So as I was telling you yesterday, once the planned economy of the USSR collapsed, the Soviet men collectively gave up and, in a way reminiscent of Faulknerian women, refused to accept the new reality. Of course, there was also a bandit class that serviced the needs of the apparatchik class but those had always existed and were fine with the changes that they had engineered themselves.
There were exceptions – my Dad, N.’s Dad – men who left their non-paying Soviet jobs, started their own businesses, and enjoyed making money. They were very exceptional, however. All of my friends’ fathers, men you would call “educated professionals”, refused even to try to feed themselves, let alone their families. The need to look for a job, offer their services, go to job interviews was something they perceived as profoundly humiliating.
Most families survived thanks to the women. There were isolated cases where women were as infantilized as men, and then the entire family either had to find somebody else to feed them or would get pauperized. For instance, my schoolmate’s parents both decided to check out and sit vapidly on the couch all day long. The entire family of 7 had to be fed by the elderly grandpa, a World War II veteran who was less beaten down than his 35-year-old son and who started a business of his own to put food on the table. Today, the grandpa is dead but the son is still refusing to work. Fortunately for him, this is now the problem of the government of Canada where the family resides.
I’m not sure whether I need to point out that unemployment benefits did not exist, and the men who checked out of active employment brought no income whatsoever. This would not even be the worst thing, though. What was really intolerable was that they didn’t just sit on their couches quietly, waiting peacefully to be fed and clothed. No, they made sure that everybody else in the family suffered as much as possible. Their greatest resentment was reserved for those who actually worked and supported them.
The way this would look, most often, is that the wife would come home from her three jobs and proceed to do the household chores (we are not a culture where men are capable even of boiling some water for their own tea). In the meanwhile, the man, who spent all day long sighing in front of the TV (we are not a culture where men do any child care), would start to scold, nag and pester her with things like, “Ah, so now you are too important to spend any time with your family,” “All you care about is money,” “What kind of a horrible mother would leave her kids to run around God knows where all day long?”, “The house is a pig-sty, and you are not even around to do any cleaning.”
Another classmate of mine had a Dad who guilt-tripped not only the poor overworked wife but even the kids. I once saw him stand over his own 7-year-old daughter as she tried to eat, berating her in a monotonous voice for eating too much and being a huge drain on the family finances. The man’s explanation for not working was that he was too sensitive, intellectual and spiritual to waste his energies on the evil capitalist market. The elder daughter had to start working at the age of 14, helping her mother haul huge sacks of canned good the women were peddling at the black market. And in the same monotonous voice, Daddy would scold the daughter for spending too little time on her homework.
These were not all middle-aged men. My first husband perceived the need to look for a job as impossibly traumatic even though he was in his early (and then mid, and then late) twenties. Gradually, he slipped into all of the nagging, guilt-tripping, showily depressive behaviors of the older post-Soviet men.
This was a phenomenon that knew no generational, ethnic, or class boundaries. The men in question were striking against the need to be adult men. The role they claimed for themselves was that of children, and they would feel resentment towards the wives who wouldn’t recognize their status as babies and their own children who’d claim the role of babies for themselves.
Clarissa's Blog 
This is a very interesting perspective / anecdote and one i would never on my own have of a distinctly different culture.
My big question is then what to do about those who won’t work? It doesn’t sound like you are an advocate of increased govt. benefits to these people, which is pretty much the left’s response here in america. So honestly am curious how you would recommend economically / financially dealing with able-bodied peopple who refuse to work?
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Clarissa will probably not agree with me, but I think this is easy. Just give a guaranteed annual income equivalent to that earned by a full time minimum wage worker to everyone over the age of eighteen. Then people who for whatever reason want to live on this can do so, but to get more they need to work. I predict that struggling artists, musicians, etc. will take advantage of this; but most people will not, because they will find it advantageous to work to have more money.
And what employer wants to hire someone who does not want to work, anyway? The amount of work that needs to be done per capita is steadily diminishing, after all.
An interesting link connected to this:
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32165-labor-day-2028
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The situation I described here is precisely the result of a few decades of such a guaranteed basic income. People were fainting with hunger, real hunger, but still refused well-paying, respectable work.
Why invent the wheel when this has been tried and the results are easy to observe?
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The reason for doing this, of course, is that soon there will not be enough work to go around, no matter what we do. The model to look at is people who are born wealthy, and never have to work if they choose not to. These are the ones who become entrepreneurs or successful artists, mostly. People who have to worry about their children starving rarely can afford the risk to do so. One has no time to practice a violin or piano if he must work three jobs to survive. The only example I can think of in this country who is a true self-made billionaire is Oprah. Even she did not grow up desperately poor the way J. K. Rowling did.
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There is overwhelmingly more than enough work but only for qualified people. We can either discard these millions of human beings, isolate them in ghettos and shut them up with a pittance or we can make an effort and recognize that they don’t have to be cast off.
The children of the super rich that I have met (and I obviously have met a lot, in different countries) become drug addicts, alcoholics, or professional depressives.
Every single artist I have met or admire (as well as academic and entrepreneur) come from poverty. I can’t think of a single artist of note who came from a millionaire family.
I was unfortunate enough to go to school with the children of the very rich. Not a single one of them made anything out of themselves. Many did not survive to be my age.
Not having to work for a living (for any reason) destroys people.
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William F. Buckley, Jr. is a good example of someone who never had to work but chose to do so.
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I have no idea who that is but, as a literary critic, I know that we wouldn’t have our great literature if the best writers the world has produced weren’t forced to write as much as they did to make ends meet.
Balzac, Dickens, Cervantes, the Bronte sisters, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Lope de Vega – the list is endless. They all wrote because they had to eat.
The world’s culture was not created by the rich. Everything good humanity has produced has come from regular folks who knew hardship. I have no idea where this idea that great artists are all trust fund babies even comes from.
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I have little use for William F. Buckley’s views, but he is a very important conservative thinker. In case you have not looked him up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Buckley,_Jr.
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Thank you! Very interesting.
Ayn Rand, on the other hand, was a penniless immigrant. 🙂
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She initially came here on a kind of tourist visa, and by some accounts she sponged off of her relatives and was distant from them when she became famous.
Penniless immigrant!
OTOT, when my mother’s family came here from Shanghai after the War, all they had was their clothes, some furniture, and the gold sewn in my mother’s coat.
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“She initially came here on a kind of tourist visa, and by some accounts she sponged off of her relatives and was distant from them when she became famous.”
The great Russian poet Pushkin, for instance, was a vile human being, a total prick. But he is THE Russian poet who inspired the entirety of Russian poetry.
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And the real tragedy is not that of the people who choose to subsist on this guaranteed handout. I could care less about them and their need to marginalize themselves. The real tragedy is that of their children. Those poor sods never get to see a productive, successful parent with a career, so they have no example to emulate.
N’s father was an abusive fuck. But N is still grateful to him for working and being successful. Among the many things of which he robbed his son there wasn’t the capacity to make money and achieve professional success.
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John Rogers
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
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Hmm… I’m a great fan of Ayn Rand yet I’m very successful and fulfilled professionally, socially, and especially emotionally. Seems like Mr. Rogers, whoever he is, is mistaken. 🙂
P.S. As I said before, admiring a writer and being in agreement with said writer have no relation to one another in my world.
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I think Potemkin companies are probably going to be a big part of the future economy (and many people working in them won’t know the truth if they don’t look too hard).
There’s also the idea of busy work on the internet.
There’s also the Black Mirror episode that deals with one version of a post work future (not marketed as such but that’s what it is).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
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I know I’m tilting at windmills here, and this is unavoidably part of our future but I believe it’s tragic that we are accepting this system so easily and even believe that it’s humane and progressive.
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I think Potemkin companies are a lot more humane than some of the alternatives. The things that people make that can’t be made quicker and cheaper by machines is growing smaller by the year.
The jobs that require showing up and doing things that don’t take too much mental effort are also shrinking as you yourself have written more than once.
What kind of jobs do you see appearing in the future?
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My sister has managed to build such a hugely successful business in an overcrowded field because there is an enormous and growing demand for recruiters, headhunters and talent hunters. Companies go to great lengths to lure desirable workers away from each other. There are very well-paid positions that can’t be filled for many months because qualified workers are rare. For instance, people who can do online marketing (this means writing blog posts and articles that people will want to read) are in huge demand. But they don’t exist. My sister is doing this work for her own company because workers who can do it can’t be found for love or money. People who write well are in enormous demand but they don’t exist. And people who can write well in more than one language are even fewer.
Overall, hirers are desperate for workers who don’t have to be micromanaged every second of the day, who are not helpless, who can think for themselves, who have a personality, who are interested in the news, who have interesting opinions. There is a great shortage of such people.
I hear recruitment stories all day every day, and my feeling is that what’s lacking isn’t jobs. It’s the workforce that can do these jobs.
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There are explanations for much of the difficulty of recruiting the “right” people. First, “winner-take-all” jobs. In some situations, employers want to hire only exceptionally talented people. Of course, the supply of people with “exceptional” talent or skill is limited by the definition of “exceptional.”
Or employers want people with more education than actually required for the job. If you want to hire someone with at least a master’s degree, but are only willing to pay the minimum wage . . . you get the picture. Sometimes, the pool of winner-take-all candidates is drastically limited by subtle, unstated or discriminatory standards. For example, the executive won’t admit it, but the only candidate he wants to hire will be a Yale man. Or an attorney who attended one of the top ten law schools AND was editor of the law review.
Many employers post unnecessary qualifications that limit the pool of applicants. They demand “credentials,” like multiple graduate degrees, or many years of proven experience, or experience in a very narrow specialty area. A list of unnecessary qualifications simplifies the life of the person or group responsible for hiring. They can go through hundreds of resumes and quickly weed out all but a few. Then the process becomes SUBJECTIVE. After interviews, each candidate is rejected for some small, irrelevant reason. (Speaks with an accent, hair is too long or too short, has a beard, not aggressive enough, too aggressive, is perceived not to be a “team player” or a “leader.”)
The lists of objective qualifications and subjective impressions can become quite long. It may become statistically improbable that a candidate exists who meets the exact combination of requirements. Two of the best examples: a committee charged with hiring a new school superintendent for a large school district, or hiring a new police chief in a large city, or the head coach of an NFL team.
The nationwide pool of candidates may be limited to 40 or 50 people. That is, only candidates with at least 10 years experience as superintendent of a similar sized school district, or as police chief in another large city, or head coach of another NFL team.
Often a three-person panel has to agree on the right candidate, as in most government jobs. Or the entire school board has to agree on the next school superintendent. Good luck with that.
One last example: It is tacitly understood that because the current superintendent is a man, the next superintendent must be a woman. Or the position must alternate between a white person and a black person.
Long story short: the operation of the labor market leaves a lot to be desired.
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I don’t believe it should be mine or anybody else’s problem to deal with such people. I’d happily leave them to their own devices. And in this country, that’s what happens. In Canada, it isn’t, and the results are not great.
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perhaps my biggest issue with that approach is almost all crime (violent crime, murder, assault, car jacking, armed robbery) is committed by people who don’t have good jobs. Really hard to find statistics at least explicitly on this but upwards of 80-90% of this crime is likely committed by these types of people.. so how do we address that short of addressing their economic failures? That is the biggest rub for me at this time.
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Psychoanalytically, criminality is a result of a person’s damaged relationship with a damaged father. What we can do as a society to repair this is to place a greater emphasis to the importance of fatherhood. This would entail a deep overhaul of custody laws and a rethinking of all the cultural stereotypes about the lesser importance of fatherhood compared to motherhood.
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“What we can do as a society to repair this is to place a greater emphasis to the importance of fatherhood”
And would require some serious stigma for women who become single mothers by choice….
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“And would require some serious stigma for women who become single mothers by choice….”
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Well it would require some rewriting of regulations regarding fertility clinics and possibly welfare laws (single motherhood supposedly was increased in black communities by welfare laws that rewarded staying single and punished getting married).
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I don;t care about regulations that much. There should be a massive transformation of collective mentality. One can easily be a single mother and provide for a profound and enriching relationship between the child and the father.
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I knew of two marriages which broke up because of the man not working. They refused to take any kind of job. From what the women told me, it wasn’t just their refusal to work which killed their marriages; it was the petulancy, passivity, refusal to pick up on childcare and abuse as well. Incidentally, after the divorces were finalized, both men got jobs and were able to support themselves at least. One guy is a lawyer with an oil company and is well connected in his hometown to state government. The other guy works in a restaurant. They both blamed the recession.
If these men refused en masse to work and it wasn’t tied to that in the old system, how did they define their masculinity and their sense of self?
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Question! Since you obviously don’t like the government providing a living wage to people for doing nothing, what about if they provide a living wage for people who work menial jobs for the government? My idea (which I am sure has been thought of before) has been that after a finite period where people can gather unemployment checks while looking for jobs, they are only given further money if they can (1) demonstrate continued full time enrollment in some sort of education program (either higher-ed or trade), or (2) also work for the government doing skill-less (or maybe skill-matched jobs), like picking trash off the side of the road and maintaing parks, being janitors for local schools, etc. Or maybe the government could partially subsidize similar sorts of jobs in the private sector. This would definitely require quite a bit of bureaucracy and oversight (yay more jobs?) to prevent abuse, but it doesn’t sound entirely infeasible to me… What are your thoughts Clarissa? Does anyone else see obvious problems I am missing with this plan?
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Sounds like a great plan. I’d support it fully. After 7+ months out of workplace, it’s extremely hard to get reintegrated into it. This system would help people avoid this issue.
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In general i don’t live this idea, but its not a terrible plan. Probably the biggest problem with this is “where does the money come from” – tax dollars, so politically unlikely to pass on a large scale here in the US. Also, presumably it would be almost impossible to get fired and if it paid minimum wage then large chunks of the population making low wages may take these “jokes of a job”, and then now you have an even greater “tax” burden to pay for this. The cycle would repeat. I am for programs like this on a limited scale (maybe for urban youth who don’t have easy means to getting connected to the work force etc.) – but en masse these are a few of the problems i see with it.
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To be clear, any time I make noises about guaranteed income or anything remotely similar I’m always thinking in terms of having to do things (besides show up at an office to prove you exist) in return. I maybe don’t always make that point clearly enough.
Thinking about this, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that
Most jobs that most people can do are disappearing at a quick rate.
Being paid to sit around at home is demoralizing and dehumanizing.
Anyhoo, whether what people would have to do would entail involvment in continuing education programs, or some kind of busy work or a job in a Potemkin company is beside the point (though to be brutally clear many jobs in bureaucracies are already on the Potemkin side) the questions are how to fund these activities.
I’m not against welfare for the truly needy and afflicted, but AFAICT welfare only works if the people who get are grateful and/or embarassed about having to receive it. Both is best, but either will work.
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\ Like the ones who go to sperm banks? I think their stigma should be shared 100% by the freaks who donate their sperm to those banks.
Do you see a difference between going to such bank and having a not-serious relationship with a man, who wants to leave afterwards and not raise a child?
Is the stigma deserved because of lack of a father in a child’s life (at age of 18, a child may meet a biological father in some cases, but it’s after childhood), or because of something else too?
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Also a quick question on the early 90s CCCP.
In Poland by 1991 major cities turned into large open air markets. Existing markets were no where big enough and in each city a number of other streets that where people set up card tables and started selling things between the pedestrians and traffic. I saw every kind of household article, clothes, electronics, every kind of food even live animals and it was hard to walk down many sidewalks because there so many buyers and sellers.
This didn’t last long (they disappeared by 1993 or so) but as state stores started going belly up (since most of them were horribly run and/or supplied by factories that were drowning in the new capitalist waters) small private ones popped up in their place. Most people didn’t really know how to run a business most of them went out of business quickly but there were always replacements ready to try their luck.
Was there anything like that in the Soviet Union? Some of the sellers in Poland were Russian speakers and so I assumed that the situation was similar there but now I’m thinking maybe not.
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Many women from FSU would go to Poland to trade on those markets. I was invited too once when I was a teenager but we were not desperate for money, so there was no reason to run the risk.
The best thing about the 1990s is that these big open markets appeared and we could finally buy things. There were two such markets in my city but they were not located in the streets. One was an outgrowth of a previously existing market and another sprung up under a bridge. We’d say, “Let’s go under the bridge ” when we wanted to visit it.
The people who sold stuff outside of the markets were grouped around subway stations with their little tables. And soon they all were placed in a multitude of little, butt-ugly kiosks.
These were all such amazing developments because for the first time ever one could buy something to eat whenever one needed and not only when the state stores were open.
It was such a beautiful, hopeful time. I still remember my favorite kiosks in great detail.
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