Word: proletarianism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...what is at the root of the conflict between Vietnam and Cambodia is the rival nationalism inherent in all Stalinist bureaucracies. The Stalinist "theory" of "Socialism in One Country" has in practice meant selling out workers struggles everywhere else and is counterposed to Lenin and Trotsky's view of proletarian internationalism...
...workers states is that the economic gains of the anti-capitalist revolutions remain intact; i.e. there is no bourgeoisie, private property has been collectivized and there is a planned economy. But the self-serving Stalinist bureaucracies have politically expropriated the working class by excluding the most elementary expression of proletarian democracy: workers soviets. We give no support to one Stalinist regime over another but call for political revolution against the bureaucracies whose class-collaborationist policies sabotage the very existence of the collective property forms upon which their states rest...
...made that Mao lived too long. The Great Revolutionary died at 82, an enfeebled puppet. His legacy, after the Cultural Revolution, was a ramshackle economy, a badly equipped military and an educational system in which intellect and learning had been superseded by a dank, Orwellian passion for proletarian ideology...
Teng attended the first Red Guard rallies, but he was soon singled out as a key target of the radical youths who spearheaded Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Teng was excoriated in the press as "Liu's henchman" and "even more sinister and dangerous than Liu." Pamphlets and wall posters claimed that Teng's consuming bourgeois passions were mah-jongg and bridge. While supposedly on inspection tours, it was charged, Teng was traveling around the country on specially chartered trains and planes with his card-playing cronies...
Most, of course, including strong-minded feminists, will agree that the first bunches of women, bra-less, in baggy pants and shirts, toting signs and pleading for sexual equality presented a somewhat unappealing image. But, consider that practically everyone back then, men too, was dressing in "proletarian garb." It just became fashionable to not wash your clothes, because who cared what we looked like? There was a cause to fight for. Women realized they no longer had to totter around in spike heels and in pants so tight they couldn't breathe--they realized they did not wish...