incremental steps, so that each year’s policy in an area has to consist of doing
more or less what was done in the previous year, with only minor modifica-
tions, which can be tested out in practice and either dropped or developed
depending on their success (see pragmatism). Secondly, programmatic
politics ignores the crucial role of personality and personal competence in
electoral choice. This is widely recognized in the USA, for example, where
each party produces a lengthy statement, its platform, at every election, the
content of which is vigorously debated at the party conventions. However, the
platform is binding neither to the party nor to individual candidates, and often
completely ignored by presidential candidates, who tend to fight on idiosyn-
cratic matters to do with their personal characteristics. Similarly, in countries
wherecoalitiongovernment is the norm, the manifestos produced by the
separate parties cannot be anything more than a very loose guide to what an
ensuing government might do. Programmes are only useful to the extent that
they particularize general partyideology, because sound voting decisions need
to involve an assessment of what a party or its leader might do about an
unforeseen situation.
Proletariat
Proletariat, a term popularized but not invented byMarx, refers to the
propertyless working class in a capitalist society, those at the bottom of the
power and wealth distribution and exploited by thebourgeoisie. The origin
is from ancient Rome where the unpropertied mass, the ‘proles’ (literally
‘offspring’), sent their children for military service to the state in lieu of taxes.
This element of service is taken up inMarxismwhich has the proletariat’s
labour as their only economic asset. In Marxist theory the proletariat will be
the last class in history, because the revolution they will raise, under the
leadership of thevanguard of the proletariat(as which communist parties
traditionally identified themselves) will neither wish nor be able to exploit
anyone. There is, in Marxism, an exact technical definition of the proletariat, as
those who neither own nor control the means of production. More loosely,
though, it is used simply to mean the poor, and often with the implication that
it is the urban or industrial poor, because those employed in agriculture are
seldom seen as being part of the proletariat. One often finds the adjectival form
‘proletarian’ used by those on the left as a very general commendatory
modifier, not infrequently in usages that are mildly ludicrous as in ‘proletarian
theatre’. In such cases it is neither that the theatre is run by, nor attended by,
actual members of the industrial working class, but that it enshrines values the
Marxist intelligentsia believe are in the interest of the proletariat (seedictator-
ship of the proletariat).
Proletariat