Source: Piketty’s World Inequality Report 2022
I shared this deep in a dunk thread earlier and figured there’s probably many comrades who haven’t seen this data. I think it’s very good rhetorically because a lot of libs have an incredibly vibes-based impression that the Soviet Union was just an Animal Farm old-boss-same-as-the-new-boss situation.
Instead, this demonstrates that Russia underwent one of the most dramatic inversions of income inequality of any country in recorded history.
For comparison here is the US over the same time period:
China:
And the UK:
The USSR in its prime was able to challenge the USA on a lot of moral issues that would have never been brought up by other powers. For instance, I’m pretty sure that civil rights was not able to progress as it did without the ability for the USA to be shamed into action.
That said, both China and Russia seem like they are near pre-revolution levels of income disparity right now. So, I don’t know who would be the standard bearer pushing for economic equality now.
It’s disappointing but necessarily surprising tbh. China has been doing state capitalism for a while now.
As for your question these statistics aren’t necessarily contradictory to the idea of extreme poverty being reduced/eradicated. As this is basically a measure of wealth inequality, and while it might be worse than pre revolution, the standard of life is undoubtedly much higher. This is a result of China’s explosive economic growth, there is simply way more wealth in China than ever before. So a higher wealth inequality isn’t necessarily a good indicator of poverty. It is however an apt representation of the CCP’s economic policies over the past two decades and is a good indicator that poverty will rise once China’s growth slows down if wealth inequality isn’t addresed.
both China and Russia seem like they are near pre-revolution levels of income disparity right now.
Uhhhh China’s life expectancy pre revolution was 33 years old. There is absolutely zero comparison between China of today and the humiliation years of hyper exploitation by the British, Americans, Japanese and so on.
wonder how those stats are calculated. The bottom 50% in 1930s China were literal serfs with a life expectancy of 30 doing borderline slavery to feudal landlords. Are we really gonna pretend they owned like 20-30% of the country’s income share ? What does that even mean or matter in a feudal context
I’m not sure the graphs support that conclusion by themselves. The dip in US top 10% occurred simultaneously with Pearl Harbor and the US joining WWII, not the formation of the Soviet Union. For the UK it likewise seems tied to World Wars I and II and decolonization. For WWI it makes sense that it did not impact the US quite as much, especially since the US in fact was a financier of the European nations, and was notoriously unforgiving of war debts. Michael Hudson has argued this debt a major factor in provoking the buildup of Nazi ideology in Germany as France and England directly and indirectly required all of those debts to come from Germany.
The measure in these graphs is inequality of income rather than of wealth. Perhaps nationalization of production during wartime is the causal factor? Unemployment goes way down as people go off to fight or are employed in war manufacture. In any case it’s hard to separate the influences of war and political system on this data.
can a smart person tell me what cool thing happened in the 60s in the soviet union?
China was cool for a second there but it looks like they’re going cringe. We need another purge, Xi.
i think this exchange pretty much nails the discourse around this issue
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/166d1239-6808-46ef-b5d9-5153c7d92b65.png
spoiler
as a certified deng beetle i am refraining from spamming deng emojis at you
Yeah they need some socialist roaders back in power, probably won’t happen any time soon though.
One things for sure, Xi isn’t the man for the job.
We’ll see, he’s been doing a lot of rooting out corruption and ending food insecurity and extreme poverty while building up the infrastructure of the country and contending with the endless hostility from America, but he has recognized that inequality is a problem which needs to be addressed over the next several 5 year plans.
Personally, I’ll defer to the hundred million members of the CPC to determine whether he does a good enough job at it or if somebody else needs to take the reins.
Wow, looks like something bad happened in 1991 that caused inequality to get even worse than under Tsarist Russia.
I mean, the soviet union devalued currency and instead valued political power, and you can see how fast its political elites were able to convert one to the other in 1991.
If you meant devalued and valued to mean “held in esteem” and its antonym, your comment makes no sense because political power in a government that’s collapsing can’t be traded for money, it’s not worth any!
If you meant devalued to refer to reducing the value of the currency on the market as part of trade policy that doesn’t make sense either because after the collapse the rub to usd exchange rate hit almost 100.
So what did you mean?
its political elites were able to convert one to the other in 1991.
Are you aware of how many people’s lives that destroyed? It was the single biggest reduction in living standards for the largest number of people outside of war time in history.
And Yeltsin and his gang of capitalist robbers were hardly representative of the soviet union. They were US-backed compradors. Yeltsin’s fucking campaigns were even planned by the americans.
