Marie Monday

Wrong
I'm not so sure about the latter statement. Classes shift a bit, but at its core class evokes something much more general than 19th century societal divisions. It existed long before and after that without super fundamental changes. I've never been to eastern Europe though so it's hard to judge how things work there

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Mucha na Dziko

Nope, it is and it was exactly the same.
The only difference is that in capitalist societies the middle/upper class was glorified, while in the so-called communist ones it was the working class that was glorified.

Also, in the capitalist societies it’s the working class that is being opressed, while in the „communist” ones it was the middle class.
An example would be that if you wanted to go to a university you’d get bonus points for being a farmboy or a factory worker, and you might get minus points for being a child of a profesor.

It’s just that usually in the soviet countries the name „middle class” wasn’t used, it was rather called „inteligentsia”.
And everybody who wasn’t working their ass off in a factory basically belonged to that group: teachers, scholars, artists, dentists, you name it.

The working class were the factory workers and the farmers, while the „upper class” were the party officials, etc.

It’s the same really.

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The Batlord

Culturally speaking you grew up in a Connecticut suburb in a two story house with a white picket fence and one and a half siblings and married the captain of your high school football team whose name is Hank.

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jadis

For example, the societal division in pre-Revolutionary Russia was based on "sosloviya" (such as nobility, clergy, peasants, merchants, townsmen etc), not classes. In order to bring society towards something resembling Marxist ideas of class the communists had to do a lot of purges of "counterrevolutionary class enemies" in the 1920s and 1930s and even then a lot of confusion remained.

If we're talking about Russia, which is the only east bloc country I know anything about, then not exactly. The main groups were workers, collectivized peasants (kolkhoznoe krestyanstvo) and the intelligentsia, but after the death of Stalin and the end of the purges there wasn't a palpable socioeconomic distinction between the urban proletariat and the intelligentsia. My grandparents, both school teachers, raised my mom in a single room in a communal apartment which they shared with builders and factory workers. By the time I was born we had our own apartment but the building we lived in housed academics and factory workers alike. Everyone got the same salary of around 100 rubles a month. Belonging to the intelligentsia in late Soviet Russia wasn't a "class marker".

The Batlord

You're conflating "class" as a distinction of wealth (upper, middle, and lower) with "class" as it's used in a Marxist sense to describe the relationship to production (bourgeois and proletariat).

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jadis

In a dictatorship like the USSR the means of production were in the hands of the party leadership, so neither applies here. Which is my entire point in this thread: don't trust trans-historical ideological fictions.

Trollheart

You'll have to speak to my Protestant landlord about that. I'm not allowed to farm anything, especially filth, without his written permission. God save the King! Cos nobody else will...

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

The Batlord

Nah it would apply, just not in the way the USSR would have said it did. Party officials as the owning class would be some form of bourgeoisie.

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jadis

Yes, at the level of precision on which you operate there isn't the slightest problem with this reading

The Batlord

This coming from the guy who doesn't know if he's French or Russian.

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