Word: proletariat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pledged to abide by parliamentary democracy and, if in power, to permit opposition, a free press and even a mixed economy. Striving to shed his party's doctrinaire image, French Communist Chief Georges Marchais went so far as to state on TV recently that the dictatorship of the proletariat is an outworn notion-a shocking bit of revisionism that brought a sharp, if predictable rebuke from Pravda. Marchais's new lip service to democratic principles has cheered French Socialists, who are allied with the Communists behind a joint platform of social goals known as the Programme Commun...
Revel feels that Socialists err in dismissing Western-style social democracy as a "class collaboration" that defuses the proletariat. Focusing on class struggle, he argues, serves "less to transform the condition of the working class than to prevent capitalism from functioning." For his part, Revel prefers the libertarian inequalities of modern capitalism to "an inequality in penury under the control of a dictatorship...
...political conscience interferred with his artistic development, pushing his work further and further towards simplistic allegory. His early pastoral poetry hardened into a black-and-white vision in his later works. Le Cenere di Gramsci written in the early fifties, already sees the world divided between an innocent proletariat (an urbanized "noble savage") and an evil, decadent bourgeoisie. His prose development follows a similar pattern; a growing rigidity of perception is apparent when one compares "Ragazzi di vita" (also written in the fifties) to "La Divina Mimesis," a parody of the Divine Comedy he was working on at his death...
...similar middle-class male fantasy. The conflict of his communist ideals with his capitalist life is a slightly magnified reflection of the mentality of the Italian bourgeoisie, a select elite who received a traditional education in a fascistic system and are now confronted with the demands of the proletariat for a decent life. Pasolini was a leftist even though his older brother was killed by a leftist group in a vicious slaughter--which turned out to be a tragic mistake. He supported the PCI despite the fact that they tried to disown him when his homosexuality first became known, only...
...never gave up his aristocratic attitudes. His books and films show the proletariat as merely a class to be manipulated. As a film-maker, and even more as a homosexual who could buy any boy he chose (and did so) Pasolini exploited the working classes. The night of his death, he picked up a boy to satisfy his sexual needs, took the kid out for dinner (Pasolini didn't eat) and then drove off with him in his Alfa 2000 to a private place. Ironically, Pasolini himself helped to perpetrate the prostitution he deplored...