Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 3

"Gorky, the future pope of socialist realism, was already at the beginning of the 20th century one of the great names of Russian literature. He was also genuinely popular and famous for his revolutionary feats. According to a contemporary survey, even workers widely read Gorky. Tolstoy and Gorky were the two most popular writers several years before the Bolshevik Revolution (Read 1990:31).
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For Gorky, ‘Man’, with a capital M was no utilitarian. He was both the divine creator and the paragon of virtues. In his novel ‘The Mother’ (Mat’) (1906), Gorky depicted conscious proletarians as the intelligenty of a new era, as non-philistine heroes, who forsake the petty-bourgeois life and dedicate everything to the great cause of the liberation of Man.

Gorky expected that the rising proletarian ‘Man’ would bring about a renaissance of morals, which the bourgeois philistines had destroyed. Gorky considered that not only greed and fraudulence, but also any kind of excessive or queer sexuality, were signs of bourgeois decadence. They belonged to the bourgeoisie, which was to cede its place in world history to the proletariat.

The worst element in Russian society, from Gorky’s point of view, however, was the peasantry. In his opinion, peasants were the quintessential philistines, who cared only for their petty property. They were the very opposite of culture. The torch of culture was born by the proletariat. No wonder that Gorky hailed collectivization, which would emancipate the peasantry by liberating them from the burden of petty property. Peasants cannot be equated with consumers, rather the contrary. In Gorky’s eyes, however, they belonged essentially to the same category because of their allegedly excessive interest for the material sphere of life.

The ethos of this ‘anti-materialist’ moralizing, which was so typical for the early Marxists and, later, for the Bolsheviks, can also be found in other moral teachers and writers of the late 19th and early 20th century."

Timo Vihavainen, "The Spirit of Consumerism in Russia and the West" in "Communism and Consumerism: The Soviet Alternative to the Affluent Society", pp. 23-26

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"The Russian Left is Different.

Grudinin has the support of the left and of the right; of workers and of managers; of communists and of nationalists. How could this happen? The main reason is that the Russian Left is quite different from the European Left. The Russians are Bolsheviks. The Western Left is predominantly Menshevik.

Historically, the Russian Social Democrats were divided into Bolsheviks, the Majorites, and Mensheviks, the Minorites. The actual argument that divided the Social Democrats into these majority and minority groups is of little importance now and of even less relevance. Nowadays, the Majorites are the Left for the Majority, while Minorites are the Left for Minorities.

The Russian Left is the force for the majority, for the workers, for the natives. The Western Left is for gender, ethnic, religious minorities. If you’d ask a Western worker about the Left, he will probably tell you: the Left is not for us, they care only for gays and migrants who take our jobs."
 Israel Shamir