Another Expose of An Evangelical Cult

Here is a link to a couple of interviews of another former member of the Assemblies of George Geftakys, who describes the horrible upbringing she experienced as a child of one of the main leaders in this group.  The interviewer is also a survivor of the Assemblies.  These interviews were very interesting to me because of my former involvement in this unhealthy group.  They are also interesting because of how they illustrate the influence of bad men from the toxic evangelical mainstream, men such as James Dobson.  As I said a while back, all the assertions of the American Religious Right are utter crap.  A caution about these interviews: they contain strong language and deal with triggering experiences.

A Dogfight Against Putin's Flying Monkeys

This will be a short post.  I am trying to get my weekly schedule under control.  However, there is continuing news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and there is therefore need to provide commentary to put it into context.

First, it appears that Vladimir Putin has begun to launch extra squadrons of flying monkeys in order to spread disinformation and to influence world opinion in his favor.  Several thousand such monkeys organized a protest in Germany to oppose the German government's decision to send more effective arms to Ukraine to help drive out the Russian invaders.  And the government of China's Xi Jinping has also tried to pressure the people of Ukraine into accepting a false "peace" which would do nothing to protect them from continued Russian aggression.  There are also the usual highly-placed mouthpieces in the West who are trying to cast doubt on the rightness of the West's continued support of Ukraine.  However, ordinary citizens in the West have begun to organize their own rallies to demonstrate their continued support of the people of Ukraine and their continued opposition to the thuggish Russian invasion.  And Poland has begun openly supplying Ukraine with military aid.  

The Russian government knows that if the West supplies Ukraine with adequate weaponry, the Russian invasion will be decisively defeated.  Therefore the voices of Putin's flying monkeys may well represent a cry of desperation.  For anyone who is genuinely confused about the character of Russia or of the thug named Vladimir Putin, please read the posts I have linked on the sidebar of this blog under the heading, "Russia."

P.S. I still need to do research before I write the next post in my series of posts on precarity and the precariat.  In future posts in this series, I hope to illustrate the connection between the oligarchs who rule Russia and China and some of the oligarchs who have taken root in the West.  Also, there is a bright bit of good news: the Russian invasion of Ukraine has motivated Europe to engage in a massive build-out of renewable electricity generation capacity.  This has resulted in a situation in which today Europe produces more of its electricity from renewables than from natural gas.  If Russia was hoping to use its oil and gas reserves as a tool to enslave the rest of the world, hopefully the Russians are now starting to realize that they have shot themselves in the foot.

The Precariat In The East: The Chinese Case

Today's post is the fourth installment in my series of posts on precarity as a feature of 21st century life and the precariat as a global cultural phenomenon.  For context, please also read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.  In the third post in this series, I wrote the following:

But the precariat has also arisen outside of the West.  What has been striking is its origin and spread in those regions which withdrew themselves from global capitalism in the early 20th century only to return to the capitalist fold near the end of the 20th century . . .

Today's post will consider the emergence of the precariat in China during the last forty-five years.  And it must be said that while precarity is a definite sign of economic inequality in a society, it is also true that there have been unequal societies in which precarity did not exist.  Chinese history spans both cases.  In fact, according to a paper titled, "Understanding Inequality in China" (Yu Xie, University of Michigan, 2010), ". . . inequality has been a part of Chinese culture since ancient times."  Historically, this inequality did not contribute to precarity among the poor in Chinese society.  However, this culture of inequality was a contributing factor in the precarity that emerged after the death of Mao Zedong.  So let us consider the evolution of inequality and class mobility in China from ancient times to now.  

Ancient China

In ancient China, the emperor was the only person with a permanent hereditary position of wealth, privilege, and power.  According to Yu Xie's paper, the emperor governed by two means: first, by the promulgation of the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius who taught that the mission of rulers is to work for the public good; and second, by the use of a vast corps of semi-autonomous administrators and bureaucrats scattered throughout the provinces of the Chinese empire.  The relationship between ordinary peasants and the emperor and his bureaucrats was therefore shaped by two points of propaganda: first, that the emperor and his administrators were actually working for the public good, and second, that for the emperor and his administrators to do their job, structural inequality was necessary.  According to Mencius, "‘There are those who use their minds and there are those who use their muscles. The former rule; the latter are ruled.  Those who rule are supported by those who are ruled.’ This is a principle accepted by the whole Empire . . ."  Therefore, the mission of the peasants was to use their labor to provide material support to this cadre of rulers.  

In order to make sure that the peasants did their part to support their rulers, a system of taxation was developed, and as part of that system, a system of personal registration (hukou (户口)) and household registration (huji (户籍)) was developed.  According to a paper titled, "Governing neoliberal authoritarian citizenship: theorizing hukou and the changing mobility regime in China" by C. Zhang, Queen's University Belfast (2018), this household registration system ". . . continuously served important social and political functions, including military conscription, taxation, local policing, social security and mobility control, for about two millennia in the centralized bureaucratic empire . . ."  Note especially the mention that from time to time, the huji system was used to limit the ability of subjects to move around from region to region in the empire.  This is corroborated by a mention in another paper of how the Qin dynasty used the huji system to limit movement of individual subjects from region to region: "The Qin people [sic] could not freely move outside an administrative unit to which he or she belonged; thus, they had to use credentials for traveling and transfer certain personal documents when moving from one unit to another."  ("In the Government's Service: A Study of the Role and Practice of Early China's Officials Based On Excavated Manuscripts," Daniel Sungbin Sou, University of Pennsylvania, 2013)

Even with this system of registration in place, however, social mobility was still possible in ancient China.  For the rich, whose riches under the existing economic and cultural system were not easily inheritable, there was always the possibility of downward economic movement.  According to Yu Xie's paper cited above, ". . . except for the emperor, the aristocratic and privileged classes were not stable . . . In fact, the emperor did not want the inheritance of the aristocratic and privileged class."  People who got too rich could in fact be repressed and have some of their possessions confiscated.  Also, poor people could advance their family prospects by investing in the education of their sons.  By this means the next generation could climb the rungs of the Chinese meritocracy and become administrators themselves.

By these arrangements, ancient Chinese society was conditioned to accept inequality as the "inevitable" price of the promotion of the social welfare of the entire society.  The system worked and was acceptable to all as long as emperors and their administrators actually ruled for the benefit of all, and as long as there was some room for social mobility among the poor.  However, between ancient times and the present, China underwent subjugation by Western powers, followed by a revolutionary fight for independence.  As a result, its internal systems went through a period of readjustment.  

Maoist China

Maoist China inherited most of the existing cultural institutions which had endured from ancient times.  Maoist China also inherited the toxic mess which Western colonialist powers had made of Chinese society.  However, the responses of the government of Mao Zedong to this mess created new challenges.  One of Mao's early goals was to transform China from a primarily agrarian society to a modern industrial society as quickly as possible.  This led to such disasters as the Great Leap Forward which was launched in 1958.   

In 1958 the system of internal household registration was also transformed into a much more rigid modern hukou system modeled on the Soviet Russian system of propiska (пропи́ска).  It is interesting to note that in its original form, the Russian propiska system, hundreds of years old, was designed to prevent the upward social mobility of Russian serfs.  The Chinese system, borrowing from the Russian system, thus created a society which was the opposite in certain key aspects from the socialist promise of a "classless" society.  

The hukou system had the following elements:

• Starting in 1958, all people had to be registered according to birthplace.
• The person's birthplace was the determinant of whether the person received State welfare services and what kind of services would be received.
• Those whose birthplace registration was urban received State services.
• Those whose birthplace registration was rural received no State services.  Any welfare services they received had to come from communal social arrangements in their village of registration.
• Those whose birthplace was urban were categorized as non-agricultural.  Those whose birthplace was rural were categorized as agricultural.
• The children of the people registered in 1958 inherited the hukou status of their parents.  The children of these children, in turn, inherited their parents' hukou status.  Thus even if you were a child born in the 1990's in a city, if your parents had a rural hukou status, you inherited the same rural hukou status.

The Maoist hukou system created a social hierarchy in which the members of the Communist Party were at the pinnacle.  Immediately below them were the city dwellers who were involved in industrial production.  Below them were the rural peoples, whose mission was to provide food to the industrial urban centers and the leadership of the country in order to fulfill the mission of rapid industrialization.  Therefore, the social mobility of the rural, agricultural hukou holders was severely restricted.  Anyone who held an rural agricultural hukou who tried to move to a city without permission was likely to be severely punished.  Moreover, anyone from the countryside who moved to the city without permission would be denied access to the social services available to the residents of the city who held urban, nonagricultural hukou status.  And the Chinese government made it very hard for anyone with a rural hukou status to change to an urban hukou status.  (See "China's Household Registration (Hukou) System: Discrimination and Reform", Fei-Ling Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005.)  According to "China’s Hukou System: How an Engine of Development Has Become a Major Obstacle" (Martin King Whyte, Harvard University, 2009), the holders of rural, agricultural hukou comprised 80 percent of the total Chinese population in Maoist times.

One last feature of note in the Maoist system was the danwei (单位) system.  A danwei was a work unit organized in Maoist China.  According to Wikipedia, the workers assigned to a danwei were the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy whose head was the central Communist Party.  Danwei referred not only to the place of work but also to the organization of the work unit.  The danwei also served the purpose of dispensing social welfare benefits to their subjects.  Thus things like health care, schooling and day care for children, and other benefits were dispensed to workers through their danwei.  Once assigned to a danwei, it was very hard for a worker to be fired, because the danwei provided an "iron rice bowl" to their workers, a system of social welfare and livelihood that, while often not comfortable, at least prevented them from having to live a precarious existence.  While this security had its good features, it was part of a system that did not deliver prosperity and national advancement as rapidly as was wished by some of the more forward-thinking members of the Chinese Communist Party.  Therefore, after Mao's death, Chinese social arrangements were again altered in order to attempt to harness capitalism as an accelerator of growth and advancement.  While the alteration did produce results, it also accelerated the increase of inequality in China and began to introduce a rapidly-growing element of precarity in Chinese society.

From The End of Maoism to Today

The changes wrought by the reforms begun in 1978 have been profound.  Two changes are especially relevant, as they have contributed most greatly to the emergence of the precariat in China.  The first is the smashing of the "iron rice bowl" danwei system.  According to Wikipedia, when individual private enterprise became possible once again, private enterprises and foreign multinational corporations were able to out-compete state-run danwei.  This led to the weakening and shrinkage of the danwei, and the increasing number of workers who were thrust out of stable careers with guaranteed benefits into an uncertain labor market.  Thus these refugees from the danwei system became an element of today's precariat in China.  In losing their danwei, these displaced workers lost the social units that once gave them status, identity, and access to benefits.

The hukou system was also changed.  The changes have been coordinated between the Chinese government and large holders of capital in the Chinese economy, and their goal has been to create and expand a large, flexible, and cheap workforce.  The elements of this change are as follows:

• Restrictions on physical movement under the Maoist hukou system have been relaxed somewhat but definitely not eliminated.  
• Hukou status has largely remained unchanged in the sense that it is still difficult for holders of rural hukou to change their status to urban.
• Legal migration of rural residents to urban centers is more possible now than in Maoist times.  However, rural residents who do migrate are still denied access to the social welfare services and legal citizenship rights granted to holders of urban hukou.  
• This arrangement has therefore created a very large class of migrant workers who are paid very cheaply and have few or no rights.  
• Those who migrate legally are more likely to be integrated into the formal economy of the cities to which they migrate, whereas those who migrate illegally tend to wind up in the informal economy.
• Whether formally or informally employed, these migrant workers are not granted stable, long-term employment contracts.  Therefore they comprise another very large sector of the Chinese precariat.
• Many of these people are forced to work like dogs, as evidenced by the "996" schedule imposed by many employers, a schedule which was only recently ruled illegal by the Chinese Supreme Court.
• Those who migrate illegally are subject to the threat of violence either by the State or by their employers.

One other thing to note is that in China as elsewhere, education is no longer the guaranteed road out of precarity into a more stable life.  A 2021 paper titled, "After the Foxconn Suicides in China: A Roundtable on Labor, the State and Civil Society in Global Electronics" describes the exploitation of young Chinese students by the tech industry, thus highlighting the struggle of the large percentage of youth in the Chinese precariat.  This is also pointed out in another paper titled, "The Chinese Race to the

Bottom: The Precarious Lives of Unemployed University Graduates in Beijing’s ‘Ant Tribe’".

Lastly, it should be noted that although the precariat in China is expanding, expressions of resistance to exploitation are beginning to appear as well.  For further information on these, you can read the first pages of Building China: Informal Work and the New Precariat by Sarah Swidler.

I have one or two more global regions to examine in sketching the precariat as it exists in the world today.  Those will require more research, so the next post in this series may need to wait a couple of weeks.

Christopher Caldwell's Sympathy for Vladimir Putin's Point of View

The New York Times recently ran an opinion piece by a Mr. Christopher Caldwell who chided the Biden administration for "escalating" the war between Ukraine and Russia by supplying M1 main battle tanks to Ukraine.  Mr. Caldwell's point of view is similar to that of some other highly-placed commentators writing for outfits such as Foreign Policy magazine, as well as a certain clueless former rock star associated with Pink Floyd.  It seems these people want the West to put up no opposition to the narcissistic desire of Russia to establish a global empire.

That doesn't fly with me.  Russia has been guilty of subverting and destabilizing the democratic process in a large number of nations, including the United States.  Russia has aggressively re-asserted its imperial dominance over a number of nations which had been in the process of being bled dry by the imperial Russian center during the days of the Soviet Union.  Those nations are once again being bled dry by Moscow under Putin.  Every nation that Russia has touched over the last two decades has begun to turn to garbage.  If the West wants to live in a world that has been turned entirely into garbage, it need do nothing more than capitulate to Russia.  I, however, do not want to live in such a world, subject to the evil, perverted desires of people like Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin.  Therefore, I choose to resist.  And I urge all who love freedom to resist.  If the world resists successfully, then Russian power will be shattered and the world will be delivered from a major threat.  Russia must lose.  If that makes Christopher Caldwwell and his fellow travelers unhappy, then I would invite them to move to Russia or Belarus or Chechnya or Georgia or Kazakhstan and live under Putin, since they seem to like living in the midst of garbage.  They should either put up or shut up.

The Desperate Need For A Distributed, Peer-to-Peer, Open-Source Search Engine

This year, 2023, is the year in which a desperate need has arisen among those of us who actually try to do useful work via the Internet.  The need I am talking about is the need for a truly open-source, distributed, peer-to-peer search engine that is not owned by any corporate entity.  Google search has turned to absolute garbage.  This is because Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has completely changed the purpose of the Google search engine from helping people find useful information.  The main purpose of Google Search has now become to earn advertising revenue by selling advertising.  I know that some who read these words will say "Well, DuckDuckGo is better!"  But such people overlook the fact that DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Yahoo!, and AOL are all owned by Microsoft.  Therefore they rely on the Bing search engine, an engine whose primary mission has also become to earn advertising revenue.  This means that both Google and Microsoft search have become increasingly useless.

These things make me think of a book I recently found called Obliquity, by John Kay.  In his book, Kay describes a number of companies which used to earn large profits for their shareholders by focusing on providing excellent products and services.  However, when those corporations abandoned their mission of providing excellent products and switched to the mission of maximizing shareholder value, they began to crash and burn.  Two examples of this phenomenon are the British chemical company ICI, and the Boeing Company.  Boeing is especially interesting in that this company used to dominate commercial aviation from the 1960's until the early years of the 21st century.  This was because of Boeing's singular focus on aviation science and the craft required to make the best airplanes possible.  However, when Boeing switched to maximizing shareholder value as its primary goal, its executives made a series of unwise technical decisions which resulted in a number of disasters, especially around the 737 MAX aircraft.  These missteps allowed the European company Airbus to gain a global market lead over Boeing.

A similar process seems to be at work in regard to search engines.  For Google, the process started with providing a best-in-class search engine which outperformed all other search engines during the early days of the Internet.  This was because Google was created by people who were genuinely passionate about computing.  But when Google was taken over by grownups in business suits, the passion became the maximization of shareholder value even if this took place at the expense of what used to be Google's primary mission, which had been to help people find things on the Internet.  (Microsoft, on the other hand, had always been run by greedy grown-ups in business suits.)  Thus we the users are now stuck with garbage.  The thinking at Google and Microsoft may well be that we, the users of their products, have no other options, so they can get away with continuing to give us garbage.  But alternatives to garbage do exist, and when they are discovered, they can take hold in a surprisingly short time.  Then companies which seek to maximize profits by offering garbage may find their profits suddenly collapsing.  Just ask the former employees of ICI and some of the recently laid-off employees of Boeing.

How Decent People Should Respond To The Murder of Tyre Nichols

I wasn't planning to write another blog post this weekend.  And I have grown to dislike regular exposure to the news.  But the police murder of Tyre Nichols came to my attention within the last few hours.  Tyre Nichols was an unarmed African-American man who was brutally beaten to death by the police in Memphis, Tennessee.  Tennessee is a red state ruled by Republicans and I am sure that many of its citizens are white evangelicals who loudly proclaim the name of Jesus even though they have no intention of doing anything He actually commanded them.

The question that naturally arises after yet another White murder of unarmed Black people is how we who are people of color should respond.  I wrote an extensive series of blog posts on that subject a little more than two years ago.  Those posts can be found on the sidebar of this blog, under the headings, "From Dictatorship to Democracy" and "Resistance In The Age of Trump."  These posts deal with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance as a means of liberation of historically oppressed peoples.  Let me summarize some key points from those posts as follows:

• Strategic nonviolent resistance is an effective means of liberation - especially when it is guided by wise strategy.

• Strategic nonviolent resistance does not consist of trying to convert the oppressor by appealing to the "better angels" of the oppressor.

• Strategic nonviolent resistance works best when an oppressed population withdraws its cooperation from a system of oppression in ways that impose coercive costs on that system and its masters.

• The best kind of coercive costs which an oppressed people can impose are economic costs.  Think of things like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance.

• A key component of effective strategic nonviolent resistance consists of the oppressed population building their own structures for individual and communal self-reliance.  This way they will not need to rely on the structures of the oppressor.

• Effective resistance does not rely solely or even primarily on mass protest marches.

• Mass protest marches are not as effective now as they were in the past, because oppressors have learned how to discredit the protests by sending agents provocateurs into the marches to cause violence and vandalism.

• One of the main strengths of strategic nonviolent resistance is its nonviolent character.  Therefore beware of any people (especially from the white community) who try to persuade you to mix violence (including vandalism or property damage) of any kind into your struggle.  If you listen to them, you will give the oppressor a ready-made excuse to increase his oppression.  That is why the oppressor sends such people to try to infiltrate your struggle.  The oppressor will use any means to try to force your struggle to turn violent.  If the oppressor can successfully tempt you to use violence or to destroy property, then he can justify using force to violently crush you.  Maintain nonviolent discipline!  If you maintain nonviolent discipline, then any violence which your oppressor inflicts on you will backfire on him instead.

• This means that you should probably not listen to anything said by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict from 2016 onward or to anything said by Erica Chenoweth from 2019 onward.  These people used to give good advice up to 2016.  After Trump entered the White House, the advice of the ICNC began to turn to garbage.  (I wonder - was that change deliberate?)  And in my opinion, Erica Chenoweth's recent book titled Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know is a continuation of that garbage.

• Effective strategic nonviolent resistance requires people to develop the art of strategic thinking and of learning to work together in long-term projects of collective self-reliance.  Start developing these skills.

Research Week - End of January 2023

As I noted in my most recent post on the subject of precarity, there is a fairly wide body of research which has been done on the origins and spread of the precariat in the developed nations of the West.  I think it is good also to see how the precariat has come into being and has evolved in those nations that are not historically of the West.  The last post in the series therefore covered precarity as it exists in Russia.  I promised that the next post in the series would cover other non-Western cases.

In preparation for that next post I have therefore downloaded several articles concerning another nation of interest to this discussion.  However, I need time to read and analyze everything I've downloaded so that my next post does not wind up shooting from the hip.  Hopefully I'll be ready by next weekend . . . 

Why Nuclear Threatening Won't Work

It appears finally that the West is going to get off the dime and send Ukraine the heavy weapons it needs to defeat the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Putin has responded by using his flying monkeys to send a message to the West that if Russia loses, the result will be nuclear war.  There's just one problem.  Putin's Russia has shown what it will do to all those whom it conquers by its treatment of Ukrainians in Russian-occupied territory.  By the pronouncements of not only Putin, but of fascist thugs like Aleksandr Dugin, Russia has shown what it wants to do to the entire world.  If Russia is allowed to win, Russia will turn the entire world into the toilet bowl of Russia.  That is unacceptable.  Given a choice between this option and nuclear war, frankly, I'd rather take my chances on nuclear war.  I do not say this lightly.  Because of my moral stance, I would much rather see a nonviolent solution, especially if that nonviolent solution was achieved through the coercive use of nonviolent economic power to destroy Russia's ability to make war.  But allowing Russia to have its way is not an option.  Russian power must be destroyed.  And those in the West who continue to make excuses for Russia or to play telephone tag for Russia or to be sock puppets for Russia must learn to shut their mouths.

The West must stop allowing its fight against Russian imperialism to be dictated by the rules the Russians seek to impose on us.  In other words, we must do whatever it takes to destroy Russian imperialism.  Whatever it takes.

The Global Origins And Spread of the Precariat (Part 1)

Last week's post described my own experience of precarity - an experience which continued in surprising ways even through the world of white-collar professional work.  This week's post will begin to explore the theoretical foundations for understanding the precariat, and will begin to trace the present existence of the precariat in the societies of certain nations of interest.  

Precarity can be understood as a social bargain that has been lost.  The loss of this bargain can be described thus: "The emergence and strengthening of [the] precariat are associated with regulatory dysfunction . . . Precariat is a consequence of the lack of effective institutions for regulating emerging new social relations. Such institutions cannot be replaced by designing effective market mechanisms . . .   Precariat is formed wherever stable forms of employment are destroyed."  [Emphasis added.]  ("Socio-Economic Sustainable Development and the Precariat: A Case Study of Three Russian Cities," Volchik, Klimenko, Posukhova, International Journal, Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues, September 2018)   Precarity is therefore the loss of the social bargain between workers and employers which was forged in the labor movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries in industrial nations.  It can also be seen as the destruction of the social arrangements which were forged and codified into law (such as antitrust and anti-monopoly laws) between ordinary people and the rich.

The destruction of this pre-existing social arrangement has been documented by observers such as economist Guy Standing, a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London.  Mr. Standing did pioneering research into the topic of precarity and the precariat, and captured his observations and conclusions in two books which he wrote, titled, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, and A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens.  To quote from a 2018 essay by Mr. Standing, "Since 1980, the global economy has undergone a dramatic transformation, with the globalization of the labor force, the rise of automation, and—above all—the growth of Big Finance, Big Pharma, and Big Tech. The social democratic consensus of the immediate postwar years has given way to a new phase of capitalism that is leaving workers further behind and reshaping the class structure. The precariat, a mass class defined by unstable labor arrangements, lack of identity, and erosion of rights, is emerging as today’s “dangerous class.” As its demands cannot be met within the current system, the precariat carries transformative potential . . . "

In his essay, Guy Standing traces the beginnings of the precariat to the deliberate dismantling of social arrangements between owners of big business and workers at the start of the 1980's.  This dismantling was part of the process of radical, rabid free-market capitalism pushed by people such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.  According to Standing, those who pushed this process ". . . preached 'free markets,' strong private property rights [at least for those who were filthy rich!  Not so much for little people . . .], financial market liberalization, free trade, commodification, privatization, and the dismantling of all institutions and mechanisms of social solidarity, which, in their view, were 'rigidities' holding back the market. While the neoliberals were largely successful in implementing their program, what transpired was very different from what they had promised."

Standing describes the process of precarization as it began in the West (especially the United States, the other nations of the Five Eyes, and Europe) and as it was promulgated by various institutions of Western economic hegemony such as the World Trade Organization.  But the precariat has also arisen outside of the West.  What has been striking is its origin and spread in those regions which withdrew themselves from global capitalism in the early 20th century only to return to the capitalist fold near the end of the 20th century.  Indeed, it can be argued that wherever there is a society characterized by connection to the global economy, extreme levels of inequality, and a very small class of plutocrats who control an enormous percentage of that nation's economy, there you will find the precariat in existence.  What is more, you will find that the plutocrats of each of the world's major societies share a lot in common with each other.  So I'd like to take this post and the next post in this series to describe the process of precarization as it has worked itself out in other regions of the world.  Let's start with Russia.

"Funeral for the Middle Class", a protest which took place 

in Russia in 2015.  In the picture, the "casket" being placed

by the man in the center has the words "средний класс" ("middle class")

written on it.  Image retrieved from Obschchaya Gazeta on 21 January 2023.

In Russia, the transition from Soviet communism to free market capitalism was a transition from the Soviet arrangement where "formalization, legal confirmation, and guarantee of a workplace for a worker were the methods which prevented the spread of precarization.  The system was oriented toward distribution of social benefits, consolidation of the worker's professional status in the consequent sphere, and work, labour, employment, and housing related stabilities . . ." (Quote taken from "The Precariat In The Socio-Economic Structure of the Russian Federation," Maria Fedina, International Department of Movement for Decent Work and Welfare Society, September 2017.)  It was a transition into an employment market which has ". . . 'responded to unfavorable economic transformations by such means of adaptation as part-time and seasonal work, forced vacation leave, secondary employment and employment in the informal sector'. Other forms of adaptation include fixed-term employment contracts, outsourcing of workers, employment on the basis of employment contracts with a condition of work outside the employer’s location, and employment of individual entrepreneurs who have no possibility to run their own business by other entrepreneurs." [Emphasis added.]  To break this down into plain language, Russians moved from an economic environment in which housing and employment were stable and secure, and moved into an environment in which many Russian workers today may be forced to work part-time, may be forced into involuntary unpaid time off, or be forced into gig/temporary work where they must assume all of the liabilities of being "independent contractors" yet have no legal way of acting as actual entrepreneurs.  

According to the sources cited by Maria Fedina in her essay, up to 85 percent of the Russian labor force faces the possibility of falling into the precariat, while 30 to 40 percent of the labor force belongs to the precariat at any one time.  A large percentage of the Russian precariat consists of highly skilled professionals and highly educated people, having achieved at least a bachelors degree.  However, the prestige of their professions has been devalued in the minds of the Russian public as a tool to force these professionals into precarious, low-wage arrangements.  This is especially true of teachers, as noted in the paper by Volchik, Klimenko, and Posukhova cited above.  Also of note is the fact that a large number of the members of the precariat are involved in the informal economy in Russia, where legal workplace and worker protections are entirely absent.

Precarity is therefore a design feature of the present system of Russian capitalism.  The origins of this system lie with the Russian oligarchs who arose from the wreckage of the crashed Soviet system.  (To see where these oligarchs came from, please read "The Role of Oligarchs in Russian Capitalism," Guriev and Rachinsky, Journal of Economic Perspectives - Volume 19, Number 1, Winter 2005).  These oligarchs controlled betweewn 70 and 90 percent of the Russian economy by the time the transformation to a capitalist society had been completed.  (See "The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry," F. Joseph Dresen, Wilson Center.)  In the early years of the 21st century, Vladimir Putin used Russian state power to transform these oligarchs into Putin's pillars of support.  (To see the definition of "pillars of support", click here.)  Therefore, the birth and growth of the Russian precariat can be quite accurately seen as part of the goals and policy of the Russian elites both in government and in the private sector.  For their overarching goal is to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense.  And Putin truly has shown himself to be a thieving little man in a bunker.  For when Putin's government arrested (or in many cases killed) those oligarchs who dared to oppose him, it was not to fight corruption, but rather to establish a loyal base of Russia's wealthiest citizens.  The Russian oligarchy is alive and well under Putin (although during the last year they've begun to feel a bit ill.  Sanctions can lead to indigestion . . . ).

For members of the Russian precariat, life has become surprisingly similar to life for members of the precariat in the rest of the developed world.  These include long working hours, an absence of benefits, no guarantee of employment stability, and a refusal of employers to manage the safety and work environments in which their employees must operate.  In an increasing number of cases this has led to deaths of workers and of bystanders, as documented by Katya Zeveleva's piece titled "Russian gig economy violates worker rights with society’s tacit acceptance" (Oxford Human Rights Hub, July 2019).

Russia is but one example of the re-creation of the precariat in a non-Western context.  Next week, we shall consider other cases, God willing.