LADA'S THEME

Great stuff Adam. Although I think you over egg some of your assertions; I don't think the elites say " you cannot have protectionism - otherwise you will get a world war", in fact I think some of them think the exact opposite. For example, in America there are plenty of politicians who would love to put up tariffs on Chinese goods and whatnot because China is a very satisfying punch bag for political frustations and popular with voters who think too many of their jobs are being exported overseas. If you do have protectionism you probably won't have a world war, but it would do a lot of economic damage and stir up all sorts of xenophobic sentiments. It's hard to know what you meant by that comment; do you think protectionism is good?

On the other stuff, I agree completely, if only because it accords with my own biases ;). I would also like to note that the idea that the collective is bad extends beyond elites to ordinary people, who seem disillusioned with politics and seem mostly concerned with their own self interests.

Last note: you have a spelling error in the paragraph beginning with "LogoVaz wanted Lada cars to sell.", it's in the next sentence after that. :)

@Juan
There is a lot of pressure for protectionism, yes, but you'll notice that there's not a lot of it happening. That's because the elites do indeed tell us horror stories about it and the dire consequences of closing our borders to imports.
As to whether protectionism is good or not, I would counter with the question "Is it morally right to allow imports from countries where we know that the preferred means of production is basically slavery?"
I think I'd also ask what you think is happening to the ordinary people of the UK if it's not "a lot of economic damage"? How would closing our borders to the produce of deeply evil production methods be worse than the mass unemployment that those imports are already causing?
The real elites, the super high-flyers that have the ear of governments day in and day out, not just once every five years, know that selling school uniforms made in sweatshops by children who will never see the inside of a school is good for profits. Naturally they are against protectionism. But they're also against humanitarianism.

fascinating as always. thank you, sir.

We need protectionism because our so called captains of industry are more concerned with enriching themselves than protecting their fellow countrymen. The Phoenix group are absolute scum and typical of the people who let our country become an industrial wasteland. If you want to move your factory fine,but dont expect to reimport these goods back here. Jimmy Goldsmith at least knew what would happen to our society if you let it happen.

The Western view of the Soviet Union, which grew out of the early Cold War, was that the USSR was a top-down, centrally planned society in which few individuals, workers or managers, had autonomy. This view was developed in part for political reasons; totalitarianism was a useful tool for linking the Soviet Union with the fascist regimes with which the US and UK had just fought a devastating war. This story is not necessarily false, but as we could see by the report on the Togliatti factory, it blinded Westerners to those aspects of reality that did not fit the story. This is a major part of why the CIA failed to see the growing instability in the Soviet system which led to its failure.

Your second rule to today's political system, that we cannot allow collective ideas that surrender the individual to the group, is something that exists firmly in rhetoric, presenting Soviet style totalitarianism as a foil to Western values, but not necessarily in practice. In both the US and the UK, the economic crisis has brought about persistent calls for adherence to free market principles, deficit reduction, and lower taxes. Even though free market principles are cloaked in the rhetoric of individual autonomy--what Isaiah Berlin describes as negative freedom--the market itself can become an ideal to which the individual is sacrificed. Witness, for example, Republican insistence in the United States that unemployment insurance must not be extended because this would damage the economy. You explained Berlin's warning of this kind of abuse of the concept of negative freedom in The Trap, though in the context of neoconservatism.

Can anyone tell me what music is playing in the of the last clip?

@ dasfaha:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDkvSKvzUBI

Regarding the economics of 'the Leviathan', whether giant manufacturing, essentially monopolising, is the product of greedy capitalism or deluded utopian collectivism, my thoughts go to the humble slime mould:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkVhLJLG7ug&feature=related

The slime moulds are a collection of amoebae, that collect to form a mobile giant plasmodium group, when the immediate vicinity is deplete of food, or dangerous in some way. The plasmodium is the first line of action to find a better vicinity.

If the slime mould fails to find a better 'solution', it then forms a fruiting spore, as the last desperate mode of survival; as only the 'select few' are gifted with the spore prize at the expense of the many.

I hope you like the analogy; it may shed some light on to why individualism is only an ideal if the environment is amenable; otherwise monopolies and collectivism will spontaneously occur in times of strife.

JimmyGiro

Damn, somebody got there before me !!!:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duLTekqtkmk&feature=related

:(

I would hazard a guess that the directors at Phoenix knew very well what they were doing in syphoning off the interest from BMW's loan for themselves and also banking enormous salaries. They knew that when the company folded the Labour government would want to keep investigations under wraps.

Labour was under pressure from the EU to help BMW get out of a very difficult situation that could have brought the parent company to its knees, as it had already put over £1 trillion into BMW UK. It wanted a solution that would help BMW save some of its future UK sales and also help Labour save votes in the Midlands.

So Labour encouraged BMW to take Phoenix's offer over Alchemy's. Alchemy had a plan that would have resulted in more immediate redundancies but a greater chance of the company surviving, because Alchemy was to turn MG into a sports brand and not keep it as a mass production brand.

From that point on the writing was on the wall; without massive state subsidies (something New Labour could not be seen to do) MG started into a headwind that all other European manufacturers (Renault, Peugeot, VW etc) are protected from, because of their own government's help.

BMW and Rover/BMW UK/MG's suppliers lost a lot of money in the this sorry state of affairs and many jobs were lost. Much of the troubles could have been avoided if the UK manufacturing plant had been as efficiently run as its German counterparts. Unfortunately there was animosity towards the parent company from within its UK subsidiary and the national press. Or, in other words, a detrimental mindset towards the new Teutonic forces that now dominate, for good reason, Europe's manufacturing and economy. The UK was riding on a superficial wave of nostalgia and optimism at the turn of the millennium and Labour (in particular Mandelson) didn't want to undo all the work it was putting in to convince the electorate that things were getting better.

This is great, nice one Adam. I also love the title.

I think its useful to look for parallels, and to enlighten readers about Soviet failiures, including Berezovsky.

However,

1) Protectionism will lead to war. And the "elites" are both better informed about this, and correct.

2) There is a difference between markets, and rhetoric. MG Rover has nothing to do with markets, and everything to do with political cronyism.

If Markets become merely ways for other participating parties to abandon all oversight, the results remain constant. Markets presume institutions, not cronyism.

To distinguish markets from rhetoric, one aught to consult the economics science, and not politicians spouting nonsense.

3) One can make a very solid economic argument, that Markets have indeed eroded in some respects, and that key economic sectors are increasingly "Russified" in the sense that state participation in the economy has led to cronyism qualitatively similar to the later Soviet stage. But not quantitatively. Our economy is still market based as evidenced by those segments that your statements overlook. I.e. small and middle sized business, and commutative currency.

I think the bird flying up indoors on 05:13 in the first film, says a lot...

You might find this interesting. The Fertitta brothers, the actual owners of the UFC (the most visible MMA franchise), have a story similar to Rover and Berezovsky. They are mob tied figures, who used a few insider shenanigans to bankrupt their own business and make 660 million dollars. The story doesn't get a lot of attention in the states, but it might be worth your time.

https://writingfortruth.blogspot.com/2010/09/station-casinos-labor-troubles.html

watch at least a minute of the first video.

Let me offer you my reading Adam. I think I am catching on to your approach. I think mine is somewhat different. I don't see the existence and persistence of Fertitta's as some failure of political thought, of the market, or socialism. I think it is the hand of nature forcing the idealists. It is a twist on the notion of "civil society" or bottom up organisation. Government and polite society, also have their limits.

Why is the Lada a wonderful car?

@ G

I think you are showing signs of fatigue citizen. Maybe you should spend some time at the BBC Health Gulag, for the benefit of your mind; and to cleanse your soul of this toxic heretical doubt you have acquired.

Relax in front of 8 hours of East Ender's each day, until you know the difference between right and wrong questions.

JimmyGiro

Slightly off topic.

I'm not who has watched the Living Dead series, but I was rewatching it recently. In the first episode Adam interviews a guy called Horst Mahler. What he says is very interesting. But I looked into this guy and what he has become involved with since is quite scary. Does anyone know anything more about this man?

Mr. Curtis,

My sincere apologies for resorting to an off-topic comment on your blog, but I've searched for other ways to contact you with no success. My name is Emily O'Neill and I'm a Photo and Permissions Associate at Jones & Bartlett Learning. One of our authors would like to use a clip from your film, "The Trap" in one of our upcoming educational products. I'd be more than happy to discuss the details of this and to request formal permission. Please email me at eoneill@jblearning.com when you receive this message. Thank you very much for your time.

@EmilyONeill

Adam has been keeping his email secret for many years. Obvious to anyone who has tried to contact him if merely to engage him on his work.

...

Dear Adam,

I hope you don't mind a bit of criticism of your work, since I am a bit taken back by the sycophanty of your raedership, and honestly, just think it natural to share some criticism if I have it.

First, you label yoru work personal opinion. This is nonsense. You present it from your perspective, but its not personal opinion. I don't know why everyone is now running scared of terms like Truth, Evidence, Reality, Objectivity, Fact, etc. But I guess you are scared as much as everyone else is.

Second, your narrative/psychological approach. It is apparent that you try to present your posts and documentaries as merely looking at something. While you have an absolutely extraordinary ability to take psychology, and portray it as the questionable "science" that it is, and dissect its influences in ways that a historian would be proud - i.e. showing the psychological tendency towards historicising its subjects, I wonder if the end product of your approach isn't counterproductive. Aren't you finding yourself, just telling stories about stories?

Third, when you try to tell us a story about a story, you strike this posture of not really knowing you are telling us a story - although you blatantly declare "this is a story" in virtually every documentary. If not exactly as I say, in the least you are trying to strike this pose in which you don't really "judge" whatever is going on. I think there is a point at which this turns into hopeless reductionism.

Take for example a trope you often repeat - the displacement of real politics, of people's real interests disappearing in their discussions, or in the politicla debate in which they are somehow participating. Isn't thsi exactly what you do with your "Camera" (or "Eye")? You're the one who is reducing things to mere ideologies, to mere ideas, that are always shown to be disconnected with ...what? Reality? In which you do not believe?

Let me give you specific examples - because I agree, theory without application becomes demagogy. In Madison Avenue you end by suggesting that feminism was co-opted. That consumption suddenly became a feminist expression. But wait Adam, if you are saying that freedom could be expressed through consumption, you need to either show us how this is untrue, or you are granting the Milton school its due. For there before you have a young female executive who is changing the way people shop, by giving them a greater choice, by increasing their freedom on the market.

Now if you want to dodge this, I suppose you could cop-out by saying you really are an "Artist." The sycophants say this about you here, but don't tell me you really honestly see yourself as something like an Artist?

What greater demagogue and pompous egomaniac exist in our days, in fact what greater Facsist, than the self-appointed Artists that carry the notions of Max Stirner to their logical absurd conclusions?

Are you Adam, basically saying there is no reality on which politics and human life is based, and if not, are you then saying that you don't know what this Reality is, and that you are capable of judging the subjects you cover, in relation to the distance they find themselves to this Reality?

Fascinating and ironic.
So Robber Baron Boris now has to hide from his government in London, I would guess that the Rover crooks also spend a lot of time abroad, with all that money they looted.
But the Rover bunch have no fear of the law.
Never mind the now defunct USSR, could the Rover situation arise in any other Western European nation? I doubt it.
Or in the USA either?

Brilliant.
Someone asked about the music - Dr Zhivago. Thought for a sec it was the Russians that added it (hilarious) but then noticed the title again. Nice one.

We live in a time when all elites, whether on the left or the right, believe in rigid rules that say there is no alternative to the present political and economic system.

No we don't live in such a time. There are hordes of people everywhere arguing for major reforms to the present political and economic system, some saying we should move more towards free markets (eg the Reason Foundation, the Adam Smith Institute) or towards more government intervention (eg Stiglitz, Krugman).

The latest rule is: you cannot have protectionism - otherwise you will get a world war

The more important reason for not having protectionism is that it means that you waste resources making what other countries can do more efficiently than you, and you lose buyers for what you can make more efficiently than they can, because if they can't sell any goods to you then they can't afford to buy your goods.

Other rules say you cannot have collective ideas that involve the surrender of the individual to the group - otherwise you get totalitarianism or, even worse, religion.

While I disagree with you about the religion claim, I agree with you that surrendering the individual to the group is totalitarianism. Definitions of totalitarianism run along the lines of: "Form of government that subordinates all aspects of its citizens' lives to the authority of the state". So the first part of your idea is true by a matter of definition.

But not so long ago the world was defined and divided by equally rigid rules. And no-one thought that could ever change.

This is nonsense. Throughout Western history people have been not only thinking that things could change, but actively trying to change them, and sometimes they've succeeded. The neoliberal economic changes in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The introduction of the welfare state around the world post WWII. The fall of apartheid in South Africa. The civil rights movement post WWII, the suffrage movement before WWII, the repeal of the Corn Walls, the independence of Ireland, the establishment of Israel, the Communist revolutions. Margaret Thatcher, Martin Luther King, Michael Connolley, Emmeline Pankhurst, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Joe Seddon, Gandhi, all clearly thought that they could change the rules of the world they lived in. You might not agree with all of their changes, indeed I deliberately listed both free-market and communist reformers so as to give everyone at least one person they disagreed with, but it's massively ignorant of history to say such daft stuff as "no one thought that could ever change".

@avishalom

I don't think that fair at all. I mean, I only have one shrine dedicated to Adam, and I only work on it every other day.

I'd just make a couple of points about what you say.

- I think there probably are greater fascists than the self-appointed artists you talk about. Quite a few. I mean isn't facism the opposite of Stirner's ideas? Isn't fascism associated with singular notions of truth? The opposition to this is not saying 'no, that's wrong here is my truth, and it's truer', the opposition should be to the notion of singular objective truths/reality.

- On a blog of a guy whose body of work in an enormous part covers how absolute beliefs and ideologies have had unpredicatable and frequently negative consequences you're asking him, in effect, for something more concrete. Perhaps i'm misterpreting, but in layman terms it seems you object to him sitting on the fence, or not spelling out the way in which things should be interpreted. I think his work is highly subjective, but it doesn't make the thing being said less true, especially compared to those who claim their work (or ideas) are wholly objective, which is just crazy. We've discussed on here repeatedly what we think his stuff means, what it's getting at, that for me is the fun of it. I don't think you could build an ideology purely from what you read on here, and that's a good thing. It doesn't mean the death of reason, or that you can't work things out and get closer to fact, to truth. It just means you probably won't have a clue when you've got there, regardless.

- I can't speak for everyone, but I think a large part of the success of Adam's stuff is that at times it becomes 'stories about stories'. I like the phrase someone used on here, 'metanarratives'. What is the nature of stories, how are them formed, do people need them and why, what are the limitation of narrative in gaining a greater understanding of things, if there are any, can there be meaning without narratives, etc?

- The Madison Avenue example - Well most of us will be familiar with some of Adam's other stuff, so I reckon he's not endorsing the idea of consumerism bringing or being freedom. But in it's own right I think that's pretty detectable; he talks pointedly about the consumer-feminist notions of beauty still being informed by men, for example.

Good points Tracy,

I think the issue here is one of describing causes via associated conditions, rather than the motivation directly. The 'times' is a blanket term, that doesn't bother to mention the direct cause.

I believe that people are rather insular by nature during wealthy, or as Pasha Glubber might put it, decadent 'times'; this I would term 'rude health'.

In 'times' of stress, such as attack, real or perceived, or reduction of ones personal wealth, then people are apt to congregate, and put their hopes in the force of numbers, to resolve their present plight. What we call 'politics', would then be the symptom of 'social health'.

A consequence may become addiction; if the political solutions work during the aberrant 'times', people develop a 'faith' in the politics for all time. So that the Yin and Yang of our social problems stem from our perpetual antagonism between our inherent sense of individualism during happy times, and our acquired dependency upon others, during strife, real or perceived.

And as with all addictions, you develop a market run by pushers and dealers; with the associated turf wars between parties. The political Parties are therefore purely parasitical, and rely solely upon the sense of despair of withdrawal perceived if their religion fails in the wake of perpetual strife, or the sense of danger, real or perceived.

To help people back to rude health, we must face up to the 'cold turkey' of denying the bad news of the pushers. We should allow a little anarchy into our lives, at the risk of chaos, we should be more resolute unto our own capabilities to survive the political nightmares. Some say you should avoid boring people to enhance your life; but I say you should avoid cowards; for they are the most dependent upon political solutions; and just as a junky is advised to stay away from other addicts, so we must avoid those who seek political solutions to problems that were dreamed up by the political pushers, to perpetuate their lucrative self serving market.

JimmyGiro

Wonderful film clips - I thank you for posting them.

I must disagree, however, with some of your commentary on the Soviet system. Yes, it may be true that the managers at this plant were siphoning off money, selling parts on the black market, etc. But in fact until the the late 1980s, even given rampant corruption (which got worse in the 1980s), it was still the Party and the hierarchy of plan and minister that determined all of the choices inside the factory, from output levels, to investment choices, to inputs (including from whom they were purchased), to prices.

Yet, although this film was made in 1977, you imply otherwise. You imply that managers had real power in contrast to what is said in the film when you say:

"Colin is convinced that it is the unions and the Communist party committee that really control the plant. Not the managers....

But in reality the very opposite was true. The absurdities of the plan were actually beginning to allow the managers to become much more powerful.

They were using the chaos and incompetence of central control to construct their own alternative economic systems. Which they controlled for their own benefit. "

No. They were not creating an alternative economic system. They were simply creating a corrupt underbelly of the planned economy in which they could siphon off resources from the factories to supplement their own income. This did not give them any of the powers described in the film, such as power over what to produce, how, how many workers of which type, what machines to use, where to get inputs, what to make, for what price to sell it at, etc. All of this was still decided by the plan and the hierarchy above the heads of the managers - and the Party still watched over the managers like hawks checking that they did follow these commands.

The fact that they were able to still exploit this system and make money on the side was simply testament to their genius for corruption. I mention this because it is an increasingly common mistake - people think now that the Soviet Union was really just a corrupt Latin-American-style mafia state, not a planned economy. This is not at all true - and the distinction is important.

To clarify: I don't dispute what happened in 1989. I do assert that this could not have happened in 1977 and that what was happening in 1977 was small scale side-incomes from selling spare parts, or using the grey and pink markets (allowed my the hierarchy) in such a way that they could pocket some extra income. Still, this all occurred within the plan structure, and the plan still determined what was made, how, by whom and for whom, etc.

This is great - thank you!

@the art teacher wrote:

" I think there probably are greater fascists than the self-appointed artists you talk about. Quite a few. I mean isn't fascism the opposite of Stirner's ideas?"

-no, there is no greater Fascist than the self-appointed artist. A solipsist. He believes he, and no one other than he, can define Truth. He makes it wholly Subjective. Hitlre was above all an Artist, and an Artsy type. So was Mussolini...so was Stalin...they all were.


"Isn't fascism associated with singular notions of truth? - isn't that what an artist has?"

that's why the Artist is the Greatest Fascist, because his Singularity of Truth is Solipsistic. What could be more Singular?

"I think his work is highly subjective, but it doesn't make the thing being said less true, especially compared to those who claim their work (or ideas) are wholly objective, which is just crazy.-obviously"

-Absolutely agreed. The issue isn't about what Adam labels as subjective or objective. It's what you posses enough knowledge about, to evaluate as such. You're forgetting that Adam works exclusively with evidence. So the disclaimer about "personal" is a way of saying "not a political scientist" and justifies the unorthodox (from an academic perspective) approach he takes to his subject matter.

This is where I want to yell, once again - Adam- your work is here both thanks to the BBC,but also hostage to it! We cannot preserve it in any form, the way the blogs are set up!! I know you are now paid by BBC, but does that mean its their product, not yours or ours?

"I don't think you could build an ideology purely from what you read on here, and that's a good thing?"
- Why not? You want to bet. Of course I can build an ideology. Why couldn't I? Is the work so limitless, the perspective so broad? Seriously? I don't want to demean it for a second - but I think critical thought is critical thought, eh? So I am not going to go soft on someone's ego, who is supposed to not even have their ego invested in this process. I certainly don't! I serve a function, and if Adam ever reads his comments, I cannot imagine him taking offense at mine, no matter how critical!

"I can't speak for everyone, but I think a large part of the success of Adam's stuff is that at times it becomes 'stories about stories'. I like the phrase someone used on here, 'metanarratives'. What is the nature of stories, how are them formed, do people need them and why,

- adam has never asked these questions. He tells stories about stories withotu even being aware of what he's doing. He can make all the disclaimers he wants, this is a metaphysical (in strict philosophical sense) issue, a question of what he's aiming to do. It's clear that the brilliance of his work comes from the obscurity of his evidence coupled with its political relevance.

"he's not endorsing the idea of consumerism bringing or being freedom."

no, I am. And I'm saying that Adam's "ideology" is to deny this is either conceivable or possible. He's always undermining this as an idea. His stories, the metaphysics of them, are possible only because he strikes from the shadow and then dissolves himself in it. So what we are seeing is more confabulatory, than the fables of those he subjects to ambiant emotional criticism.

The Phoenix amid the flames of the DeLorean? Back to the Future indeed.

So far as the Lada is concerned...... Give me a Trabant any day. Vorunsprung dork technik.... :-D

It reminds me of a time when my piano instructor went on a group visit to the Soviet Union and got into all kinds of trouble by talking to the locals. At the airport a man asked him to take a document out of the country. He didn't know what to do, so he flushed it in the lavatory in the airport toilets. Pity it wasn't filmed.

@avishalom
Please make another application for that teaching job, or write the book, make the film - your own film. Anything to take this semi-philosophising critique away from my eyes.
What kind of person wastes so many words trying to undermine someone else's work and replace it with their own rambling, ordinary views, and on that someone else's blog?!

Go and consume and be free.

It looks like Bill was still fighting the fight in 2008... :-D.

"His promises failed to sway retired car worker Bill Jupp who said pensioners had got ‘next to nothing’ in the Pre-Budget Report."

Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1088930/Winter-bonus-Pensioners-receive-60-families-given-early-boost-child-benefits.html

Got to be the same guy surely.

The second clip of the UK workers visiting Togliatti had a brief moment of resonance with me: the nursery with rows of sleeping children. My father was a journalist and his work took us to Moscow in about '72. I was four. Because my father wasn't with the embassy, my sister and I couldn't get places in the American nursery school and were sent to Russian ones. Initially, being older, I went to one alone. There was a nap time at some point every day, at which point the kids all dutifully lay down on these little cots, as shown in the film. I could not get to sleep, but the perk of this was that a beautiful woman sat and chatted with me very nicely, though it was probably all in Russian, which I did not know. I probably only went to this school for about a week, so this may have happened only once. I remember her giving me little yellow sweets, which made me feel I'd really done the right thing in not going to sleep. Perhaps they were knockout drops!

In general, I found the two Russian nursery schools I attended depressing places. It wasn't so much the physical spaces, though these were perhaps a little darker than I was used to, but the drab stupidity of what we were expected to do. There was a lot of dancing around in circles to childish tunes as I remember it. Previously in Washington DC, I'd been to a Montessori school, so I went from a sort of nec plus ultra western individualist free play learning environment – where, so the theory went, and I do think it was pretty sound though I might have a few cavils, children 'at the sponge stage' would learn very quickly given the right stimulus – to the opposite extreme where, though the teachers were perfectly kind, activity was terribly regimented and really quite boring and nothing was taught at all (except conformism and submissiveness perhaps). I can't help feeling as I write this that infant-stage education, the theories around it and the ideology implicit in them, could be a fascinating research avenue for you, but I guess one could say that about a lot of things.

I have a nice old photo on my mantelpiece of four kids, none of them me, at one of these schools. I think my father took it. They are playing with a model of a modern town and the boy in the middle, as if he is commandant, is dressed in a somewhat military style with a hat I know to have been red, though the photo is black and white. I think this was a 'young pioneer' style. There were always one or two kids dressed like this. Perhaps they were the children of party members, I don't know. Despite my general antipathy to the conformism of these places, I was rather covetous of some of the regalia. I never saw any girls wearing it.

Something else I'm struck by in the film and have also noticed on trips to Berlin when I've gone to relatively unchanged places in the former East is the quality of the furniture and interior design. Admittedly, it's not Charles and Ray Eames, but a lot of it's pretty good and is duly bought up by hipsters for their Berlin flats. I don't think this is just nostalgia or even Ostalgie as it's known there (East nostalgia). The stuff is solidly made (it's held up for forty years) of decent materials and has a good sense of colour and good, modernist lines. A lot of it's not that different from the stuff we fetishise in Mad Men now. What happened to design? What happened to the modernist dream of good design through mass production for all? The story that dominated the Cold War in the west was that only the west had nice stuff. Since the fall of the Soviet bloc, less and less ordinary people have had nice stuff. Think silver-look plastic and wood veneer flooring (a photograph of wood on vynil). Things are made cheaply now and not made to last. Designers are often not employed at all to design so-called 'engineer-designed' electrical goods, which are expected to be discarded the first time they break. It would be neat to put this all down to the fact that great consumer goods are no longer needed to put the case against communism, too neat in my view. Still, an interesting trajectory. And, thinking about it, it's not just poor or ordinary people who've been affected. I've been for meetings in big corporate environments where the spaces and furniture are deathly in their blandness and shoddiness and the spaces hardly seem to have been thought about at all. Compare that to the meeting room with the Lenin wall decoration in the Togliatti film.

Had a bit of trouble posting, so am trying again. If it ends up as a double post, perhaps this second attempt can be deleted.