Relative affluence and highly skilled workers

[Mr. Piccolo]

First off, I am new here, and I hope I can learn a lot from this forum. I have been lurking for a while and found the discussions fascinating.


I recall reading a book entitled Revolution from Above:The Demise of the Soviet System by David Kotz and Fred Weir and the authors mentioned that much of the support for a transition to capitalism in the USSR came from the ranks of the well-educated. Many of these workers were unhappy with the Soviet system because:


First, they disliked the fact that, despite their highly developed skills, their income was often not much greater than less skilled workers. One example given in the book was a scientist who resented that a truck driver had a dacha next to him with similar furnishings, etc.


Second, images of similarly skilled people from the West portrayed a much higher standard of living. Often these images were misleading (for example Soviets writers might envy rich Western writers without realizing that the vast majority of aspiring Western writers were struggling and not wealthy) but they had a psychological power to them.


After the USSR collapsed, many of these same people ended up losing many of the privileges and secure positions they had under the Soviet system and had to scrounge to make a living (for example, Russian scientists being forced to scrape together a living tutoring young wealthy students from abroad), so I guess many did not get the better life they hoped for.


Now, that being said, I still think there is a kind of mentality among skilled people that prevents them from seeing that essentially, when you look at their relationship to the capitalist, he or she is little different from a janitor or other less-skilled laborer. My question is, where does this attitude come from and how can it be fought? Does it come from cultural factors, from the wage premium that sometimes does indeed go to workers with certain skills?
As for myself, I think there might be something more than just financial considerations at play here.


In the USSR and other former state socialist countries, I do believe that certain skilled individuals were paid more than those with less skills, it is just that the differentials were not as huge as they were in the capitalist states. This leads me to think that the issue is one of relative position and the extra status that tends to attach to certain professions. Basically, I think many people like lording it over others and may be willing to put up with the problems of capitalism for a shot at being able to significantly upstage everybody else at their high school reunion, to put it in more base terms.


What do you folks think about this issue?

[subcp]

No one likes being "proletarianized". Since the social relations underlying the USSR were always capitalist (except for a small time frame when everything was in flux 1917), as demonstrated well by your description of currency, waged labor, etc it's just typical frustration from exploitation.

In the West, highly skilled workers (professional air traffic controllers, longshoremen, master stone masons, etc.) make a lot of money compared to other waged workers- but their relative affluence has no bearing on their class. We're seeing more and more of the former professional strata (those involved in R&D or science/technology fields, healthcare professionals) fall into the proletariat because of a restructured economy.

I don't think any industry creates 'counter-revolutionists'; workers are workers. The ideology that goes along with capitalism (competition, social darwinism) will cease to be a factor after this mode of production is relegated to the history books. No law of value, no capitalism.

[Thelonious]

I am a bridge painter. I am very well paid. You do not need to be a good painter to do what I do, you just slop the paint on (but there are many other aspects of the job: arc-welding, oxy-acetylene cutting, knot-tying, rigging, etc.). However, the main reason why bridge painters are very well paid is because of the hazards of the job.

I met someone at a Christmas party who is a college graduate and is employed as a computer programer. We had a lengthy conversion where we questioned each other about or respective professions. When he found out that I made more money than he did, he was more than a little surprised, and I suspect a little angry. He seemed to think that it was unfair that a blue-collar worker should make more than a college graduate. When I pressed him to further explain his reasoning he decided to end the conversation and he walked away visibly perturbed.

I think there is certainly a "pecking-order" mentality here in the United States concerning the hierarchy of the various professions and what the respective salaries are. Many people probably think that any college educated worker should always be paid more than a worker who did not go to college.

I suspect that many college educated workers believe that they have a right to better pay because they feel that they have more invested in their profession because they spent money and time on their education. Therefore, they feel that they should be better compensated. Perhaps they feel that what they do is more valuable.

Personally, I cringe when I hear the amounts that some CEO's and Wall St. executives make. I feel like vomiting when I hear that some of these types still get seven-figure bonuses even after losing millions of dollars in working peoples retirement funds.

I may be veering off the topic, bit there needs to be a radical change in the country I live in. I hope to see it in my lifetime; I hope to able to participate in the revolution that is too long overdue for the United States of America.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The problem is money, and job specialisation. The former always leads to problems. When income inequality is high, people complain rightly about the social ills and lack of fairness, when it is tight, some people will complain they're not earning enough/no incentive blah blah.

Of course, what the USSR lacked a convincing education/propaganda machine, since it went into overdrive and seems to have been a caricature not taken hugely seriously, much like Leonid Brezhnev himself. That it was a political dictatorship did not help either, probably drove people to be cynical against the regime, I know that attitude prevailed a lot in the former East Germany.

The latter, job specialisation, leads to alienation and does have the problem of leading to people expecting a high salary if they're in a managerial/skilled job for a long - time, you know career progression and all that. I've no doubt that communism can work if job specialisation is abandoned for job rotation, money is abandoned as abundance in production makes possible no-limits in consumption of many goods.