Leadership Quote by Harry Pollitt

Rage is doing the organizing work here, but it’s a disciplined rage: Pollitt stacks “all this” like a charge sheet, turning sacrifice into an indictment. The repetition functions as moral bookkeeping. Effort, comradeship, idealism, manhood - the inventory of what’s been spent - is meant to make the final revelation feel obscene: the bill for these virtues is being paid to “assist the capitalists…to defeat the proletariat.” In one sentence, he flips the presumed logic of patriotic duty into class betrayal.

The key subtext is that the working class has been conscripted not just into war or political struggle, but into a kind of self-erasure. “Loss of comradeship” isn’t only about dead friends; it’s about the deliberate breaking of solidarity, the atomizing of workers into isolated units who can be managed. “Prostitution of idealism and manhood” is a deliberately rough phrase, aimed at people who’ve been told their sacrifice is noble and masculine. Pollitt isn’t politely disputing that story; he’s saying it’s been sold off, that moral language has been hijacked to serve owners’ interests.

Context matters: Pollitt, a major British Communist figure, is speaking from a tradition that treats wars and state projects as class instruments, not neutral national necessities. The sentence is propaganda in the best and worst sense: it compresses a worldview into a gut-punch, making “capitalists” and “proletariat” feel less like abstractions and more like warring camps. It works because it weaponizes shame against the audience’s existing pride.