In a new anti-communist political statement this week, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, President of Kazakhstan, declared a sweeping overhaul of the country’s social benefits system and openly denounced the existence of broad, publicly funded social provisions as tantamount to... “victorious communism” that must end.
In a televised address, Tokayev claimed that Kazakhstan’s free healthcare, wide range of benefits, and state social spending have provoked envy among neighboring states and led to “massive parasitism” by recipients of state support.
In a televised address, Tokayev claimed that Kazakhstan’s free healthcare, wide range of benefits, and state social spending have provoked envy among neighboring states and led to “massive parasitism” by recipients of state support.
He also argued that bloated welfare obligations have caused budget deficits, fraud, and administrative chaos, justifying an immediate and systemic revision of funding mechanisms.
The president singled out official statistics showing some 740,000 people with disabilities as “abnormal for peacetime” and ordered a thorough investigation by government and law-enforcement bodies to “clean up” social support systems — a move that in practice signals upcoming cuts and stricter eligibility checks for some of society’s most vulnerable.
Tokayev frames his offensive in the language of managerial efficiency and anti-fraud rhetoric, but the substance is a political assault on social rights. What the state labels “dependency” is in reality social necessity — wages and support that sustain millions of people unable to survive on the capitalist market alone. The president’s rhetoric shifts blame for economic strain away from oligarchic accumulation, rent-seeking, and unequal profit extraction toward those on the receiving end of social aid.
This is a classic ideological maneuver: cast universal rights as undeserved privileges, paint claimants of those rights as cheats and “parasites,” and then shrink or abolish protections in the name of fiscal “sanity.” In this conservative framing, free healthcare and broad social benefits are villainized as relics of “communism”, when in fact they represent the hard-won gains of working people — whether under socialist regimes or in social-democratic struggles worldwide.
What the government dismisses as “communist abundance” includes: Free universal healthcare provided by the state. A broad suite of social benefits covering families, elderly people, disabled workers, and low-income households. Public financing of education and subsidies that lower barriers to access.
This offensive in Kazakhstan is not occurring in isolation. Across the post-Soviet space, decommunization has been used politically to erase the legacy of working-class achievements, substitute market discipline for social guarantees, and dismantle collective institutions built under past socialist projects. What is presented as a break with an “ideology” is in fact a class attack — an attack on the social safety net, on public ownership of essential services, and on the very idea that a society should pool resources to meet human needs rather than corporate profits.
In Kazakhstan, this process now extends to social policy. The government’s talk of “cleaning up” disability rolls and social assistance recipients betrays a deeper agenda: not just fiscal tightening, but ideological decommunization — the deliberate removal of any remnants of a social order where communal welfare is prioritized over elite enrichment.
This decommunization — the symbolic and material erasure of social gains once associated with socialist thinking — is not yet complete. The interests of working people and the poor must be defended by organized resistance rooted in class solidarity, not by appeals to a state that now casts those very appeals as ideological failings.
The president singled out official statistics showing some 740,000 people with disabilities as “abnormal for peacetime” and ordered a thorough investigation by government and law-enforcement bodies to “clean up” social support systems — a move that in practice signals upcoming cuts and stricter eligibility checks for some of society’s most vulnerable.
Tokayev frames his offensive in the language of managerial efficiency and anti-fraud rhetoric, but the substance is a political assault on social rights. What the state labels “dependency” is in reality social necessity — wages and support that sustain millions of people unable to survive on the capitalist market alone. The president’s rhetoric shifts blame for economic strain away from oligarchic accumulation, rent-seeking, and unequal profit extraction toward those on the receiving end of social aid.
This is a classic ideological maneuver: cast universal rights as undeserved privileges, paint claimants of those rights as cheats and “parasites,” and then shrink or abolish protections in the name of fiscal “sanity.” In this conservative framing, free healthcare and broad social benefits are villainized as relics of “communism”, when in fact they represent the hard-won gains of working people — whether under socialist regimes or in social-democratic struggles worldwide.
What the government dismisses as “communist abundance” includes: Free universal healthcare provided by the state. A broad suite of social benefits covering families, elderly people, disabled workers, and low-income households. Public financing of education and subsidies that lower barriers to access.
This offensive in Kazakhstan is not occurring in isolation. Across the post-Soviet space, decommunization has been used politically to erase the legacy of working-class achievements, substitute market discipline for social guarantees, and dismantle collective institutions built under past socialist projects. What is presented as a break with an “ideology” is in fact a class attack — an attack on the social safety net, on public ownership of essential services, and on the very idea that a society should pool resources to meet human needs rather than corporate profits.
In Kazakhstan, this process now extends to social policy. The government’s talk of “cleaning up” disability rolls and social assistance recipients betrays a deeper agenda: not just fiscal tightening, but ideological decommunization — the deliberate removal of any remnants of a social order where communal welfare is prioritized over elite enrichment.
This decommunization — the symbolic and material erasure of social gains once associated with socialist thinking — is not yet complete. The interests of working people and the poor must be defended by organized resistance rooted in class solidarity, not by appeals to a state that now casts those very appeals as ideological failings.
