In his 1937 review of a memoir by the aviator Georgii Baidukov, writer Andrei Platonov provides a richly speculative picture of Soviet socialism:
A symbolic image of the entire modern economy might be a heavy body, supported in air space by the thrust of a propeller; at one and the same time, this image gives a precise picture of the most intense work of the mechanism and of the person of our time.
But what kind of person is it who works on a machine in the air, on a machine that pulls behind it all of modern technology? Does the pilot-person not have some new features that will later be transferred to the character of the future person?1
Andrei Platonov’s “symbolic image” suggests that Soviet socialism can be kept aloft, defying gravity at least for the time being, as a precisely calculated interaction of mechanical energy and human labor. But there is, Platonov suggests, the possibility of a different economy, one yet to be defined, let alone achieved, where natural limitations like gravity, entropy, and perhaps even death will not have to be resisted so forcefully, where the flight of socialism will become effortless, free, and final. This would be communism, albeit in a version that owes as much to the cosmism of Nikolai Fedorov and Aleksandr Bogdanov as it does to Marx and Lenin.
Platonov’s eccentric vision of a cosmist communism has made him into one of the most intriguing and inspiring Soviet writers for our day, but this cosmic
Article source: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/88/172568/how-to-keep-communism-aloft-labor-energy-and-the-model-cosmos-in-soviet-cinema/