Word: proletarianism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Commons.* Appealing to voters disenchanted by Macmillan's crackdown on credit and pay raises, the Liberals run on a platform resembling Labor's (main difference : the Liberals do not favor nationalization of industry). They are unencumbered by the Labor Party's internal feuds and by the proletarian stigma that keeps many middle-class voters from going Labor. Sniffed Macmillan: "The Liberal Party is performing the valuable function of the exhaust pipe in the motorcar...
...Lower Depths. Akira Kurosawa's Japanization of the classic proletarian comedy by Maxim Gorky boils with demonic energy and rocks with large, yea-saying laughter...
...same was true of another cultural stalwart of the Party, John Dos Passos. For all his proletarian sympathies, Dos Passos never found any form of collectivism congenial. He was never able to shake off the feeling that the Party was using him, never able to swallow the Party's slogans and the doctrine of two truths (one for the elite, one for the masses), and found it especially hard to stomach the Party's leadership. Like so many other writers, Dos Passos wavered a long time before he finally broke with the Party; but his break could have been predicted...
...pastel, pastiche, dilettante religion, without the true neurotic blood and fire, a daydream of homosexual figures in graceful gowns moving archaically among the lilies. Or his description of Archibald MacLeish: a "white collar fascist out of Harvard and Wall Street." But they were mostly as dreary as the proletarian novelists they praised so excessively. Marxism's direct cultural impact on America was slight, and is mercifully forgotten...
...Lower Depths (Toho) is a fascinating minor work by a continually amazing major artist: Japan's Akira Kurosawa. Filmed in 1957, Depths is presented simply as a Japanization of Maxim Gorky's classic proletarian comedy, but in fact the film has a hissing demonic energy and a vast life-welcoming humor that are unmistakably Kurosawa...