Word: proletariat
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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...
...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...
...chief of state resulted in such a sunburst of high art. A troika of young film maker-theoreticians-Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin and Alexander Dovzhenko-seized the movie toy and remade it into a sophisticated machine that dazzled the world intelligentsia, even as it instructed the Russian proletariat. As long as the party hierarchy was amused too, all was well. But in 1924 Stalin rephrased the famous dictum, and his diaphanous threat holds to this day: "The cinema is the greatest means of mass agitation. Our problem is to take this matter into our own hands...