Storm-rider (Comment #4)

There is an important error in your comment: the proletariat, as Marx used the word, is not the lazy, tax-eating, non-disabled poor as you put it but rather those who do (industrial) manual labor or work for wages. The proletariat class does not contain farmers or shopkeepers or anything else: they are, essentially, the industrial workers. As such, they are not inherently lazy, as you suggest.

I don’t say this to defend Marx or Marxism, both of which I loathe, but just so that all concerned understand the ideology proposed by Marx and his followers. Lenin, for instance, saw a huge distinction between the new and rather small proletariat of Czarist Russia – Russia was very late in beginning its industrialization compared to Germany and England – and the ancient and immense serf class that made up 90% of Russia in those days. Lenin feared the serfs for their darkness, ignorance, and superstitions but made strenous efforts to win over the proletariat: after all, Marx described the Communist Party as the Vanguard of the Proletariat. The literate proletariat was supposed to rise to the top of the social structure with the aid of the Communist Party, those intellectuals who had figured out that collectivism was the solution to society’s ills.