Word: proletariat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stolidly relentless vehicle of Marxism lumbers through history toward the light, its honored cargo has always been a rather dense abstraction called "the proletariat." But Karl Marx never lavished much bourgeois sentimentality on the proletariat in person, on real workers as individuals. In their private correspondence, Marx and Engels even referred to them as "stupid asses...
Communism promises everything to the proletariat. The great theoretical Marxist engine, after all, repairs the dread alienation of "heartless" capitalism by restoring the means of production to the workers. Well, as the Polish emigre writer Leszek Kolakowski, an apostate Marxist, has said, that "has been the greatest fantasy of our century." Observes TIME Correspondent David Aikman, who has covered Eastern Europe extensively: "It is exceedingly hard to find anyone there, and especially in Poland, who believes the official mythology that states run by Communist parties are actually operated for the benefit of the workers. Party officials will sometimes...
...scientific concept of the dictatorship [of the proletariat] means nothing other than unlimited government unrestrained by any laws or any absolute rules and supporting itself directly by force." Marx said that after a Communist revolution, the state would wither away. Wrong; it has grown and overgrown, with a bureaucratic luxuriance...
...operating procedures of Marxist states usually follow a depressing logic. Marxism, with its incomparably oafish legerdemain, softens up the sanity by explaining that failure is success, and otherwise fulfilling George Orwell's expectations. The revolutionary "vanguard" clearing the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat develops into a "New Class" of privileged party officials and bureaucrats. The system runs by what the Soviets call blat- influence, clout, corruption. A new minority rule sets in. If it is not the dark, satanic will of Stalin, it has little to do with workers' wishes either. Although members of the ruling...
...classic liberal agenda?generous welfare plans, unemployment compensation, Social Security, Medicare, civil rights legislation. Some of the beneficiaries of these programs no longer consider themselves to be Democrats. Says Sol Chaikin, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union: "You have a group that has moved out of the proletariat into the broad middle class...