Louis Proyect
Fri, 15 Dec 2000 11:54:40 -0800
>_Only socialists who have been to college_ romanticize manual labor >in a _workerist_ fashion, "singing to tractors," so to speak. Most >manual laborers -- be they under capitalism or socialism -- don't. >Vasily Shukshin -- no "socialist realist" & himself intimately >acquainted with the reality of manual labor -- understood this fact >very well. I am not sure what point you are trying to make by this. The whole story of Stalin's USSR was about eradicating the democratic esprit of the 1920s. The movie depicted class relations from the pre-socialist past being replicated in the 1960s. Cuba more closely resembles the USSR of the early 1920s when such class distinctions were being uprooted by the Bolsheviks. Eventually Russian society succumbed to outside military and economic pressures, including tens of thousands of dead Bolshevik cadres in the civil war. To replace them, Stalin looked to the old Czarist bureaucracy which fostered its own elitist attitudes into a corrupted CP. Cuba was spared. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org