And here's another good quote...

...from the same book. This one's from a 60s-era Polish student activist, Eugeniusz Smolar. Apparently there were a lot of university protests in communist Poland during 1968 (that's kind of the thesis of Kurlansky's book, that there was quote-unquote something in the air that year, with intergenerational clashes going on everywhere from Poland to Czechoslovakia to Spain). Much like the campus protesters in the US, the Polish kids were from their society's equivalent of the middle- and upper middle class, and in fact Smolar's father was an important member of Poland's Communist party. 

Anyway, the primary tool that the Polish government used against the students were these "worker's militias": blue-collar types who were bussed in by the truckload to "talk" to the demonstrators -- which of course quickly degenerated into them beating the protesters. Basically, the government's line on this (i.e., what they were telling the "workers") was that these were a bunch of privileged rich kids who summered in Paris, etc. -- which was basically true -- and here they were causing unrest and undermining the government -- which in communist ideology, after all, exists explicitly for the purpose of looking out for the interests of workers like themselves. Which the kids also understood; the whole point of their protest was that the communist system -- just like the capitalist/democratic system that the US kids were agitating against -- wasn't living up to its own ideology.

So anyway, the protesting kids figured that the workers would be on their side, and were apparently marching through the streets yelling things like "Long live the workers of Poznan [a city in Poland]."  But the workers beat them up anyway. Which brings me to Smolar's quote, which I think encapsulates a lot of the distance between idealistic middle-class types (like myself) and the poor/oppressed/etc. people whose causes these types like to champion:

"In 1968, students had a motto: 'There is no bread without freedom.' Workers thought this a ridiculous slogan--there is no freedom without bread. Bread always comes first. Most of us had never gone without bread. We didn't understand each other."