn't say that. It's a fact that some parts of China were locked down for months, and that people were going hungry because they couldn't get food. That was all over Chinese social media.
Some tiny border towns were. Long lockdowns of major cities were very rare: Shanghai (2 months), Xi'an (a few weeks), and then the list gets pretty thin. There were sporadic lockdowns, but nothing like what one would imagine if, say, CNN were one's only source of information.
> Maybe you should have gone to China last year or the year before to enjoy the authentic Chinese experience of living in a cage without food because grocery shopping was verboten.
That's the bailey, the wide-ranging generalization about China as dystopian hellhole that you want to make. When you get pushback, you retreat to the defensible motte of: Well, there were some lockdowns for limited time periods in some places in China. The second the coast is clear, you go back to occupying the bailey.
Yes. The "authentic Chinese experience" is not living in a cage without food. The "authentic Chinese experience" is living in a massive, bustling city with great cuisine, terrible traffic jams and awesome public transit.
That's an extreme outlier within China, and it was for a limited period of time. People were not kept in cages: they lived in their apartments. It was difficult to order food at first, but people managed, and the initial supply problems were alleviated.
Everything you said was ridiculous hyperbole. That's not a "nitpick." You took the most extreme thing that ever happened anywhere in China during the pandemic, wildly exaggerated it, and then presented it as normal life in China.
The lockdown was a difficult but highly unusual event. However, it also wasn't nearly as extreme as you describe: people didn't live in cages and they didn't starve.
With sufficient repetition, propaganda embeds itself into a person’s core belief system. This makes it self-replicating in ways that no state alone has the resources to accomplish.
Very quickly when people travel (even if within their own country), they realize that their worldview has been shaped by what others want them to see. Maybe it is a benign travel ad that crops out the favela in the background, maybe it is genuinely lovely people colored as backwards or belligerent. There’s a reason someone has chosen to post that video or show you that picture.
Oh, I've been to China many times. Enough times to appreciate not having been born there. Western media about China, while somewhat one-sided, isn't particularly unfair in my experience.
For example, I could say that Mao ordered the killing of all of China's sparrows, leading to a massive famine. Is it one-sided to not mention that this was under the mistaken belief that the sparrows were eating all of the food? Maybe. I don't think it's unfair, though. It was idiotic and it had disastrous consequences.
One could also mention that the one-child policy was kept in place for years after China's looming demographic issues became apparent, and the silliness of replacing it first with a two-child, and then a three-child policy before its abolition. Perhaps it would be one-sided to not mention the massive bureaucracy of the family planning commission consisting of millions of workers at both the central and local government levels who would have to find other work without it (of which I even have family who used to coerce women into getting abortions), but I don't think that makes it any better.
Or ghost cities, which appear in Western media, but rarely mentioning that most of the apartments in these cities end up getting bought because of a real estate bubble in which Chinese citizens pour their savings into buying empty apartments in empty cities. It is 'one-sided' perhaps to not mention that the apartments have owners, but it is factually true that they are empty and the ghost cities exist.
Is Western media sometimes unfair? Sure. The BRI gets painted as a debt trap, but the reality is the projects really are intended to be profitable. Will travelling to China help with that? I don't see why, since the BRI is investment in countries outside of China.
The biggest misconception most Westerners have, though, is that they are under the illusion that the Chinese are yearning to be free from their oppressive government. And perhaps that is the 'distortion' you are thinking of. Is this a result of the media? Perhaps. But in my opinion, it is a factor of Westerners implicitly believing that all people are just like them, when in reality tyranny is only possible because the people who live under it accept it. Every nation gets the government it deserves.
Funny, I have been to China many times visiting family and have never felt that western media has been particularly unfair in its portrayal.
I would rather not ever go back while Xi is still in power if I can help it (unfortunately I may have to one or two more times for familial obligations) and would recommend against going to anyone on the fence. Don't get Brittney Griner'd.
His rule has corresponded to a more authoritarian turn in China, especially in the last few years with his abolition of term limits. It was hardly a liberal country before, but the fact is it has gotten significantly worse, and I have no confidence of that situation improving as long as Xi is in power. I have no desire to end up like, say, Saad Ibrahim Almadi.
> do you have reason to believe his successor would be any better?
It's not difficult to visit China (except that you'll probably have to apply for a visa, but Chinese people have to do that to visit Western countries too).
You won't experience much about the government while there. Police aren't really that present in public. Border control is like any other country. The only issue you're likely to run into is the Great Firewall, for which you can just install a VPN before arriving in country.
Many Westerners experience a sort of shock when they first visit China, because the dystopia they're expecting to see never materializes.
Very much this. The only area where I felt uncomfortable was in Xinjiang, as two friends in that region have effectively been “disappeared”. While I am skeptical of much of what has been written on this topic, due to its obvious use as propaganda, many of the tours I had there reminded me of those in DPRK. There was an obvious level of orchestration designed to show you a face of Xinjiang which lacked any warts.
This was right before COVID. I was there as part of an economic cooperation summit, so the tours were part and parcel of that event. I am supposed to visit again later this year.
So presumably you can wander out into town in the evening after work? Maybe you should try doing that next time.
Even bog standard tourist bus trips in literally every country have obvious levels of orchestration designed to show you a face of that region which lacked any warts.
I did visit parts of the area on my own. My issue was with the discordance between what the Chinese press and my more militant Chinese friends say and what I saw in the totality of my time there. I had no less than 6 seemingly non-extremist Uighurs express their desire to live in the states for religious freedom reasons.
I still can't forget how the immigration tried to disassemble my camera lens in Shanghai (not just remove them from the camera, but also tear them down), so visiting China might lead to some unexpected bad impressions. Also being barely able to see sun in Beijing due to fog/smog everywhere when arriving from pristine New Zealand looked very unwelcoming.
American police are actually much more scary tbh. Physically, many Chinese cops are fairly scrawny and usually don’t carry guns, maybe just handcuffs and a baton. Their main weapon is their body camera. Sometimes they do carry guns but it’s not the norm imo.
I will add one more aspect is the almost complete absence of traffic cops. A lot of the most dangerous situations with cops in the US have been at traffic stops. But in China there are cameras that send out tickets automatically. I’m sure there are due process concerns with that implementation, but there is also a zero percent chance you will be killed by police at a traffic stop.
Are "many Westerners" really expecting China to be a dystopia? I'm a westerner and my impression of the Soviet Union (and now Russia) was intuitively dire (probably exaggerated compared to reality) but my intuitive expectations of China isn't really.
I feel like "westerners" today treat China like they used to treat Japan in the 70s/80s, not like they used to treat the Soviet Union. There's plenty of positive reporting about how things "just work" in China compared to the west (especially constructing infrastructure) and strong economy development.
If you bring your own cell data plan you won't even need to futz with VPN. Cell data tunnels back to the carrier and the Great Firewall doesn't block anything.
You may be surprised to find out that outside of HN, not many people use Internet freedom as a prime measurement of dystopia.
As a techie I am personally also very annoyed at the lack of Internet freedom. But as a Chinese I also recognize that there are many more aspects in life and society that are more important than Internet freedom, and that China scores pretty high at (especially in historic context).
Said the Americans. Until they got drafted into an illegal war in Vietnam or were given no other chance to earn a living than getting paid to kill in illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And let’s not even talking about all the coups the State Department and the CIA nurtured across countless countries
Just because I pose no real threat to the system and by being allowed to ineffectively ranting I help to build the illusion of freedom.
Now, try being Chelsea Manning and watch in awe the speed of the boot coming into your face the minute you really threaten the system.
My stron belief is that freedom of speech (free internet) together with democratic elections are the only things that combined can prevent the government from coming up with their own rules when it so suits them.
And when they eventually do, you will have nothing to say about it
Just like the russians today.
They too have a rich culture of writers, poets and composers that they should have the right to be proud of.
When you dismissively say “internet freedom”, what you really mean is “free expression”, “freedom of association”, “right to peaceably assembly”, and “right to petition your government for a redress of grievances”.
I'll give you something much simpler than all of those things: having enough food, having housing that doesn't leak, having running water, having electricity, having access to schooling, having toilets, not having nearly every street in the city be a dirty mud pool full of trash, having safe streets mostly devoid of violent crimes.
None of those things were a given when I grew up. Those things ard still not a given in many countries in which the west tried to forcefully introduce western liberal democracy, where they all focus on things like "freedom of association" at the expense of freedom from poverty.
When you are poor, you are not free, no matter how much you can voice your opinion.
I am sorry but seeing my parents and grandparents working their asses off in a society where your next meal is not guaranteed, lifting 800M people out of poverty, seeing my hometown stop being a trashy mudpool and seeing the elimination of child abductions, count for much more to me than any amount of VPN annoyance. In the grand scheme of things, these are still literally the best 30 years out of 3000 years.
> You can, in fact, lift a country out of poverty without also inflicting an authoritarian state on the populace.
> Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism.
You mean the half of the world that enriched itself by inflicting "authoritarianism" on other populations - or indeed, their own populations too - unless you don't consider the treatment of Black and Native people in the US to be authoritarianism, or the Irish in the UK, etc etc?
If you truly want to know what I think and why I think it, feel free to email me and take this discussion off HN. You can find my contact through my profile.
If you can’t make the case for China’s authoritarian capitalism here, I don’t see how picking it up over e-mail is going to help.
It’s also counterproductive to take the debate offline, as further discussion would be for the benefit of anyone else that might read this thread. I’ll never agree that lifting people out of poverty requires authoritarian control over the populace.
It's not necessarily that it requires authoritarian rule, but rather that if you grew up in a rich country, you have a very different view on what is important.
Internet censorship generally ranks very low on your list of concerns if you're struggling to put food on the table. People in China have seen a complete transformation of their lives for the better, in just a few decades. They've gone from bicycles to electric cars, from not having reliable electricity to paying for everything with 5G-connected smartphones. From the point of view of how people live their everyday lives, things are better than ever.
Issues like censorship will become more important over time, but right now, they're still secondary. There are other issues at play as well, such as the legitimacy the Party still enjoys from the revolution and from its management of the economic boom of the last few decades, and people's fear of the sort of chaos that consumed China for much of its modern history.
Well people protested against 0-covid during a time that the media reported as "Xi wants to maintain 0-covid forever because he wants more control". Mere days later, 0-covid was lifted. Sounds like a prime example of "the expected dystopia never materializes" to me.
Uhm, people were protesting 0-covid in China for almost a year before Xi lifted it. It wasn't like there was a protest, and Xi lifted it right away. It took the CPC sometime to figure out they were doing the wrong strategy.
To the extent you are all you'll see is buildings. This illustrates the limits of using personal observation to learn things if you aren't an expert.
A lot of the forced labor involves people involuntarily working alongside voluntary workers at ordinary factories. As a foreigner you won't see anything notable there.
If you ask Chinese people outside of China, they also really don't care. They know what happened, its like the Kent State shooting for them.
The west severely exaggerates every bad thing that happens over there then pretends like every misstep is solved with execution. Sure there's censorship but its exaggerated to a level of fiction in the west, like a movie that's "based on real events".
More than likely if you ask a Chinese person in China about Tiananmen, they'll see you like one of those Nazi streamers who call girls whores in public. Just a weird edgelord looking to stir up trouble.
No, I mean the person I had in mind knew full well about it. Just thought of it as something that was bad, but not an indictment of an illegitimate state like people talk about it.
Most people know what happened, but nobody refers to Tiananmen Square because 1) that's a pretty notable place on its own and 2) the protests were a nationwide movement, of which international journalists only ever saw any of it in Beijing. Akin to calling the January 6 protests the Capitol Hill protests. You'd call the Tiananmen Square protests June 4, or if you're being rather cheeky, May 35.
I lived half of my life in Soviet Union and would say that this article is simplification with sources more from instate propaganda than from reality. The article basically describes russian upper middle class (yes, there were classes within soviet society) after WWII. Most of people couldn't even dream about Sochi. Soviet Union was huge and differences between regions, classes, nationalities etc were very much there. The life of intelligence in Moscow was very different from the life of intelligence in Baltic republics or the life of farmer in Central-Asia republics etc. Even in seventies it was common that people in many regions weren't even allowed to move from their hometown or village.
While any article will be a simplification this one does match my own anecdotal experience.
To wit: My current mother in the law was a simple accountant in a mid-sized Baltic city. She was able to go to a sanatorium in Crimea (without husband of course) for the yearly vacation due to a slipped disk in her back. Where she apparently had a platonic affair with another vacationer who kept writing her letters afterwards..
Similarly I was able to attend Artek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artek_(camp) ) in Crimea solely due to my grades. Our village grade school in Latvia had one ticket allocated.
Note: It might not have been solely due to my grades. I was visiting Kiev on an academic trip in late 2021. The head of institute mentioned that Artek tickets were quite expensive and not everybody with an opportunity actually went. She mentioned price being 200-300 rubles - which was about twice my father's official salary.
Yeah as somebody coming from former Czechoslovakia, it was hard for us to travel too, even in 80s. My parents were forbidden to travel to the sea to former Yugoslavia for example, since it was neutral country that one could use to escape to Austria. Heck, even travel to very much communist Poland nearby was very hard, special approvals from apparatchiks were required and those were only granted to regime-friendly folks. Not unlike current China for example.
But Soviet union from my late grandparents tales was different reality, they used chewing gums and other stuff we considered common as currency much more sought-after by locals than rubles. It makes sense regime didn't want for people tt discover massive discrepancies between various parts of eastern bloc. As whole world saw few years after, mighty soviet union was actually pretty fragile mosaic with pieces desperately wanting freedom from often horrible and incompetent central Russian management.
One of the reason why eastern part of EU is not so happy with uber-centralization in Brussel - we saw what level of inefficiency such approach brings.
> Heck, even travel to very much communist Poland nearby was very hard, special approvals from apparatchiks were required and those were only granted to regime-friendly folks. Not unlike current China for example.
You don't need any special approval to leave China nowadays, and haven't for a few decades. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people vacation abroad.
> freedom from often horrible and incompetent central Russian management.
Russia does just fine without most of those pieces, whereas the pieces struggle to be viable.
The management was not 'Russian', by the way. It came proportionally from all of the Soviet republics, more or less. When the Union collapsed, they mostly stayed in Moscow.
Soviet Union never claimed to actually be communist - it was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, after all. Communism was supposed to be that thing that'll eventually happen after you had socialism for long enough for the "new type" of people to emerge. The Soviet joke about it went, "communism is like the horizon: an imaginary line that is always the same distance away as you walk towards it".
That’s why soviet union had communism written on the facade and caste system inside. Party members had every luxury westerners had. And stupid dissidents silently disappeared to some far far away places behind Arctic circle.
I wouldn't say they had everything, but they surely had more. It's basically like in 1984. If nobody has chocolate and you have a little, you already feel richer.
That's not true. Not to idealize anything, there were people, of course, who were poorer than average for one reason or another, but once in a while an average person could actually afford a vacation in Sochi and other areas around Black Sea. (The quality of accommodation is another question, of course.) Also, union members (i.e. pretty much everyone) were occasionally given an opportunity to spend time in spas ("sanatoriums") there. And if you remember, people took vacations that were usually one month-long!
I'm only in my sixties, so yes, I remember. But that's not true. As I said – if you were in privileged middle class, yes, that was your life. I could never dream about it although my parents were educated people. Both worked in factory with thousands of workers and every year union got 5-7 vacation tickets (путёвка) in spas around Black Sea. Of course only people close to party and upper management got these. This wasn't the case only once – workers (including my parents) demanded that one ticket must be given to worker who had cancer in the last stage. My personal experience in last decade of Soviet Union was basically same although as a young university student I could already travel on my own with my peers. This wasn't in any way easy though.
Your experience may very different if you worked in military important factory etc. Second half of eighties was already a very different story though.
Idk about Soviet Union, but in Communist Poland, the farmers didn't even get basic health care and pension until 1970s (that was still probably around 40-50% of population by then), not to mention luxuries like state-provided vacations.
Happy May Day! Here's a Twitter thread [0] that has excerpts/paraphrases from an old Soviet pamphlet called "How Soviet Workers Spend Their Leisure." (rolled up version [1])
You can find a scanned version of the pamphlet here [2]. There were many of these pamphlets published. One day I will scan them and post them. There was one on Waterways & Transport in the USSR, one about Soviet theater, one about the food industry in the USSR, one about light industries of the USSR, and one about the countryside of past and present of the USSR. I think these were a series published in 1939.
Article 119 of the Soviet Constitution:
> ARTICLE 119. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to rest and leisure.
>
> The right to rest and leisure is ensured by the reduction of the working day to seven hours for the overwhelming majority of the workers, the institution of annual vacations with full pay for workers and employees and the provision of a wide network of sanatoria, rest homes and clubs for the accommodation of the working people.
'Sanatoria' being health/medical centers or hospitals.
Did the Soviet government actually follow the Constitution of The USSR? I believe it also mentioned freedom of expression, freedom of religion and freedom of assembly, all of which seemed to be ignored.
I seem to remember a similar thing happening under Mao for a brief period of time, followed by a near total crackdown on anyone who had decided to speak up.
It wasn't followed, of course. Indeed, the early dissident movement in 1960s started with demands for the government to actually follow the constitution, and then kinda evolved from there. But also, as usual with constitutions, the wording in many cases is vague enough to allow for some ... creative interpretations.
In preparation for the 1980 Olympics, Soviets published a pamphlet titled "USSR: 100 questions and answers", meant primarily for Soviet citizens as an agitprop manual - basically a list of precanned answers to the most common questions that Western tourists were expected to ask. It is a hilarious read, but also very informative if you want to know how it was all sold in official propaganda.
Ok, but without consequence? There were a thousands of arrests and people hurt/killed voicing their frustration. Even journalists were shot at with rubber bullets and arrested. Yes, that's right, journalists were shot at and arrested by police in the US.
I think more accurate would be to say it allowed freedom from expression, freedom from religion and freedom from assembly. Unless in the service of the communist party of course.
A former colleague of mine, born and raised in the USSR, liked to quip that there was only one minor difference in the way freedom of expression was implemented in the USSR and in the West.
Both places guaranteed the freedom to express oneself, but only the West guaranteed your freedom also after you'd expressed yourself.
Prolonged periods of time spent without obligation to work for pay is one of the greatest luxuries you can have in this life. People shouldn't have to wait until retirement to enjoy it. Sabbatical, basically, although even sabbatical often comes with obligations for self-improvement serving the company offering it. A lot of discourse on working hours revolves around decreasing the hours worked per week. I would also like to see people talk about a right to take 6-12 months of unstructured leave after 3-4 years of service. Seems unrealistic? What is all this wealth and automation and productivity growth for, then?
> People shouldn't have to wait until retirement to enjoy it.
Also people should not pursue a strategy that concentrates ALL their enjoyment until retirement. It's a high variance strategy with IMO low EROI . My bias is because my father died in his 40s and my step father in his late 50s.. Both never saw a day of retirement despite saving for it.
I highly recommend a patterned approach to life enjoyment, yes this is highly privileged and I hope it will be universal one day.
Here's my strategy now that I'm financially stable:
I do something special, scaled to the time available, where they overlap I intersect them (ie, use the one weekend to build the one week)
* One weekend a month have a special plans
* One week a half disconnect, could be travel or camping, or staycation where you just chill and do stuff you love only
* Two weeks once a year - take an adventure, or a deep disconnect according to needs
* One month every 5yrs - Do something big that stretches you. Backpack foreign countries, or disconnect and focus on intensively learning a skill you intended to also practice going forward
* One quarter every 10 - Sabbatical (Sabbath) . Let your body and mind reset. Only do healthy and restorative things, celebrate every win you can remember, the only work you do should be investing in others, and do it at < 50% your capacity.
I'm happy you've boiled your recharging needs down to a science but none of this compares with long contiguous periods of unstructured time you can choose to use as you wish. Three months off every decade? Really?
I have ~ 15y of experience and I have a grand total of 3 weeks PTO. My father, at my age had 5 whole weeks and doesn't understand why I don't take big trips more. Despite the trend in 'unlimited vacation', I feel it's only getting worse.
> with long contiguous periods of unstructured time
Can you tell me more concretely what you're thinking? How do you define "long"? And, what is it about my list (despite it's prescriptive structure) that makes the time usage not "unstructured" ?
This is an interesting idea — there could be a sabbatical accrual of sorts.
One way this could realistically work today (with a lot of kicking and screaming about how it’ll ruin the economy) is each year of work earns a month of sabbatical, and once you’ve earned at least 2 months you can exercise your sabbatical rights, given some notice.
Companies could cap it at 6 months at a time so you don’t completely lose track of changes at work.
We could even make up to 2 months transferable between companies, and if you’re ever fired you can choose how or if you’d like to be paid out. That would help discourage retaliation against using the time, in addition to making it illegal.
I don’t see a reason that we couldn’t pass a law tomorrow that does this. Sure the economy would slow a bit, but what a giant quality-of-life gain it would be. And maybe it would actually make the economy grow faster in the long term if it encourages more private innovation.
But we already accept this idea for parental leave, this would be the same thing without the need for having a baby.
>>I don’t see a reason that we couldn’t pass a law tomorrow that does this.
Why do we need for a law to be passed? There are so many people seemingly in favor of this, why don't they just band together and start a company and then pay people to take 6 month vacations?
I know you're asking this question in bad faith because you posted the same thing elsewhere in the thread, but the answer here is because they will be outcompeted by companies that don't offer that policy. In much the same way, businesses that use child labor will outcompete those that do not. Of course a great many people are against child labor, but you don't see people telling them to go start their own company that doesn't use child labor if they're so against it.
It's fairly common for a majority—even a large majority—of people to want something, but to be unable to make it happen without a law. Coordination problems are real, and they are everywhere.
And that's just at a basic game-theory level—quirks or dysfunctions of political systems can make passing a law extremely difficult, too, even given super-majority voter support.
In Canada, there is the concept of sabbatical accrual (https://ett.ca/know-your-rights-self-funded-leave-plan/). When my wife & I were backpacking in Patagonia we met a Canadian teaching couple with their two children doing the same thing, except instead of one week (us) they were on a 6mo trip from the southern tip of South America up to Alaska.
Then, the same year, we were visiting family in Grenada and met a young family (teachers) with a 4yo on a 40' sailboat they were cruising around the Caribbean on.
This would not only provide a break from work but also offer opportunities for personal growth and exploration.
This could reduce the career growth penalty for mothers. Companies may be hesitant to hire or promote women to leadership positions, fearing that they will take significant time off for childbirth. However, if taking sabbaticals every few years becomes normalized, women wouldn't be viewed as a special liability for taking leave around childbirth.
Furthermore, during these sabbatical periods, there could be programs created for potential career switchers to try out new jobs. These internships could provide workers with opportunities to explore different fields and find work that aligns with their skills and interests. This could ultimately benefit the economy as a whole by increasing job satisfaction and promoting a better match between workers and their jobs.
If you don't want to work for a year then just quit your job and then get a new job later. But it's ridiculous and unrealistic to think that an employer should hold your job open for a year. How are they supposed to get work done during that period, hire a temporary employee and then lay them off when you decide to return?
If you want that lifestyle then just become an independent consultant rather than an employee. I know a married couple who does that. They work for a while to save up enough money, then take off and sail their boat around until they run low on money and have to find new consulting gigs.
I know all of these things sound nice. But in the real world a lot of businesses aren't making the kind of profit that allows workers to just take time off and not generate any revenue for the company. Sure there are some that could pull it off. But most small businesses aren't making that kind of profit. Unless you are assuming workers are supposed to take unpaid time off. But then how are they going to afford to take time off?
> But most small businesses aren't making that kind of profit.
It always feels that way in a small business, but then all of a sudden a key employee needs to take a three month medical leave and somehow the business survives.
You just have to plan well, and I'm sure there will be devoted employees who answer the odd emergency email during their sabbatical.
Businesses don't start flush with cash. It's a long process to become established. Your viewpoint is that businesses just have positive cash flow at all times and if they don't it's poor planning. It's not poor planning. It could be investments need to be made in certain areas in order to grow. or they haven't established a big product or client portfolio yet. Everyone starts somewhere.
Most of the world has statutory minimum of vacation days that also applies to small businesses, and somehow those businesses manage to survive. They just include it in their business model and market finds new equilibrium.
Moved from where to where and which industries exactly? Do you think this happened in the entire world? I do not see Germany as de-industrialized country, for example.
If it can't for any reason, it's failed. The problem is the more things you pile on, the harder it gets. The main point of a business, and the main good it does, is not employing people. It's what goods or services it provides its customers, at a lower price.
If you moralise and add more things for a business to do, the big ones will do some performative stuff and spend their vast marketing budgets on it, and the small ones will go under, and we all lose because we get less choice and higher prices.
Not really. It could be a new business that is only a few years old and is still trying to grow and become the type of business can afford these. Or an established business that lost a major client. Your viewpoint is really limited.
Personally in my career I would have much preferred sabbaticals to a reduced work week. I think most companies would find sabbaticals hard to retrofit though. You either screw the people who have a long tenure with the company or you suddenly have an unsustainable number of people who are now eligible for a sabbatical all at the same time.
Just a quick reminder that while paid time off was mandatory, working was also mandatory in the Soviet Union. One couldn’t just go on a sabbatical, that’d be a crime there.
> Those who refused to work, study or serve in another way risked being criminally charged with social parasitism (Russian: тунеядство)
Hey if they let people work less because the machines do it, they might figure out we're "dangerously" close to post-scarcity in a lot of fields. Gandhi figured that out a long time ago and talked about it, it's why the only machine he liked was the sewing machine.
The things that people really covet will always be scarce no matter how much machinery we have. There will never be "post-scarcity", it's just a silly concept.
As always, the gap between reality and propaganda is hilarious. Soviet workers and their colonized subjects spent their leisure time filling in for the massive failures of the state to provide anything resembling their promises. Some excerpts from my childhood:
* Family outing to the fields to harvest carrots to pickle for the winter. This would be bartered with other families who went to harvest other veggies, so that your turshia would not be too monotonous.
* Going to my friend's apartment to roasting and canning peppers, because no one has to money to buy the factory made stuff. And if you did, you still wouldn't want such poor quality.
* Helping my dad unload window frames for firewood. He worked at a window factory and was able to redirect a small truck full of finished wooden frames, which we could break down and burn for heat over the winter. Sure, it would have made more sense to buy actual firewood or coal rather than steal finished industrial output, but you can't afford that on a regular salary. And it would have made even more sense to offer district heating, and the government had such plans, but you'd freeze long before this became a reality. Eventually we did get district heating - about 6 years after communism fell.
Yeah. I remember my parents getting a permit to vacation by the Black Sea like once. My grandfather went to Egypt once. The vacations even within the soviets were super scarce experiences and going to the west was only possible for a choir trip or something like that after being vetted by the kgb for your flight risk.
There were trips to leningrad or moscow but even those had years between them.
So yea, most vacations were helping out at grandparents farm. And reading books during rainy days.
These examples highlight the deficiencies of the Soviet economy, and it's evident that such failures caused considerable suffering among the population. Nevertheless, given more time to engage in activities akin to the first two examples, and separated from the threat of malnourishment, I believe I would experience greater happiness and a stronger connection to both my food and community. Through shared struggle, bartering, and communal work, we can create a sense of connection that is absent from the isolation brought about by specialization, which, although more economically efficient, also contributes to the social problems present in western society.
I used to go foraging for mushrooms with a close friend. That friend developed depression due to his perceived failures to keep up in the rat race of career advancement, and committed suicide last year. I know this because of some pretty explicit conversations I had with him about feelings of inadequacy due to money and career path. So now I don’t have a friend to forage mushrooms with. I can do it by myself, but that doesn’t really address the alienation issue.
My parents and grandparents were forever traumautized by this experience leading them to leave objectively worse lives. Instead of actual leisure they'd spend their free time working on their car in the garage (because there are no car services), working in the garden (because food supplies aren't too diverse and you can't just go to the store to buy jam), or doing something else. They still feel weird about me ordering apartment cleaning once a month.
My grandma would continue working in her garden until she was extremely old because she was used to this, even though we could have bought any veggies or fruits to her. This likely affected her health in a negative way.
Living in a pre-industrial society isn't "good". It doesn't bring any advantages.
As someone who also lived in that society, albeit briefly, I can tell you that "experiencing a stronger connection with your community" is not necessarily a positive. Especially when you don't exactly have much choice when it comes to picking said community in the first place.
Certainly, I completely agree that it's not always a positive. Western capitalist culture is better suited to providing freedom to non-conformists, and it's true that life can be arduous in communal cultures if one deviates from the norm.
On the other hand, there are psychological advantages to collaborating with one's community to address shared issues. In western capitalist culture, many individuals are predisposed to feeling that their problems are their own responsibility, leading them to believe that any misfortune they experience is solely due to a lack of effort or poor decision-making on their part.
I wonder if it would be possible to build a society that gets the positive parts of both approaches, or if there is a better balance to be sought between individualism and collectivism.
I don't recall much "collaboration with one's community", at least not in urban Soviet landscape - perhaps things were different in the villages (but if they were,
I don't think the Soviets could claim credit for that). The society that they ended up building was actually very cutthroat in many ways once you got past the guaranteed basics that everyone had, precisely because anything above that was that much harder to get.
Thing is, you fundamentally can't enforce good socialization. You can enforce socialization in general, but the more it is forced, the less likely it is to actually be good. A good society is the one that gives opportunities for people to socialize if and when they want it, and accepts that some people really just don't and that's fine too.
Not exactly different from my parents experiences growing up in the US, where "summer vacation" was a trip to uncle's farm to detassel corn or pick cotton, hunting to get meat, etc.
Yep, all of my vacations growing up were either hunting or fishing trips. While getting out in nature is nice, when you take your kids out on a boat for 10h / day because you haven't caught enough fish it very quickly stops feeling like a vacation and more like work.
The information presented by the quote and JSTOR is accurate, at least insofar as it reveals that a significant number of individuals in USSR went on either tourist tours or sanatoria each year for rejuvenation.
In the 90s, state sanatoria maintained their popularity in post-Soviet countries. To this day, travel agencies in some of these nations primarily focus on two types of journeys: relaxation and "learning" holidays. This deeply ingrained cultural practice persists throughout the region.
I don't know how many and which groups of people went on annual holidays in the USSR, but I know it wasn't an insignificant number from what I've observed living there as a kid.
The down voting of the parent is wholly unjustified. This is a factual reality that has already taken place and continues on to this day.
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
There is nothing about the use of prison labor that benefits a free market. The opposite is true. By controlling a source of labor that can operate at below market prices it's easy to destroy any competion and gain total control. That is the antithesis of free market economics.
If anyone is a 'tankie' it's people who support government-supplied cheap labor...
The Soviet economy was somewhat surreal and it is difficult to explain it well to the Western audience. Including vacations, vacation tickets («путёвки»), summer camps, sanatoriums and the like.
I still remember some parts though, so if you are interested in how it worked, I can answer your questions. Most definitely it wasn't all that rosy.
My grandparents and my father grew up in the Soviet Union. I always find it fascinating hearing about my grandparent's childhood and what it was like to grow up there.
One anecdote for not all rosy:
My father is permanently traumatized because he had to get his tonsils removed when he was young and they didn't give him any anesthetics.
I got my (pharyngeal) tonsil removed without anaesthesia, in 2001 I think, as a kid, in the Czech Republic. It didn't hurt at all, but I still remember the loud crunch of the cutting and the whole setup — I sat on one doctor's lap, he grabbed me with his arms around my whole body AND my arms, so I couldn't move at all, and a second doctor did the cutting. It only took a few seconds, there was a lot of blood, but I got many cold drinks and ice-cream in the next few days, so that was good. But I can definitely see someone getting traumatized by this.
>"and there was boy in sewer... and he was eating the rat...and the rat was eating the dog...and the dog was eating me...but i was runned away... and it was so bad..."
>"and then the police shoot the dog...and the dog raped the boy...and then the rat shot the police..."
>"and then you have to eated the police...but the dog was eating the rat..."
>"and my grandmother ate the police...and the police turned the dog into lampshade....but the rat raped the police...and now my grandmother is dead inside lampshade dog...."
Anesthetics were only for the higher caste kids of party members. Basically they had everything the westerners had :-) General population however had nothing.
This cannot be further from truth. High ranking party members had access to "special distribution" stores whose selection of goods available was inferior to what your local 7-11 offers (not to mention the modern Russian supermarket chains for that matter).
They could get some of the things westerners had, but with extremely low bandwidth.
Lol. As a very high level party member you could murder anyone. And if the crowd wasn’t too big you could get fine with it. I am not talking about the poor souls who got party books just to get mid career promotion.
Interesting thing that was common in, at least Yugoslavia, was for companies to own bungalows and vacation houses near the sea and then allow workers to use them for a time for vacations. Didn't think it strange at the time.
What was the process for reserving a vacation ? Were y'all able to select the time and location ? If so, what was the lead time like ?
Did you manage to form a relationship with someone outside of your initial social circle that persisted beyond the duration of the vacation ?
I recommend amending your offer with some specifics, so that we may better focus our questions on the particulars of time and place. Not to identify you (though that is a risk), but to draw context about the time (relationship with NATO, do computers exist) and perhaps about the specific locale (Okhotsk beaches are probably not like Astrakhan beaches).
There was a system of distribution of pre-paid by the government (and maybe, not sure, there were a subsidized ones) and by big factories, ministries, which often had their own resorts/sanatoriums, vouchers[0] to rest/vacate/heal there.
Add: Sometimes they were a part of incentive and motivation for fulfilling a quota or finishing a project, sometimes as means to penalize someone ("You've been seen in the state unacceptable for a Soviet man, so you are out from the list for putyovka this year!") and of course as means to gamble or obtain something, trading it for things or services.
How you get a vacation in a capitalist country: you earn enough money and buy it.
How you get a vacation in the USSR: most people just don't earn enough money to buy it on the "open market", so instead you apply for one. And the supply is very limited. So you need to know someone, pull some strings, provide something in return to the people who make decisions and maybe you get a subsidized tour. The people making these decisions have an additional income (not always monetary) through the power they yield.
This is great. I've been interested in understanding how the Soviet economy worked for a long time. I've found only a handful of articles like this one. Unless you're willing to delve into hardcore economic academic papers (I am not) it's hard to get an actual informed perspective. Most Googling around will basically return you the rote response that it basically didn't work. Which, despite the many issues with the Soviet economy, is obviously not true.
It's probably the language barrier - anything English is basically one-sided cold war propaganda repeated ad nauseam. Anything more detailed tends to be Russian, German or generally Eastern European since US literature tends to not care about more detailed looks into how the country worked besides repeating the same lines about food queues and other cliches.
(And that makes sense, we tend to focus on our own country and environment.)
> Which, despite the many issues with the Soviet economy, is obviously not true.
The first thing I hear from any ex-Soviet who grew up in the USSR is how their lives were impacted by the constant shortages and censorship of issues with the supply chain. There's a classic joke from the USSR that goes:
"Comrade, aren't you excited for when the USA finally falls?"
"No, who will we buy our grain from?"
Another one:
"Isn't it true that the USA is rotting from within?"
"Yes, but what a smell!"
Millions of people in the USSR starved to death, and their consumer tech was among the most unreliable and poorly-made available internationally. This despite Soviet mathematicians and engineers being among the finest and hardest-working on the planet. They could only just overcome the constraints that the centrally-governed economy placed on them. The only notable exception is military hardware, which was actually funded.
What do you mean "it's obviously not true [that the Soviet economy didn't work]"?
A guy walks into the store, looks mournfully at the bare shelves, and asks the worker at the counter, "So, comrade, you don't have any meat today, do you?"
"Comrade, did you not read the sign at the entrance? This is a seafood market; we don't have any fish. The meat shop is across the road - they don't have any meat."
Well, the country septupled its GDP over the 70 years of Soviet rule. For a time, between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of WWII it was one of the fastest growing economies in world history. While facing terrible famine and hunger before WWII, the Soviet Union largely ended starvation by the mid-late century. The Soviet government managed to extend the benefits of sanitation, healthcare and electrification to tens of millions of the people living under its power.
To me, while we might see many many problems within the Soviet economy and see many ways it could have been better, it is clearly not an economy that "didn't work". And by some measures, we can even say it "worked" better than the post Soviet economy.
I found Zubok's recent book 'Collapse' to be quite informative in this regard if you haven't read it, not exactly what you are looking for but in the first half it deals with Gorbechev's economic reforms and there is some fairly detailed discussion of the economy and how it functioned.
> I've been interested in understanding how the Soviet economy worked for a long time.
After the '91 collapse Western scholars briefly got their hands on some Soviet archives and worked to piece this together. The Soviet economy was run by fixers; Party people that answered to Party leadership and mediated the difference between the State's official socialist schemes and reality. The system was opaque and kleptocratic in the extreme and, except for a brief period after the collapse, it appears not much has changed.
A concise survey of the archives can found found in: "Behind the Facade of Stalin's Command Economy: Evidence from the Soviet State and Party Archives" (Paul Gregory, 2001).
> In the West, what you do when you leave the office was and is your own business. In the USSR, it was everyone else’s.
Is this actually true? In Germany at least, vacation from work is not truly our own time. We are legally required to use it to relax and restore our capacity for future work. Few people probably see it that way, admittedly.
Of course, there is still a huge difference, but it's awkward to view everything through that us-versus-them lens.
> We are legally required to use it to relax and restore our capacity for future work.
What does that mean in practice? Will the police come knocking on your door if they see you digging up the garden? Will someone arrest you if you go sailing and get bonged in the head by accident instead of resting? If you use your vacation days to help your grandma move a grand piano will you get in trouble? If you do your taxes on your vacation day will they refuse your forms?
It's not a criminal matter. The employer might bring it up if there is an employment dispute. An employee who regularly comes back from vacation injured or sick is likely to raise some eyebrows (similarly for coming to work every Monday with a massive hangover), but it's totally at the discretion of the employer if they want to do anything about it.
On the other hand, we do get separate sick days (technically even if we get sick during vacation, but I don't know if anyone actually tries to get vacation days back they lost due to sickness). It's very different from countries when you just get time-off days and have to use them for both holidaying and covering sick leaves.
>We are legally required to use it to relax and restore our capacity for future work.
Well that's an interesting bit of trivia. Can you share anything more about it? Just for my own amusement and the amusement of people I will relate it to in the future, I would love to read whatever dry legal code sets that in writing.
It's hard to translate. The law speaks of Erholungsurlaub, which could be translated as “recuperation vacation“. That already sets a clear purpose. There is also a clause that prevents us from working during vacation if that work endangers the purpose of the vacation (that is, recuperation): https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/burlg/__8.html
Other countries have non-competes, employer ownership of things created during off-hours, and so on.
What do you mean "legally required"? E.g. is there a law that says that specifically, or a common interpretation of a law that says something vaguer, or a common clause in employment contracts, or were you being metaphorical and it isn't actually legal?
I'm from the US, and this sounds very strange to my ears.
The OP just decided to strangely translate a clause that asks for employees to not demand work during cation (the usual US "I'm still reading my emails") and that they cannot work at another job in that time.
I don't have the immediate texts at hand but I cite sources in my guide about taking time off in Germany. The law is very unambiguous about what vacations are for. A nice example is that if you get sick during your vacation, it counts as sick days and you can use your vacation days at a later time.
Literally, it's about preventing taking a second, paid job during vacation from your first employer. So it's not entirely clear whether this is about protecting employers or employees. As far as I know, non-competes for blue collar workers are uncommon (or at least they used to be).
Agree. I’m not a legal expert but I’m sure the court would take the side of an employee in such cases. Treating vacation as only a treat for the employee’s body that must rest is nonsense. When you take vacation to work as caregiver for your family member or to improve quality of your life with some home project, or even to dedicate time to your hobby that may be a physical challenge but offers you spiritual fulfillment is perfectly normal. Nobody shall be able to deny you that.
You are forced by law to take at least two consecutive weeks once a year. But yes my employer also allowed this and one of my colleagues had accumulated an absurd amount. You still had to take two weeks but could keep the rest.
>"The Soviet Union's approach to paid time off (PTO) was unique, as it not only provided workers with time off but also determined how they spent it"
Utter bullshit. I was able to travel to every part of USSR (except of course restricted areas and abroad) during my vacation time without any problems. USSR had gobbles of big problems and general lack of freedom but vacations were not part. As a matter of fact I spent more vacation time in more places than the average North American.
Yes if one wanted they could join some semi-/organized form but there was nothing mandatory about it.
Yep, my wife grew up in the USSR and enjoyed more and longer vacations (up to two months, and at least one) than we ever did as an upper middle class American family.
Disclosure: this is no endorsement of the Soviet-style systems. But my wife had a much better childhood then the anti-Soviet would have you believe.
>"this is no endorsement of the Soviet-style systems."
You do not have to apologize for confirming that not everything about USSR (late USSR in particular) was mothers eating their kids for breakfast. People with more than 2 brain cells should understand that the world is not binary. And those who do not should go back to school as the education in their country (whatever that be) had definitely failed them.
Unfortunately on HN you do, the majority of the people here live in coastal American echo-chambers.
If you mention anything here that could portray any aspect at all of the Russians (any era) as positive (or even just neutral but factual), you'll be eaten alive with down-voters.
Not completely true but there is definitely some degree of it here. Some of it I think is propaganda machine doing the job, some of it is lack of critical thinking, some - intolerance to the opposite opinions and we probably have healthy dose of Ukrainians here who are understandably in no mood to let anything non negative slide.
As for downvotes themselves - I personally do not give rat's ass about those. In large part those are "I do not like you" type of reaction. So fucking be it. I am not being paid for karma. Personally I did not downvote single post however I feel about content / poster.
You are right with your disagreement, because the article starts quite sensational with this phrase and does not make it clear enough how different was USSR in different times. It is a typical mistake that many Western writers and readers make to judge Soviet Union based on Stalinism, NEP or Perestroika. Yet as the story in the article develops, you can find there that there was indeed some freedom about travel in Soviet Union. It is unfortunate that it does not cover all aspects of Soviet tourism and the rich culture around it.
I think there is not a distinction being made between "time-off" and "vacation" - the author seems to be focused entirely on travel destinations and resorts.
“Designed to refresh and reenergize workers for upcoming Five-Year-Plans, these resorts subjected their guests to daily wellness procedures, such as massages and mineral baths.”
A spa. We call that a spa break here in the decadent West. It’s a whole luxury industry thing.
I worked for Olivetti in Milan and Ivrea the mid/late 80s. In particular, that was before the wall came down.
When I landed at Malpensa in Milan for the first time, I noticed there was an Aeroflot airliner parked on the tarmac. This seemed odd to me. Why would someone want to fly from Milan to the USSR?
Olivetti was a massive (at the time) paternal Italian company. It had a department called Gestione Varie, miscellaneous management, which handled various things including vacations and sports programs for Olivetti employees. Among the many vacation packages offered were very reasonably priced summer vacations to Leningrad.
> I worked for Olivetti in Milan and Ivrea the mid/late 80s.
Really interesting, you're the first I meet that has. Olivetti still has a stellar reputation in Italy, disliked by other enterpreneurs and (so they say) loved by his employees. What's sure is that the work conditions were really progressive and I think still unparalleled today, at least in Italy.
Do you have any anecdote or interesting fact to share about your time there?
The typewriter factory in Ivrea was ... a typewriter factory. Yeah, I worked on compilers but the building still built typewriters. I was there for a month before I was "allowed" to go to lunch by myself for fear of getting lost.
The main hotel in town, the Hotel La Serra, is shaped like a ... typewriter.
The Brigate Rosse was a threat when I was there and Adriano Olivetti was very afraid of them. You'd never see him. If you drove at night you were likely to be pulled over by the Carabinieri and have a machine gun stuck in your stomach while they figured out who you were. Everyone was on edge.
But it was a cool time. Ivrea was a company town and I think if I wanted to dial the Olivetti operator from my apartment I dialed 6. But taking a shower meant getting up at 4am so that there would be enough water pressure.
I'll add to the list:
The closes my dad ever was to 'travelling abroad' during the soviet occupation was when they filled up a bus and went to Yugoslavia. He knew everyone on the bus except a couple of guys who showed up last minute and sat in the front row of the bus all the time. It was quite of a journey for him at the time, because he mentioned it at least hundred times when we were growing up.
In the past, a was skeptical of writings describing totalitarian societies/states, especially since it was often politically motivated. Until becoming a subject of one.
Edit: I am curious as to why I get downvoted. Is it a political trope in a particular country to say that one lives in a totalitarian society/state? A rhetorical ploy? I use it in a literal sense: no freedom of expression, no freedom of the press, jailed political opponents and journalists, criminalization of political movements, jailed citizens for saying thinks on Facebook, jailed citizens for having been in a protest, the constant threat of prison for almost any trifle...
The history of Stakhanov's feat, however, tells a somewhat different story. The push for a record on the night of Aug. 30 was, in fact, carefully planned and prepared by the Communist Party organization of the Tsentralnaya-Irmino mine in the Donets basin.
The mines, short of skilled workers and machinery, were failing to produce their quotas of coal. The party tapped Stakhanov, a little-educated, hard-working peasant-turned-miner, to set a record that would become an inspiration and example.
Konstantin G. Petrov, the chief of the mine's party organization, recalled that Stakhanov's wife strenuously resisted his attempt to make her husband a hero until she was silenced with the gift of a cow.
To increase Stakhanov's chances, the pattern of work was changed to free him from his usual task of shoring up the tunnel as he dug into the seam. Instead, two timberers followed after him, and Mr. Petrov himself held a light to the coal-face.
What Stakhanov did, to be sure, was still impressive, especially with the unreliable jackhammers of those days. Contemporaries described the big miner wrestling his hammer for hours, coal dust choking his throat and nose and grinding between his teeth.
''I suppose Stakhanov need not have been the first,'' said Mr. Petrov in an interview several years ago. ''It could have been anybody else. In the final analysis it was not the individual face-worker who determined whether the attempt to break the record would succeed, but the new system of coal extraction.
It was not exactly appealing if husband and wife keeps getting different vacation for years and can't go on vacation together. Bribes would fix that though.
Agreed. So many articles and discussions these days about how everyone is so lonely and isolated. The article seems to want to imply this system is kind of a bad thing, or at least weird, but I have trouble seeing anything but good things in it.
You don't want to spend vacations vacations with your family? This soviet system in it's heyday was damn close to that. Especially when, for a short time, „7 workdays week“ was implemented where people worked 6 days, but the day off was on different day to keep factories running 7 days. So you may not have a day with your spouse for years :D
There are so many possibilities to go on vacations like that where everything is pre-arranged and with strangers. From fancy cruise ships to regular travel company arranged stuff.
I think the difference is the forced separation. Most people go with friends, family, groups, what not. If you go alone you are the outsider. Forcing everyone to go by themselves opens up true "stranger" vacations.
I haven't finished the text, but it's a bad write up.
The author tries to make it impressive, and for that brings unneeded speculations.
> Failing to applaud a speech by Joseph Stalin could get a person arrested. So could listening to bootlegged copy of the Beatles.
The Beatles were published in USSR officially, as well as many other western artists. At least in late USSR. I still have many those vinyl discs. In earlier years, when my father was young, he and his friends had all rock records: Beatles, Creedence, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, everything. Without any problems.
Stalin and the Beatles are two different ages.
Also, life in USSR was not always the same during its existence.
> That fact drove Soviet policy toward time off..
No evidence is given, what driven the policy. That's just a speculation.
> As the country industrialized, it became evident workers needed time away from the job if they were to remain productive when they were on it.
What? That had always been evident. Rest and free time was a theme of socialist movements all over the world long before the October Revolution.
> Following this train of thought, hardliners feared...
I always love when journalists have telepathic abilities. Not only they know what people do, but also what they think and feel.
> They also believed that, once the science of work systems had been perfected, workers would no longer need rest, rendering time off obsolete.
Really? A reference is needed. Vacation time was only growing with years. As far as I understand, the ideology was that with time the growing work efficiency will give more and more free time to workers.
In short, in this text true facts are mixed to produce some bullshit picture of the author's fantasy.
> Failing to applaud a speech by Joseph Stalin could get a person arrested. So could listening to bootlegged copy of the Beatles.
Moreover, Stalin died in 1953. The Beatles were not even formed until 1960. It's fair too sweeping a way to paint a picture of a very complicated country.
> "In the Soviet Union, the government regulated almost every aspect of life. Censors decided which books could be published. Comedians had to submit material for approval before they could step behind a mic. Failing to applaud a speech by Joseph Stalin could get a person arrested. So could listening to bootlegged copy of the Beatles."
Its amazing how the author feels the need to parrot these hysterics in order to write an article about how Soviet workers generally had far more leisure time and opportunity compared to western contemporaries.
Imagine starting an article about sockhops in the 50's with:
>"In the United States, the government regulated racial boundaries with strict enforcement. Slavery was over but vagrancy charges were regularly used to traffic southern blacks to northern coal mines to work for no pay in dangerous conditions. Entertainers were getting called in front of the Anti-American Activities Committees for donating to civil rights bail funds. Failing to support the war in Korea could have you black listed from any real career.
There are a bunch of zoomers out there who un-ironically claim Communism is the ideal way of life. I've worked with some of them. I still can't fathom what's going on in their brains.
There's a bunch (Well, a lot) of people at all ages who unironically think that we've reached some kind of end of history, and that our current state of society resembles some kind of maximum.
They are generally unable to engage with good-faith criticisms of the parts of it that don't work.
I can at least appreciate someone who advocates for non-Marxist or Leninist forms of communism or just socialism in general. But there has been a remarkable rise of young people who now defend Leninist communism!
I think for a lot of people, it's intellectual junk food. A Marxist revolution has a low risk of actually happening in the modern world. And rather than educating yourself on policy and working on advocacy, you get to play in a fantasy world where you don't have to do anything except fight the conspiracy suppressing a natural egalitarian world order.
It's the "intellectual junk food" behind the USSR and China turning from backwards peasant conditions to rival global powers. Orthodox Marxist theory States that society must be advanced enough to reach a socialist phase. The nature of the class-based Hegelian dialectics that leads to communism is nebulous and unclear IMO, but I interpret it as something like the fall of feudalism.
If what you care about is rivalling global powers, it's hard to beat US at this game. Conversely, does it really matter one way or the other if the citizens don't see the benefits? E.g. speaking of backwards peasant conditions: USSR had restrictions on peasants moving around until 1974 - before then, most peasants simply weren't issued internal passports.
USSR certainly industrialized past the levels of serfdom, but individuals were clearly still held back from their full economic potential. It wasn't until AFTER they left the USSR that most of the former Soviet states actually reached modern standards of living. There's nothing to say the revolution actually benefited the average person in Russia more than the natural dissemination of coal power would have.
China only began thriving after they abandoned Marxist-flavored communism and integrated markets into their government.
Well, it's not just unclear to you. Even if you buy into some of Marx's more coherent ideas, it's such a bonkers idea to form a government with the expressed intent of achieving some sort of vague Hegelian state as outlined by some untestable arguments described in an unfinished work of political critiques. Das Kapital is not exactly a useful guide for creating actual policy.
One explanation I've found pretty accurate: When the young start to become educated (late teens, early 20's) they face the realization that they will be entering the world on the bottom of the economic totem pole.
There are two primary responses to this:
1. Realize that the real world is competitive and difficult and much self-improvement and hard work will be needed to thrive. These people put their heads down and get to work.
2. Refusal to address the truth of #1. Frame the real world as some unwinnable game to avoid putting in the required effort to succeed. Distract yourself with structural problems (real or imaginary) far too big for you to have any effect on but keep you from the painful self-improvement that is really needed.
Communism preys on the people who are susceptible to the second path.
Communism rebalances the relative worth of people in society. I.e. my grandfather, an engineer, earned less than a factory worker. An average or passing artist could earn a decent living in the Soviet Union, compared to having scraps today (in relative terms).
I notice this calculus as I have an artistic career and a software career. I would like to pursue the artistic career (and am actually pretty good at it), but I would make many multiples less than I currently do in software. This is partly because of how we've financialized/structured the economy (i.e. software monopolies should have been broken up, taxes imposed, etc), not because the work is actually worth less in some sense.
> not because the work is actually worth less in some sense.
It depends on how you define value. If you mean value in terms of how much money you receive, you actually need other people to agree that what you're doing is worthwhile.
If you only care about the feelings that YOU get from doing the work (which is totally OK) your work is still valuable, but don't expect others to provide you value in the form of money when you provided them nothing.
In other words, I'm cool with you being an artist. But you can't force me to pay you for your art if I don't want it.
You're not paying for my software engineering either, at least not directly. In fact, you don't have a choice about it. It's included in the markup of the products you purchase - in all of them.
In fact, if you had a choice, if we sold software services the way we sell art today, software salaries would go way down (in fact, someone could increase revenues for a company by making it impossible for you to unsubscribe. If that's not anti-value, I don't know what is. In fact, it's so bad that we even have to pass laws to outlaw it). Same for medicine and many other things - the financialization and obscurity of the actual source of the money is part of what allows this whole thing to continue.
My point is that money is a very imperfect proxy for what people find valuable - frequently the things we spend the most money on are not a free market. And the closer you look, the more imperfect it gets.
Someone would happily buy a house that's half the size of most on the market (or less) - unfortunately, such houses are prohibited by regulation. So they are forced to choose between buying twice the house at twice the cost or renting.
It sort of works when you're comparing product A to product B at the store. When you're comparing parts of the economy, there are much greater forces and distortions at work.
Right, this is the kind of seductive but ultimately unrealistic kind of thinking that ropes in the vulnerable.
Shouldn't people be incentivized to pursue work that they are good at, enjoy AND which society actually demands?
If good art is rare and in higher demand, good artists will be able to demand higher pay. If good art is in high supply because many people prefer the artist lifestyle, artists will not be able to demand as high of pay. Both of these situations seem perfectly reasonable to me.
Sort of, but not really. There is a prisoner's dilemma here. People would like [better public transit, more art, you name it], but what's actually produced (and rewarded) doesn't completely overlap with what people want. It overlaps mainly with what _rich_ people want, which is different.
The reason investment bankers are paid well is that they make money _for rich people_. If you look at any professions, the closer you are to the money source and to the rich, the more you make.
Rich people want to stay rich in relative terms, not in absolute terms - something people always forget (because that makes them able to command other people's time and make other people "dance" for them, not buy gadgets or luxury goods which don't matter anyway).
I.e. I would argue that a lot of things that command a high income in the U.S. are actually net-negative for society overall (if we look at the value not in $ value, but in human value). Extracting monopolistic rents, for example. Slumlording. Speculating in Bitcoin. The list is long if you want to really make it.
Meanwhile, capitalism preys on people who are convinced that if it weren't for the moochers and layabouts and undeserving holding them back, they would have a life of wealth and respect.
Joe the Plumber was the poster child for this, a decade ago.
1. Keep your head down, work hard and humbly, be a good little serf.
2. Say "screw this", realise there's a ton of wealth in the world and the leeches are taking it all, push for some changes that might actually make a difference in the world.
Capitalism preys on the people who are susceptible to the first path.
They make some good points against capitalism, but like Democracy is the worst form of government other than all the others, capitalism is the worst economic system other than all the others.
But I simply cannot agree with a world that make everybody equal, no matter how much or how little work they do. People who work jobs that require extensive studying (ie, medical doctors) or jobs that almost literally nobody would ever volunteer for (ie, cleaning public restooms) should be rewarded.
Capitalism alone doesn't do that either though? Doctors, bankers and rich people's children get rewarded. Nurses, public restroom cleaners and teachers don't.
Right, but we should. If the state's purpose is to do things like provide education, the state needs to make it worthwhile for people to do the work of education. Despite what some people claim, capitalism is not the solution to every problem. But at the same time, if citizens are apathetic about education, they won't want to pay for it.
It's one of those weird catch-22s. If we actually incentivized those jobs nobody wants, they'd get done better, and then people would be more proud of the work, and be willing to pay for it. But because people don't pay for it, the work is done poorly, and so people aren't proud of it, and thus don't want to pay for it.
It's fascinating how the ideology of Marxism–Leninism (Communism) today is more popular than ever among young people in former capitalist heartlands like the US, Canada and UK.
A simple European-style welfare state with universal healthcare is all you need to satisfy 90% of people but the elites in the US and the UK refuse to provide that.
Its only popular as an aesthetic. On both left and right, most politically inclined people don't have the reasoning skills to talk about politics effectively, nor would the actually enjoy living under their hypothetical best system of government.
Most political discourse is used as a signal to show what kind of person you are in conversation. And generally, there is a trend of people who basically have nothing of value to demonstrate about themselves attaching their identity to politics as a way of giving their life purpose.
>simple European-style welfare state with universal healthcare
You make it sound very simple. Its not. It sure would be nice to have if you could just will it into existence, but with realistic means, the amount of issues that you would have solve for, given the people doing the solving, its not guaranteed to turn out well. Id rather see EU adopt a more competitive business strategy and immigration policies to attract money and workers so that anyone wanting to benefit from the EU policies can immigrate easier.
This is a good way to put it. I have friends who got very mixed up with the El Chapo Trap House content. It has certainly scrambled their brains and made them insufferable - but for all of the worship of dictators and crude jokes about guillotining dentists they now make, none of them really care enough about local politics to actually start attending caucuses, let alone create militias.
It's clearly not that hard, if most of Europe can pull it off with dramatically less money than the US. Where's our American exceptionalism when it comes to catching up with any random European country?
The issue in the US isn't a lack of means, it's a lack of will. Our political system is bought out by unimaginably rich interests, who's interest in the common welfare will only begin when it has fully eroded the foundation that they built their wealth on.
>if most of Europe can pull it off with dramatically less money than the US.
... with a whole different set of legislature, political history, and even cultural history, all of which GREATLY matter for implementing something like healthcare.
Simplifying this all down to "capitalism bad" is virtue signaling just like I talked about in my original post. Either talk about real solutions or don't talk about it all.
Is it? I don't really see any surge of young communism ideologies... If anything I'd say it is exactly as popular as it's always been.
I cannot speak to any but Canada, but the MOST people here do not want pure communism, they want Scandinavian/Nordic socialism. Our policies tend to venture into a weird combination of that and American policy copies, so we end up with a very weird mix.
I don't know if it's more popular in absolute terms, but it's more acceptable to be upfront about it, so it pops up in places that seemingly don't or shouldn't have that kind of affiliation. Here's an example:
I think Euro-socialism is what most of those kids want, whether they are aware of putting it in those terms or not. The culture wars seem to dictate that there are huge contingents of tankies among the youth, but that doesn't really seem to be the case on the ground (i.e. not on Twitter).
The DSA, the biggest, by far, left-org in the US appears, at least to me, to be pushing a platform indistinguishable from a Euro model.
I don't think there's a coherent political goal for the Western activist left. There's a laundry list of wishes, and a general vague notion that they can't be obtained "because capitalism". From there it quickly devolves into guillotine memes and such, but I don't think there are many people who are even well versed in Marxism or other hard left ideologies and actively pursuing their goals - it's mostly just venting.
What about a "varied culture" prevents a nationalization of the health insurance industry? It's about presentation: If pitched as "We're offering better health insurance at a lower price than your existing plan" the vast majority of people would be on board.
It would take a political miracle because of our thoroughly corrupted political system, but once it existed as an option, I have no doubt that trying to kill it would be political suicide. The problem is that our far right party is A-Ok with working class people going broke from healthcare costs, and poor people just dying, and our center-right party has pretty much adopted a platform of "We won't make things any worse".
Europe, of course, being a totally homogenous culture? This argument that America is too culturally diverse or too big for something to work has got to be the most uninformed, "the world consists of america and other", ever.
I have a theory to explain this. Prior to Boomers, the public was very left wing. Unionization was high. Communist and Socialist parties had huge support. Until the 50s, a lot of towns had socialist mayors including Milwaukee. US had a top tax rate of 90%. But Boomers and Gen X are very conservative. Gen Z and A are again more left wing.
My theory is Boomers and Gen X have had a huge amounts of lead poisoning from leaded gasoline. This shifted their politics to be more conservative. The 'culture war' we are fighting now is really a generational war. One with people who have lead poisoning and another without.
At this point it's about a desire for rational economic planning versus a capitalist system that they view as increasingly incapable of addressing broader 21st century problems such as climate change.
Perhaps young people in the US, UK, and Canada understand that elites will only settle for “a simple European-style welfare state with universal healthcare” with the explicit threat of Communism? Historically, that seems to have been the case.
Why would young people from UK and Canada think that, given that they already have a European-style welfare state with universal healthcare? Canada actually pushes it further than most of Europe with their single-payer healthcare system that effectively prohibits private coverage for things covered by the public system.
Canadians of all people also ought to remember how they got their system, which was by voting[1] for parties that supported it in elections. It had basically nothing to do with threat of communism.
Young people being naive is nothing new. And it's hardly surprising that young people are more aware of the atrocities that their own societies systems have wrought than those of a historical system that is no longer used.
Of course, what we really need is the discourse to shift from "capitalism vs. communism", to recognise that both are extreme ideologies in their pure forms, and to start working out what a "best of both worlds" system looks like.
I don't think the ideology of communism is the issue, on paper it's a very sound ideal.
The problem is when greed/other human attributes gets involved it stops working. As with any of them, it's all about the people and how they implement it. I don't think capitalism sounds good at all on paper, but has worked for quite a while, mostly due to some degree of working standards and unions.
Remember most of these haven't been in use for longer than like 100 years. Before 1920 it was largely a mix of other religious/monarchy ideals.
Right, but isn't the ignorance of actual human character shortcomings a huge reason why communism can't ever work, even on paper?
People are inherently self-interested. I would argue that any proposal for an economic system or government needs to acknowledge this at the outset and be built based on that foundational belief.
Sigh, that's not always easy with many of the people here with "unlimited PTO" without guaranteed minimums. Most of the unlimited clauses are based on manager approval.
The base HR justification for unlimited PTO is to not have to pay out unused PTO when they leave. Naturally, it sounds good on face, but leads to less PTO taken due to inherent worries of "how much is too much", lack of manager approval, and the like.
I reject companies that force 'unlimited' PTO. I demand a minimum hard number in place on the offer letter. I've turned down places for that reason.
I work in a place that offers 20 days plus all federal holidays. It's a good compromise, but I'd prefer more.
If you live in California, they still have to give you actual PTO and it _does_ accrue even when they say "unlimited". I had to use this banked PTO (I lived in CA, my company was in OR) during medical leave after a surgery (PTO means I'm fully paid, medical leave means you get less than half of your regular salary).
So, if you're in CA, you're protected somewhat, talk to HR and take your PTO.
Unlimited PTO is never good for you, its always good for the company, it allows them to not pay you your earned time when you leave. People with "unlimited PTO" tend to take _FEWER_ days off than those with actual PTO.
'unlimited' PTO should only ever be offered with a required minimum number of days. If that means my boss has to say "Go home for the last 2/3 weeks of December, you can't work any more this year", that's fine.
Personally, I'm in a position where I'm perfectly happy with my current company's offer: I get a relatively small (2 weeks) amount of non-sicktime PTO, but I'm more or less free to take as much unpaid time as I want. Which in a field as well-paying as software development, is absolutely fine with me. Even better would be a formal pool of UPTO, which doesn't need any negotiation at all, but luckily my boss is accommodating.
In two previous jobs I've had "unlimited PTO" and almost everyone in the office worked more than if they'd been given bank holidays. Pretty sure it's just a mgmt strategy that sounds awesome on paper to workers and is known to actually reduce time away from office.
That said, I personally made good use of it. Had a coworker or two ask about how I thought it was "fair" to the company. I knew the rate at which my (salaried) time was being billed to customers and didn't see it their way at all :P
20 + 10 = one full calendar month (that's 6 business weeks) of work.
You're asking for more than six weeks per year where you can just get paid for not working. Sure, there's plenty of holistic value-add to being a well rested, happy employee, but if the difference for your happiness and well-being is somewhere above having six weeks of paid vacation (plus assumed sick days as needed for actual sicknesses) and getting paid for doing nothing. . . what's that quantitative number, and how did you arrive there?
If your job is so stressful that the aforementioned six weeks plus sick days is not enough vacation for you to recuperate, you're likely underpaid, in the wrong field, or something else is driving your discontent. I'd suggest using your PTO to do some introspection and accounting for where those capacities may be needing some care.
Just looking at the raw numbers from a German PoV, that is in line with our minimum vacation days (4 weeks * 5 workdays/week + 9 to 12 holidays depending on state, if a public holiday falls on a weekend, it is not not "made up later"). So for me that sounds fair and at the lower end, especially if you have negotiation potential. I am stating this to make my bias clear.
I found your reply coming across fairly harsh. I think this is because we might have different interpretations of what PTO is. For me PTO is part of the compensation for doing my work. In essence, I am not getting paid to do nothing. I get paid less raw money for working, in exchange for more flexibility and less time at work. PTO is reducing my average work hours per week, just taken in bigger chunks at once rather than working a little bit less each day. I think you can also express more PTO as an increase in hourly compensation, but of course with additional implications.
Whether the mandated minimums or any amount of PTO are fitting or not is a different discussion. I think having time you can plan yourself is important. Overall, I think we should strive to work to live and not live to work. At what amount of PTO, compensation, work hours and working conditions you draw your personal line is, in my opinion, very subjective and not necessarily related to job dissatisfaction.
P.S. One extreme example for time/money trade-off I have seen, is someone who works 100%, but gets paid 2/3. In exchange he takes an entire year off every 2 years while maintaining his salary during that time. It works out, roughly, to the same hourly wage, but with more flexibility.
I'll concede rudeness as it's perceptive and not intrinsic in this case; I apologize for the timbre of my approach.
My stance is more of one rooted in individualism and self-advocation, i.e. if you're dedicated to a job that's considered a full time commitment, that's the social construct. We're not in a society post-labor, idealistic techtopia yet, and that transition if it occurs will be painful and bloated.
The reality is if you want the future of work when, how, where you want, then you have to recognize, admit and accept that your mental model of "employee/employer" relationship has to shift. You must not be the one exchanging what you are claiming to be your most precious asset - unburdened time - to the employer. There is no sense in continuing to enslave yourself to the constructs of yore. It is, ostensibly, within your control and power to become the master of your domain. Of course, this is going to look very catered to your particular requirements and value-adding skillsets.... do you have a set of diverse skills that can be leveraged into one-to-many income streams?
Why should the organization, that which agrees to give you quite a generous offer by any standard on a global measure, be responsible for ensuring the rest of your life is as you desire? You are the captain of the ship on this journey, only you are in control of the choices you make.
Truth is if your employer wanted to you be happy they would give you a full pension and send you on your way.
They want your labor, intelligence, work product, but it's all the same. They want your TIME.
Build businesses. Choose lifestyles that reduce dependency on extrinsic systemic operational uptime. Expose your raw value to the world as you decide and don't undermine your only static asset in life - time. It's incredible how variable the dollar-amount people set on their hours. . .
The employer/employee relationship is a business transaction: I pay them in labor, they pay me in cash. PTO is just me adjusting the amount of labor provided.
Imagine I walk into a spice stall and say: "I'd like to buy a pound of cinnamon, please." The seller might reply "Sure, that'll be $20 dollars". But I don't have $20. I have $10. So maybe I counter "Hmmm, best I can do is $10 dollars". The seller could then counter offer "I'll sell you half a pound for $10", and then we could both shake hands and walk off happy.
Replace cinnamon with labor, and that's a job negotiation. An employer, to satisfy me into selling my labor, has basically two levers: They can pay me more, or have me work less for the same pay. "Have me work less" is PTO.
Right, there is an intrinsic ceiling to how much an employer will decide to pay for that. My point is you can unlock that ceiling by choosing to pursue other business transactions, by increasing the value of your time. What employer would pay you $100k per month? Is that enough to be considered enough? You could do that with your own business but unlikely to get that from employer.
My current job, with 20 days PTO plus federal holidays is what I get per year.
If I get sick, it comes out of the 20 day pool. If I want a vacation, comes out of the 20 day pool.
At least, thankfully, I'm a remote worker, so I won't be infecting the whole office. But I still have 'come to work' sick this year. There are more than a few obnoxious cold bugs going around. And still, COVID.
And from what I understand, most European Union countries get unlimited sick leave, and 4-6 weeks of vacation both.
I also want to live and enjoy being with my SO, and doing fun stuff together. I do not live to work. I work because I have to because the threat of homelessness and destitution is the ever-present threat.
> And from what I understand, most European Union countries get unlimited sick leave, and 4-6 weeks of vacation both.
Just a side note, but in most countries sick leave requires a doctor-signed papers. Even for a day. Although sometimes companies give call-in-is-fine days as a perk. There're a lot of caveats around pay during that period. In most cases employer pays full salary for first week or so. Later it's on state and pay may be reduced. E.g. 80% of one's salary.
He's getting the literal minimum paid time off required by the EU (20 days + national holidays). Maybe in the US this is considered too much time off, but this amount would just be a basic right for any worker in Europe. Maybe you are the one who needs introspection?
Personally, I get 6 weeks + national holidays + 2 family days here in Denmark.
> If your job is so stressful that the aforementioned six weeks plus sick days is not enough vacation for you to recuperate, you're likely underpaid
Many people would prefer to be paid less and have more vacation time. Vacation time isn't just for recuperating from work. It's free time for people to live their lives as they wish.
Implying that "free time" is the luxury which should be coveted and is rare, rather than prioritizing "free time" as number one and deciding on a survival pathway that fits into that framework.
The Soviet Union's approach to paid time off (PTO) was unique, as it not only provided workers with time off but also determined how they spent it, often with groups of strangers instead of friends and family. This policy aimed to promote the collective as the most important social unit and provided subsidized vacations to a select number of workers. Although Soviet vacations initially served as team-building exercises, over time, citizens' desire for family vacations increased, challenging the state's policies. The rise of family vacations and personal investment in holidays led to a shift from purposeful production to popular consumption. Soviet vacations played a role in loosening ideological restrictions on freedom, and as travel policies opened the door for political dissent to spread, the government struggled to maintain control over leisure time.
>"The Soviet Union's approach to paid time off (PTO) was unique, as it not only provided workers with time off but also determined how they spent it"
Utter bullshit. I was able to travel to every part of USSR (except of course restricted areas and abroad) during my vacation time without any problems. USSR had gobbles of big problems and general lack of freedom but vacations were not part. As a matter of fact I spent more vacation time in more places than the average North American.
Yes if one wanted they could join some semi-/organized form but there was nothing mandatory about it.
Two sides of the same coin. I know it’s difficult to see it while stuck inside the loop but corporate work is like soviet work with fancy iphones and the illusion of free choice (you can chose as long as the choice is right). The politburo is replaced by the board while the apparatus by management. Conformity and obedience are not just desired are actively encouraged. Spreading corporate propaganda and preventing workers from organising are also shared values. All in all both are systems of oppression with the exception that in free societies you can escape - until of course they find a way to replace people at scale. Then you get sucked back in while the proletariat cheers from the sides.
All things are "the same" at some level of abstraction. But if you have to reach to a high level of abstraction to illustrate that the things are the same, I don't see that as a particularly insightful comparison. Sameness is a mundane observation at a high level of abstraction.
Sort of like just tossing your hands up and saying "life sucks" regardless of what "system" you are living under and then concluding all "systems" are "two sides of the same coin".
There you go. I cant help but wonder what would such people have achieved hadn't they been “freed” of their “burdens” by the “democratisation” of every aspect of free enterprise (coincidentally, communism also saw itself as a democratising force). I have a feeling those people would have lived a free and independent life as a small business owner with employees that looked forward to working with them.
With the extremely minor difference that if you don't go to corporate events the worst that could happen is losing your job, but if you don't obey the government, the worst that could happen is that they kill you
They also eliminated weekends[0] for eleven years, by forcing everyone to take different days for their weekend.
I don't understand the desire to find praise in the Lenin and Stalin regimes, which were as brutal as Hitler's, outside of an ongoing desire to rehabilitate the brand of socialism and make ignorant people forget about its horrors and lies -- like claiming to give its people time for recreation while making a mockery of the concepts of weekends and vacations!
Oh I am not praising stalin and lenin, those two belong in hell. Right along with socialism, communism and corporatism.
> the worst that could happen is losing your job, but if you don't obey the government, the worst that could happen is that they kill you
Well if you lose your job, in some countries, it can equal death and misery. Not by the same means as in the soviet union but by having your access to housing and health care revoked.
> like claiming to give its people time for recreation while making a mockery of the concepts of weekends and vacations!
Some software workers may reveal they can barely enjoy weekends or vacations without an email or a slack message bothering them.
Basically corporatism and communism have both hijacked free and independent enterprise.
I’m from Eastern Europe and I’ve learned what PTO means after working with US folks.
For us it was always called “vacation”. It is taken for granted that sick days, funerals (and plenty more that I can’t list from my head) are always paid.
In my experience, it's not common in English-speaking countries outside US/Canada. "Leave" is common, or just "holiday", or non-abbreviated "time off" (the "paid" is implied!)
> Huh. Is that not common vernacular where you're from?
I don’t know about the parent commenter, but I am of the opinion that regardless of how common an abbreviation is, it should always be expanded, unless the circumstances prevent you from doing that. Here, in Hacker News, submissions must have a title with maximum 80 characters, but look at this:
30 characters -> Workers of the World, Take PTO
46 characters -> Workers of the World, Take Paid Time Off (PTO)
I can only speculate why the original poster decided to use the abbreviation alone.
Wouldn’t you prefer to err on the side of caution and expand abbreviations whenever possible? Particularly in contexts where the audience may not be familiar with the abbreviation or where clarity is particularly important. I believe that expanding abbreviations is a simple but effective way to demonstrate inclusiveness and promote greater understanding and participation in communication, especially in multicultural contexts, like Hacker News, where different people have different levels of familiarity with certain terms.
This is very common in technical documentation, specifically things like RFPs (Request for Proposals) <-- Is to state the acromyn the first time, and expand it and throughout the RFP you can then use the acronym, the real reason this is important is that RFPs --> $MONEY and thus, will be scrutinized by the "penny pinchers" who will lack a lot of domain knowledge being addressed with an RFP for a project.
For example, I, as a Director of OPs was constantly educating our CFO on cloud spend, and would have to kind of train him on technical matters while at the same time explaining where all our costs are etc...
Or when designing a huge project (I have worked on many projects with budgets over $1 billion) and going through vendor selection processes, where we review the RFPs with the vendors and the finance holders for the project, there are many times when one has to justify telling Mr. Money Bags why simply accepting the cheapest offer is not sufficient.
This was actually a type of work, which at the time felt tedious, but now I realize how much I actually liked this aspect of my career.
It's one of the reasons I heavily use the HTML (hypertext markup language ;) <abbr> abbreviation tag [0]. I think it's useful for reminding the reader what the acronym/abbreviation/initialism means so they don't have to backtrack to where it was originally referenced. I know how it feels to read something with unknown abbreviations because I've read comments here on hackernews about machine learning.
I imagine an analogy of summer camp as that is my only way to relate as I'm in a rich country. I'm going to go to a summer camp not of my choosing and participating in activities not of my choosing and being bunked with people not of my choosing for the rest of my vacations for life and then when i'm about 80 years old then claim there is negligible delta from not having to do that. That last bit, I can't imagine.
I can choose where to live, work, and spend my leisure time. Obviously, some of these opportunities are determined at a second order level by regulations, but this is much less direct and a significant delta compared to USSR.
It's funny to me that there is a widespread perception that in 2023 life has become more regulated in most developed economies. Most of what is now the "developed" world reached its height of regulation and government involvment in daily life in the middle of the 20th century. Deregulation and market solutions have largely been the direction of most advanced economies. Those, more aggressively in the U.S. but fairly consistent none the less.
The delta is very much _not_ negligible. Even people’s apartments were not in their property. No private business allowed, all production was government-managed. It is difficult to understand how USSR worked, unless you lived there.
Vast numbers of people in the West don't own their own home either. Not really the same as living in the old East since you can choose where you live here, within your budget, but I wanted to highlight that a lot of our freedom ends when the money does.
Who is telling you where to work? What profession you're in? Where you will eat lunch? Who you are allowed to associate with?
I order for it to be less confusing, perhaps the article could have said "government prescribed behavior in almost every aspect of life" and I claim the delta is not negligible.
Well, to be honest, people were allowed to pick a profession. And you had some wiggle room to pick your placement and change works later on.
And you were allowed to drink in your kitchen with whoever you want. Although if KGB noticed you were partying with known dissidents or on certain days (e.g. independence day of the republic that was then occupied by soviets)... you'd be, let's say, cancelled :) Or if you kids had poppy seeds in dental inspection that was accidentally held on christmas day...
This can actually work out well. I experienced something similar in the US while on vacation. I was traveling with someone from Glenwood Springs, CO to Denver, CO via Amtrak. We went to the dining car for lunch an since there were two of us and space is at a premium, the Amtrak policy was to seat us with one or two random strangers. We sat and had lunch with an oil executive and someone's grandmother and it was quite an interesting experience and we got to meet two strangers. It was actually a highlight of that train trip.
I feel like the experience of having unplanned social interactions with strangers is often missing in modern American life. I don't know if the Soviet style of assigning vacation groups via a worker's committee would be pleasant, but I can't help but think things would be better if we had more situations where we are "forced" to engage with strangers.