Chairman Khrushchev Flies to America by Francis Spufford

 

 

 

Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back on the world as if they were  independent powers, requiring factories to be opened and closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh grow cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands and dancing round, and round, and round. with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the dead, whirling on. That was Marx’s description, anyway. And what would be the alternative? A dance of another nature? A dance to music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all . . .

Such a long journey. Such a long way traveled, the Chairman thought, since he had been a  quick kid himself, the kid on the coalfield with a homemade motorbike and three gold roubles in his pocket on a Friday, and the fluffy white duck-down hair ( That hadn’t lasted long.) Such a long journey to tis point in time for the whole country; and none of it easy, none of it achieved without cost. No one gave us this beautiful plane. We built it ourselves, we pulled it out of nothing by our determination and strength. They tried to crush us over and over again, but we wouldn’t be crushed. We drove off the Whites. We winkled out the priests, out of the churches and more important out of people’s minds. We got rid of the shopkeepers, thieving bastards, getting their dirty fingers in every deal, making every straight thing crooked. We dragged the farmers into the twentieth century, and that was hard, that was a cruel business and there were some hungry years there, but it had to be done, we had to get the muck off our boots.

 

We realized there were saboteurs and enemies among us, and we caught them, but it drove us mad for a while, and for a while we were seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere and hurting people who were brothers, sisters, good friends, honest comrades. Then the Fascists came, and stamping on them was bloody, nobody could call what we did then sweetness and light, wreckage everywhere, but what are you going to do when a gang of murders breaks into the house? And the Boss didn’t help much. Wonderful clear mind, but by that time he was frankly screwy, moving whole nations round the map like chess pieces, making sit up all night with him and drink that filthy vodka till we couldn’t see straight, and always watching us: no, I don’t deny we went wrong, in fact you recall it was me that said so.

But all the while were building. All the while we were building factories and mines, railroads and roads, towns and cities, and all without help, without getting the say-so from any millionaire or bigshot. We did that. We taught  people to read, we taught them to love culture. We sent millions of them to school and millions of them to college, so they could have the advantages we never had. We created the boys and girls who’re young now. We did  the dirty work so they could inherit a clean world.

And now was the time when it all paid off, he thought. The wars were over, the enemies were gone, the mistakes were rectified. Forty-two years since the Revolution, and at last the pattern of the new society was established. All the young people had known no other way of living. They had never seen a rich man going past in his carriage; they had never seen a private shop. And so at last it was becoming possible to make good on all the promises which they’d fed the people during the hungry years. All well and good, he thought, because we really meant them, we weren’t trying to hoodwink anyone, but there’s a limit to how long you can keep going on that kind of a diet. You can’t make soup out of promises. Some comrades seem to think that fine words and fine ideas were all the world would ever require, that pure enthusiasm would carry humanity forward to happiness: well excuse me, comrades, but aren’t we supposed to be materialists? Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who get along without fairytales? If communism couldn’t give people a better life than capitalism, he personally couldn’t see the point. A better life, in a straightforward, practical way: better food, better clothes, better houses, better cars, better airplanes (like this one), better football games to watch and cards to play and beaches to sit on, in the summertime, with children splashing about in the surf and a nice bottle of something cold to sip. More money to spend- or else more of a world in which money was no longer necessary  to ration out good things, because there were so many good things, all gushing out of the whatchamacallit, the thing like a cone spilling over with fruit. The horn of plenty.

Fortunately, the hard part of the task was nearly done. They had almost completed the heavy lifting, they had heaved and shoved and (yes) driven people on with kicks and curses, and they had built the basis for a good life, their very own horn of plenty pouring forth the necessary steel; and coal and electricity. They had done the big stuff. All that remained was to get the small stuff right. It was time to use what they had built to make life a pleasure instead of a struggle. They could do it. If they could produce a million tons of steel, they could produce a million tons of anything. The just had to concentrate on directing their horn of plenty so that, as well as spitting out girders, it now also overflowed with music boxes. Now the sacrifices ended. Now came the  age of cream and dumplings; the old dream of a feast that never had an end, but truly delivered, delivered in sober daylight, by science.