Word: proletariat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...what do we get from the Students for a Democratic Society? Piercing protests as to the plights of the "proletariat." Christ, it's not only the workers who are oppressed; it's all people whose lives, whose very existence, is dependent on the economic self-interests of those large corporations who pay the wages...
...miniature transistor factory. In small, whitewashed rooms, the kids hunch over the tiny things, putting them together in silence, with determination. A visitor asks a 15-year-old girl what she wants to be when she graduates. "I wish to be a successor to the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat," she says. She carries an open copy of Mao's little red book. Yes, yes, says the questioner, but how does she want to do that? "I want to do what is beneficial to the people," the girl responds...
...proletariat's task was not the writing of great literature, said Trotsky. The bourgeois, educated to leisurely pursuits, could do that better. Its task was the nuts and bolts construction of the new socialist order. Mayakovsky admitted as much when he write in a poem, "Shakespeare had at his disposal a total of 60,000 words. But the genius-poet of the Future shall possess in every moment 150,000,000,000." Mayakovsky had the vision of the future genius-poet but was stuck with Shakespeare's used-up diction...
...bankrupt if he failed. Historically, the U.S. Government has often done much to strengthen those twin pillars of free enterprise, private ownership and unfettered competition. Americans have grown so accustomed to living under free enterprise that they rarely even think in terms of class struggles, expropriation, the proletariat or other concepts that mark national debate elsewhere...
...more than merely getting drunk on weekends. As a matter of fact, the vivid proof of the growing well-being and prosperity of the average worker is attested to by the summer spectacle of our highways--choked with the vacation-bound cars of the "oppressed" American proletariat...