Word: classlessness
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...even classless China is exempt from the new elitism. After Mao's 1949 triumph, Chinese Communist leaders immediately moved into villas expropriated from capitalist tycoons and, among other things, designated Peitaiho, one of the country's best seaside resorts, as their exclusive playground. Chauffeured cars ferry the wives of high-ranking Chinese cadres to exclusive shops and their
...proletariat and the concentration of near total power in a tightly structured party that is supposedly the vanguard of the revolutionary masses. Communism is dogmatic in its determination to abolish private property and nationalize the means of production as the first steps toward achieving its ultimate goal, the classless society...
NONFICTION Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys. A Belgian-born Sinologist argues persuasively that China, far from being a classless society, is a tyranny ruled by a privileged clique of bureaucrats and generals. Coming into the Country by John McPhee. Three lengthy bulletins on Alaska, handcrafted out of diligent reporting and a supple style, magically transform this vast, nearly unspoiled area into a state of mind. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh edited by Michael Davie. One of the century's great novelists discloses incidents in his life (among them the death of a child and a crucial stint...
...calls the "social realities." Josephine is formidable: a successful writer with another daughter and a number of former husbands left in or under the dust. She is also a hardheaded survivor of the spaghetti-and-Chianti bohemian liberalism of the '30s. "Since we are not living in a classless society," says Josephine, "there is no point in pretending that we are. I would fight for the rights of all minorities, write articles, send checks, but I would not necessarily invite them to parties in my house; they would not like it there...
...boots,/ under the wheels of Black Marias." Life under Lenin's current successor has relaxed, grown somewhat less bleak, but there still seems no prospect that the mythology will be fulfilled: that, in the fullness of time, the state will begin to wither away and leave only the classless, abundant workers' paradise. On the contrary, the stolid bureaucracy expands, reduplicating itself and its controls. The Revolution's promises seem doomed always to recede into the future...