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saubeidl parent
If the workers rise up properly, they can reposses oligarch riches instead!
abeyer
History has seemed to show the only likely outcome is the violent redistribution of riches from one set of oligarchs to another.
jjani
Absolutely not. The French revolution overall had enormously positive effects on Europe in terms of equality. A quick look into that period across Western Europe will give you numerous cases where suddenly the powerful became uncharacteristically eager to let go off significant parts of their power. In fact this event may well have had the biggest such effect of any event in history.

A recent event last year in the US also immediately resulted in actions undertaken whereas peaceful protests did not. Mostly protective actions, but it showed a very clear impact, the contrast was stark.

achierius
Based on what? Sure quips like that are catchy, but what "oligarchs" were there in the Soviet Union circa 1920-1989? The "nomenklatura", while well-off, were absolutely nowhere near the wealth of today's American oligarchs or modern (capitalist) Russian ones. Moreover, unlike oligarchs, they do not form a class: wealth does not transfer reliably one generation to the next, and individuals would phase in and out of high status according to their position in their career.

A very striking way to illustrate this is to look at the career histories of high government officials even very late into the Soviet Union. The last Minister of Coal, Mikhail Shchadov, was born in a village, worked in a mine, went to mining school for engineering, became head of his mine, and thereafter worked his way up the ranks until he was head of the whole apparatus. This story, not that of inherited wealth or monopolistic oligarchs, dominates the histories of Soviet ministers even very late in the decline of the Union.

Where is the "other set" of oligarchs of which you speak? There is none, which means there is hope for workers who might wish to enact fundamental economic change.

abeyer
You can quibble over degree and the path taken, but wealthy insiders using money to control politics and ideological insiders using political control to amass wealth feel like two sides of the same coin, both leading the same way.

Your definition of class also seems to be very different from a traditional Marxist take -- hereditary systems were mostly seen as a symptom and not the problem itself, and were mostly orthogonal to any understanding of class.

I _hope_ there is hope, but I don't have much confidence that it lies in century old tropes of "rise up and throw off your chains."

achierius
But that's the key point: these people weren't insiders, not before gaining their positions, and they didn't even really accumulate wealth. They gained benefits from their position, sure, but little of that was attached to their position -- rather, to their office, and when that office lapsed, so did those privileges. When Khrushchev was removed from office, he got a small pension (500 rubles/mo.) and a house + cottage in which to spend his retirement, and even that was considered relatively comfortable.

So what did they accumulate? Few acquired power for life; none acquired significant wealth, or a power base independent from the party-state. Even after the end of the union, it was not the former nomenklatura who became new oligarchs: by and large it was the security services and their affiliates who were able to feed on the corpse.

You're right to critique how I described class in the previous message, but what I was trying to accumulate was essentially the above. It's not perfect, but I think this is very much a situation where it's important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I would far rather live in a society where my leaders were once workers like me, raised in the same way, and all men were subject to the same basic economic guarantees. What we live in today is the rule of oligarchs, and it'd be a big step up to merely suffer the rule of bureaucrats.

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