The author uses the idea of the
proletarian dream in German culture from 1863 to 1933 to illustrate the role of emotions in social movements and the formative role of culture.
The first theme is the importance of recognizing that social action should draw on the historical wellsprings of agency amongst
proletarian groups during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Yet, the artists and performers associated with the ballet were mostly
proletarian, who held a liberal view and were open to the ideals of socialism as propounded by the Bolsheviks.
He was born in Riga -- the city to which he dedicated his most significant work with the series The
Proletarian Districts of Riga (1970-1980) -- which includes approximately 7,500 negatives and hundreds of printed photographs.
But just because these discussions recognize that many left-wing notions either attributed too much potential for social transformation to workers or exaggerated the bourgeois abandonment of liberal principles, and because he shows that some moderate socialists were hardly less terrified by the threat of Bolshevik dictatorship and violence than were bourgeois liberals, the notion that what chiefly stood in the way of "
proletarian democracy" was bourgeois fear seems one-sided here as elsewhere (175).
At the same time, however--as suggested by my epigraphs--the novel seems to privilege "female realism" over "foolish male dreams" by opposing
proletarian women who are strong, wise, communally minded and distrustful of capitalism to individualistic, tin realistic men, especially the narrator's capitalist.
I believe it was Leon Trotsky who wrote that there are two cultures in every capitalist society, the bourgeois culture and the
proletarian culture.
First, there is the emerging prominence of images of the
proletarian woman in a wide array of journalistic, literary, and visual media (i.e., posters and film).
Proletarian nights; the workers' dream in nineteenth-century France, rev ed.
Wherever you look in the history and culture of the USSR, there it is--the iron horse of Communism, the icon and fetish of the
proletarian empire.
This would ignite yet another controversy when Rivera produced a surreal montage of Soviet hagiography and
proletarian revolt.
Indeed, as Fine notes, the archtypical
proletarian heroes of the New Deal-Popular Front era--white male factory workers--and their children were depicted in both popular and scholarly discourses as part of "George Wallace's popularity in the North in 1968, the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s, the Ross Perot phenomenon of 1992, the so-called 'angry-white-man' congressional election of 1994, and the importance of working-class members of the National Rifle Association during the 2000 presidential election." (9).