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Comment by jltsiren | Hacker News Reader

Class consciousness is an interesting term. Not too long ago, people were trying to figure out what it would mean in practice to build a society based on that. It turned out that the answer was in class interests. In particular, whether it would be in someone's interests to support communist revolution and the subsequent abolition of private property.

The eventual conclusion was that the interests of the upper middle class did not align with those of the working class. Anyone with substantial non-labor income, such as a small business owner with permanent employees or a professional with enough wealth to have a rental property or other investments of similar value, would not want to have their wealth taken away. That made them class enemies of the working class.

It can be instructive to read what happened to kulaks (wealthy independent peasants) in the early USSR.

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That would be group 2, not group 1

"Your passive income is enough to live"

Maybe I'm too naive but I can imagine a whole bunch of scenarios between the current capitalismmaxxing and "ThE GuLAgS".

You don't have to be marxists or revolutionist to notice that you're getting the short end and that a smaller and smaller part of the population is profiting more and more. Wealth inequalities weren't anywhere as bad between the 1930s and 1990s for example, it was still capitalism, still largely the same societal organization, etc.

We're asking that we perhaps should consider doing something about the 0.1%... and people like you are misrepresenting it as "they want to literally kill anyone owning anything". Nobody gives a shit about the local baker, farmer or ice cream shop.

There is a middle ground, but class consciousness does not lie that way. Once you start thinking in terms of class interests, the natural conclusions are unpleasant.

The propaganda of the communist revolution was just a mirage.

The communists confiscated everything of value from the majority of the population and in theory all that became "common property of all the people".

In reality, every valuable property was controlled by a small class of privileged people, who even if they were not the owners on paper, in reality they used and benefited from those properties exactly like or even more than "capitalist" millionaires and billionaires. All the communist revolutions just replaced a few privileged people with other few privileged people and the majority of the people typically became even poorer after the revolution, though frequently some minorities received some advantages after the revolutions, because those in power needed faithful people in some lower jobs, to be able to control the majority.

The only difference between the "capitalist" oligarchs and the "communist" oligarchs is that for the former the amount of money recorded in their bank accounts is important for their power, while for the latter money is of little importance but what is important is their network of allies with which they are connected by family relationships, complete obedience when subordinates, bribes or barter of various favors.

The first decade after the Russian Revolution was characterized by a power struggle and search for direction in the communist party. First there was "war communism" with forced socialization and central control. Towards the end of the civil war, there was a switch to a form of market socialism, for both ideological and pragmatic reasons. Many people even got wealthy during that time. Then Lenin died and Stalin started consolidating his power. The first five-year plan marked the beginning of the kind of communism we now know.

During the civil war, communists saw kulaks as enemies, as their loyalties were at best unclear. And because they were convenient scapegoats. Most Russians were peasants, and kulaks were the neighbors who were better off than you. When things were bad, you could blame kulaks for your misery, because they had more than you.

Later kulaks were tolerated as a necessary evil in market socialism. Then Stalin started his "dekulakization" campaign. Millions of kulaks were deported (mostly to Siberia and Kazakhstan), which was a major contributing factor to the famine in the early 1930s. And when Stalin's purges started, most of the victims were from former kulak families.

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