Word: proletariat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Karl Marx could hardly have imagined that a socialist empire based on the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would one day be shaken to its core by a son of the working class. Yet in 1980 an unemployed Polish electrician, Lech Walesa, rose from the masses to become one of the Communist world's most charismatic figures. When he scaled the gates of Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk last August, Walesa did far more than seize the reins of an angry strike movement. To millions of Polish workers, he became the symbol of their dreams...
...current issue of Foreign Policy: "It undermines the legitimacy on which Communist power rests by refuting the claim of the Communist Party to be the sole authentic representative of the working class." Communist orthodoxy predicates authoritarian rule: a bedrock belief of Marxism-Leninism is the absolute dictatorship of the proletariat, as represented by its vanguard, the Party. In practical terms, Moscow-style Communism also insists on rigid central planning; that kind of "command" economy is in trouble if it cannot command its own workers. For these reasons, the Soviets are nervous that the Polish disease will catch elsewhere...
...wonderfully impish performance) and proclaims his independence, Sir is left flab-bergasted with nothing but his empty rhetoric on manners and tradition. Though proud, the revitalized Cocky is not heartless. He dreams of "a new beginning, a new game of new hope, fellowship and understanding." O, Noble Proletariat...
...sympathetic treatment of the revolution, attracted glowing praise from Lenin, who wrote in a preface to the book's first edition in 1923, "Unreservedly I recommend it to the workers of the world...a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant...to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat...
Even Mao's successors in China have tacitly acknowledged their failures to solve the problems of the proletariat...