“The guides of the proletariat were right. The lessons of recent political and social events prove it.”
So declared France’s Catholic worker-priest movement in a collectively authored book published in 1954. Who were the “guides of the proletariat”? The French Communist Party, of course. And how had recent events vindicated the PCF? Well, the Party argued, and the worker-priests agreed, that the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan caused “unemployment,” “low salaries,” “housing shortage,” “illegality,” and “repression,” among other social ills.
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