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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

> In older societies,

Which ones? England and some north europe maybe. It's not an important thing really in most old societies. In fact british classism looks outdated and cringe to me.

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The classes got wiped out in all Central and Eastern Europe countries which went through communism. Pretty much all of their wealth was confiscated and they were persecuted to a various degree. From society's perspective, it's actually one of the positives of going through the horror of communism - the societies were reset to be much more egalitarian. Even to this day, wealth disparity in post-communist countries is lower than in Western Europe - there wasn't enough time yet for the true billionaire elite class to emerge from the egalitarian soup.

Aren’t the new elites just the party elites? The ones who are not seen publicly and elect the party leader? It seems to me like they get full reign on economic development projects - which they loot to enrich their families. And once the country goes post-communist these same elites remain in control of the institutions and industries they helped set up.

At least in Poland, for whatever reason, the communist apparatchicks mostly didn't get rich off of their power. They had a higher standard of living - but that meant a house and a car, and not a small flat and a bus pass, like most of the population. I think the ideology was still strong enough to make such behaviours completely non-palatable and would mean exclusion from the party. Only in the eighties, when it was clear that the system is broken beyond repair, the communist values crumbled and the elites started to accumulate wealth. Even with that, there are very few if any former high party official on contemporary Poland's top 100 wealthiest people list. Of course, if the system continued to reign, as is in China's case, the people at the top of the party would probably amass giant wealth.

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