Word: proletarian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sotheby's feels it is being arraigned for the crime of high success. David Nash, head of its Fine Arts division, told the Washington Post that critics, far from being elitist, have "a hostile proletarian attitude toward our business." (Let 'em eat Braque.) But auction-house pretensions to be self- regulating have collided with the skepticism of Angelo Aponte, New York City commissioner of consumer affairs...
Strikes are not technically illegal in the Soviet Union; the Marxist tenet that they are unnecessary in a proletarian paradise has not kept them from happening. Until the Gorbachev era, Communist rulers used bullets or gifts of consumer goods to quell unruly workers. But under the impact of perestroika and glasnost, work stoppages have become part of the economic landscape...
...industrial economy, creating a retarded form of industrial feudalism. It is that system that Gorbachev's perestroika and Deng Xiaoping's "Four Modernizations" seek to reform. But in China factory workers have shunned colleagues who earned incentive bonuses, or gone on strike to prevent introduction of such bonuses. Their proletarian comrades in the Soviet Union have reportedly downed tools for higher pay, while others burned a prosperous collective that raised pigs because it was too successful. In Poland the economic program of Solidarity runs directly counter to any efforts at reform. It demands higher wages, stable prices and job security...
...schoolteachers, Brigada S (or the S Brigade, christened by lead singer Igor Sukachev because he liked the letter S) has become one of the most popular of the new generation of rock bands. Although the four-year-old group has yet to produce an album, the self-described "Proletarian Jazz Orchestra" enjoys a tremendous following. Teens from Tallinn to Vladivostok spray-paint the band's name, with the Russian equivalent of S drawn like a Communist hammer and sickle, on walls of public buildings...
Dislocating cultural rebellions are not unusual, especially when population curves bulge and mature. The difference in 1968 was that the whole world seemed to be in the midst of a great proletarian revolution, determined to establish an alternative elite complete with attendant counterculture. The Beatle George Harrison voiced his side of the civil war in February 1968. "It doesn't really matter about the older people now because they're finished anyway," he said. "There's still going to be years of having all these old fools who are governing us and who are bombing us and doin' all that...