Word: proletariat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...arts of yesterday; and he still has to be invented." By this, Thoré (like the artists he spoke for) meant man as political creature, man seen in his manifest social relations-not the decorative peasants of Boucher or the squalid, undifferentiated social lump the French bourgeois imagined the proletariat to be. The task of realism was therefore to record, in Weisberg's phrase, "human needs and social symptoms" -contemporary life, arts, tensions, suffering...
...Lenin in 1920: "We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas or ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat...
...Brezhnev in 1968: "Our party has always warned that in the ideological field, there can be no peaceful coexistence, just as there can be no class peace between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie...
...these countries, to suggest that most of the revolutionaries are indeed peasants is to mock the history of such revolutions, and to further suggest that any movement heavily supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union will improve the life of the peasants--one would merely have to ask the proletariat in, say, Afghanistan and Ethiopia if their conditions have improved since their Cuban- and Soviet-supported "People's Revolutions" took place...
Karl Marx could hardly have imagined that a socialist empire based on the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would one day be shaken to its core by a son of the working class. Yet in 1980 an unemployed Polish electrician, Lech Walesa, rose from the masses to become one of the Communist world's most charismatic figures. When he scaled the gates of Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk last August, Walesa did far more than seize the reins of an angry strike movement. To millions of Polish workers, he became the symbol of their dreams...