"I see that Chris knows a lot of intellectuals who think that the working class were overpaid and lazy in the soviet era. I too have met middle class people who thought that workers were overpaid. I've also met people who are nostaglic for the 1940s and 1950s in Britain, and weave fairy stories to themselves about how we were all better off then. No doubt some people have ostalgia for the Stalin era, too. But a wiser person might have taken this with a pinch of salt."
I'm no Stalin worshipper and neither is Chris. He is describing the living conditions of the mass of people under the Soviets and under neo-liberalism. My experience is of living in Romania and remembering the living conditions of the intelligentsia (superb) and those of the working class (pretty good) -- compared to now. Even in the darkest days of the Ceausescu regime, there were not thousands of children living in the sewers of Bucharest...as they do now. There was an era in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union when most people felt they had a right to health care, child care, a good education, work, .... and they did have access to all this. Yes, I do think Stalin was the gravedigger of the revolution and I do think that Ceausescu was a psychotic tin pot dictator, but even they could not defeat the revolutionary expectations of the working class after the Russian revolution and after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
If most Americans believed that health care, education, work, social support was their right, this would be a very different world.
Joanna