Word: proletariat
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Members of the American Communist Party, who never numbered more then one million, must have felt jilted by history. The beloved proletariat, so requiting during hard times, had, at first opportunity, run off with capitalism's traveling salesman. As the cold war closed in, Communists were once again looked on as the seducers of godless foreign power. "We ought to drop one of these automatic bombs on the Communists," said one Midwestern farmer during the early '50s. The prescription for homegrown Reds was McCarthyism, which threatened democracy more than the encapsulated cells of the American Communist Party...
...performance footage intercut with this material is rather perfunctorily and inelegantly shot. One suspects that Soviet authorities, not wanting the world audience to get the impression that the kids are a sweated artistic proletariat, forced the documentarians to avoid any overt suggestion that there might be more pain, narrowness of intellectual focus and disappointment in the children's lives than is shown in this overly sweet film. It is assuredly a harmless way to pass a rainy weekend afternoon with one's own kids, though the commercially made and fictional The Turning Point, for all its melo drama...
...industrial city of Radom, where embattled workers burned down Communist Party headquarters in 1976, the latest issue of the samizdat magazine Robotnik (The Worker) began circulating last week. It focused on an injustice that weighs heavily on the Polish proletariat: lack of any real representation. Robotnik called for genuine workers' organizations to replace the officially sponsored trade unions, which the journal called "dead institutions...
Then there is Eurocommunism. With varying degrees of emphasis and sincerity, the Communist parties of Italy, France and Spain have denounced the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Soviet Union as the only true model of Marxism, and have sworn their willingness to co-exist with bourgeois freedoms in pluralistic societies. Skepticism about the depth of these commitments, which could readily be overturned by future leaders less moderate than Spain's Santiago Carrillo or Italy's Enrico Berlinguer, is warranted. Meanwhile, Moscow tries to cope with the reality of three heretical parties that, alas, simply cannot be excommunicated...
Thus, in its different ways, constructivism aspired to become the last universal style. Its victory would bring the history of art to an end and accomplish the millennium. The constructivist vision was art's analogue to the reigning fantasy of Marxism: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its ideal order would wipe out nostalgia for older styles and set up a "permanent revolution" of design. Alas for the designers, this did not happen. Most of the triumphs of constructivism survived in the fictional space of painting or sculpture, theater or typography. As soon as ideal form moved into the real...