Discussions dedicated to this topic are very popular in our society. But the opponents normally only talk about specific figures, discussing salaries, general earnings and expenses of the population, completely forgetting the main question – what the phrase “standard of living” actually means?
Contemporary dictionaries cannot properly explain this term, because, first of all, they separate it from such terms as “level of prosperity” and “quality of life”, creating unnecessary entities and not allowing to look at the issue in general, and secondly, they try to limit this concept with only talking about material wealth, largely ignoring the non-material side of things. Continue reading
During Perestroika, when there was a massive attack on the minds of Soviet people, the idea of having the right to choose was one of the dominant ones. The arguments of liberals and democrats, who were advocating free market economy, were based exactly on that – on people having the right to choose, something that a person living in a socialist society amidst government planning doesn’t have, they said, because someone from above decides everything and that means your will is being ignored and you don’t have any freedom of choice. At first glance all this demagogy sounds nice and pretty, that’s why many people in the USSR actually bought it. But, in reality, it turned out that behind all those seemingly righteous words there was very rotten content. Now, having lived under capitalism for 30 years, we understand that very well.
It’s well-known that the bourgeois economic science denies the objective laws of economic development discovered by K. Marx. Its representatives – various experts, economists and political scientists – have spent an incredible amount of energy proving that there are no objective laws of social development, that there are no laws at all that are independent from someone’s will and that are governing the development of the mode of production (in this case, capitalist production); everything that is happening in the society, according to their opinion, including in the economic area, is exclusively the result of people’s will and personal desires, and not just any people, but the special kind of people – only those who are in power and of a high social standing. The rest – the working population, the masses – are not taken into account by the bourgeois political economy. From the point of view of the pocket scientists of the bourgeoisie, those are only a blurred background to the “powers that be” – governors, politicians, businessmen, etc. – and their games. 
Probably no concept in human history has been surrounded by such a huge number of myths as private property.
One of Work Way readers is asking: “According to a popular opinion, capitalism always makes the society thrive. Though Buzgalin, an economist, says that only 20% of all capitalist countries live in prosperity, while the rest are miserable”.
Another liberal myth which is widely spread in the Russian society is that strange conviction that only things that you pay for can be of good quality. That is, a truly good education can only be obtained through money, private healthcare is better than free healthcare etc., which brings us to the conclusion that if you pay enough money, you will get cured, and if you don’t – you will unavoidably get misdiagnosed and mistreated. The same thing goes for all other social benefits and even products – if you have to pay for it, they are by definition better. 
All too often in today’s discussions, whatever topics they touch upon, one may get confronted with the following categorical comeback: “It’s just my opinion!”. Normally, that is an argument which is made by one of the members of the discussion who has run out of other arguments that could prove them right. It roughly translates as: “Whatever you say to me, whatever proof and arguments you come up with, I will have the same opinion and none other, even if it is in fact false”. Naturally, continuing to argue with such an opponent is totally futile, since they are not interested in the Truth, they simply use arguments to impose their views, no matter true or false. 
Since we live in a class society and the interests of our two main social classes – those of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – are completely opposite, therefore, in this kind of society there 
Most likely none of our readers will be surprised to find out that the contemporary Russian society is not a fair society. In our country, this has already become obvious to everyone.
