In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s fine play, “The Love-Girl and the Innocent,” he describes a poster hanging on the office wall of one of the Soviet Union’s infamous forced labor camps in the 1940s, one prison of which the great freedom fighter had personal experience. That poster had this ironic inscription, a quote from none other than Josef Stalin: “Instead of the onerous burden it was under Capitalism, work has become a matter of honor, of glory, of valor, and heroism.”
Yes, indeed; work valorously for the State. Work tirelessly until you drop. Work without freedom, justice, or sense of personal dignity. Work for nothing but the sheer satisfaction of being a cog in the Great Wheel of what Stalin, like Marx and Lenin before him, called "Dialectical and Historical Materialism."
This, sad to say, is real Socialism. Not in theory or a liberal's fairy tales but rather in cold, hard history.
