[lit-ideas] Re: Guess - Answer
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2009 22:04:46 +0000 (GMT)
--- On Mon, 3/8/09, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I would have thought that the proletariat and the
> bourgeoisie were two different species. He's hardly
> advocating a revolution of the middle class—?
Gee, it's been a long time since I studied this but my recollection is that on
a strict Marxist analysis many of the positions/jobs that we might take to be
middle-class and bourgeois (e.g. Professor, doctor, lawyer) are positions/jobs
that put us in the proletariat: it is ownership of the means of production
that, for the Marxist, puts one in the 'capitalist' or non-proletarian class
(the non-owning managers who act on behalf of the owners are also in the
proletariat). Both proletariat and capitalist are victims, in one form of the
theory anyway, of the capitalist system - for the capitalist's room for
manoeuvre is just as constrained by that system as are the actions of the
proletariat (attempted defiance of these constraints will just ensure the
capitalist is overtaken by rivals). The state is powerless to intervene to
eliminate the excesses and injustices of capitalism which is an economic system
upon which the state is erected and sustained; and so
the system contains within it the seeds of its own destruction because its
inability to reform itself portends a revolution that will destroy it.
But obviously I need to check all this.
Donal
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