Word: peasant
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That something has failed, and failed badly, is no longer seriously disputed, even by many Marxist experts. Before Deng, the failure was more starkly obvious in China. The average peasant or city worker was little better off, if at all, when Mao died in 1976 than he or she had been in the 1950s. But even the Soviet Union has long since had to forget Nikita Khrushchev's hollow boast that it would inevitably "bury" the U.S. by surpassing the American standard of living. Quite the opposite: the U.S.S.R.'s economic growth rate has slipped to about half the pace...
...degree extreme even for the Communist world. The land was worked by communes that grew what the state directed and turned over all food produced to the state for distribution. Pay was based on a system of "work points" that bore little relation to production: a peasant would accumulate a certain number of work points for planting rice seedlings, for example, but he or she would fare no better if the eventual crop was large than if it was small...
Most of the first leases were for two or three years, but they are now being extended, usually for 15 years and as long as 30 years on grazing land. Under a 1985 law the leases can be inherited. Peasants own their draft animals, and those who prosper can buy machinery; ownership of tractors has burgeoned from 90,000 to 290,000 in the past two years. Though the state retains the power to cancel a peasant family's lease and award it to someone else, that power is rarely exercised. Farm families are increasingly regarding the good earth...
...seem to think that allowing peasants to "grow what they wish" and "start private businesses" is a step toward the restoration of capitalism and perhaps even democracy in China. This has merely changed the status of the peasant from that of a serf to that of a sharecropper. The peasants cannot buy the land they farm, and this is what matters. The essence of capitalism is not making a profit. This can be done under the barter system. The basic element is the right of the citizen to own private property. In China, all the land is owned...
Here, as in Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars, the Tavianis' style is surrealism made simple. Their fantastic fables are filtered through a peasant ruggedness; their images are as clear as a Giotto fresco; the actors find precision in the volcanic gestures of Italian opera. In one scene, Batà sits alone in the town square to confess the origin of his ailment, and a flashback shows the infant Batà in a field at night, his huge eyes transfixed by the harlot moon. No minimalist torpor for the Tavianis--every frame is over...