THE MEDIA speaks of the mass of the American proletariat as Middle Class, during the recent election the term was used interchangeably with 'working class'. But who is the real middle class? Why the bourgeoise of course.
The working class, the mass of those who sell their labour or are unemployed or unpaid (housewives and students), are still the proletariat. In America the myth that we can all become bourgeois; that is small business owners our own bosses, gave rise to the declasse melting pot that is American economics. In the sixties the ideology of the neocons was that in order to end class war they would announce the end of Marxism and that we had all become consumers and taxpayers. Gone was the idea of the proletariat, now we were all middle class. But were we ever?
Part 7 in a multipart series examining solutions for our ailing economy,
presented by Art Thompson, CEO of The John Birch Society.One of the most misunderstood terms used in America today is “middle class.” Because people think they know what it is, they are very misled when and how it is used.
The greatest boon to an economy, likewise the freedom of the people, is a vibrant and growing middle class.
For this reason, Karl Marx attacked the middle class, or what he called the bourgeoisie. Marx was never against the rich. After all, his greatest associate was Frederick Engels, himself a rich man. Neither of them ever advocated Engels giving up his riches in empathy for the downtrodden masses.
Marx and Engels and those who used them only objected to certain people flush with "old money." It wasn't because these people had money, that the early Marxists opposed them. Power, not wealth, was their concern. Those in power had wealth in the form of "old money," handed down through the wealthy aristocratic classes. The Marxists wanted nothing more than to take the reigns of power for themselves and away from the old ruling class, and they wanted to undermine the cultural and societal architecture that supported the old governing structures in order to make way for their own. Their criticism of wealth, therefore, was simply a rhetorical device to be used to that end, nothing more, and their supposed fellowship with and concern for the downtrodden was only a vicious lie.
Because the middle class was part of the old cultural and societal architecture they sought to replace, in the Marxist view the middle class needed to be destroyed. We ought not use the past tense, either. For today's Marxist follows the same stategy.
Universally, communists, socialists, Nazis Marxists all work to destroy the middle class, which in Marx’s day was a growing segment of all Western society, and a threat to any accumulation of power.
So just what is the middle class and how does it pose a threat to Marxism, but is a boon to the people in general?
First, what it is not. It is not a standard of living. And this is what most people think it is. This definition misses the mark.
The middle class is essentially entrepreneurial. It is a condition of risk taking and responsibility, both emblematic of the exercise of essential individual liberties and freedoms. A member of the middle class may be a professional or a businessman. What he must be is an independent (i.e., free) professional and businessman, with an ability to provide a service or a product. He must be able to start up a practice or a business simply due to the fact that he has the innate ability and desire to do so. He must be free to form contracts with others. He is not a manager, but may function as a manager. An entrepreneur risks his fortune; a manager risks his boss’s fortune.
The owner of a small hardware store is a member of the middle class. The manager of the local Wal-Mart is not, even if he makes more money than the hardware store owner. An entrepreneur has a heightened sense of responsibility since he not only risks his fortune; he risks his family’s as well, and the fortunes and families of all he employees, even the businesses that supply him with the goods and services he requires to carry on his trade. If he makes the wrong decisions, he risks losing everything — including his family in some cases.
The frequent references to the middle class made by the media typically gloss over or obscure what the words "middle class" really mean. But, to solve our economic woes and to save our freedoms, we need to constantly remember what the middle class really is so that we understand the ramifications of its dimunition or destruction.
The middle class produces new products, provides better services, creates jobs, etc., and many are amply rewarded for their work. Some are not. But they only do this well when they are free to do it. Yet we are told that by regulating business, which really means putting controls on the actions of the middle class, government is doing the people a great service. We have seen what regulation has done to Wall Street. And now we hear that more regulation will solve the problem.
Taking that attitude and visiting more regulations upon the middle class, soon there will be no middle class. And that is the point. The people who want to socialize Wall Street are the same people who want to regulate all business. They will destroy the middle class in the process.
Since they are in essence free men and have independent means, the middle class is a threat to those who want power. They can provide the wherewithal to oppose would-be totalitarians, both with money and the means to fight the accumulation of power in the hands of the few.
This is the reason would-be tyrants hate the middle class ? it has the ability to stop the growth of total government.
The reason that we need to stop government from regulating and nationalizing business has as much to do with our future as a free country, as it does with providing the atmosphere for the economy to grow. When the middle class grows, the country benefits.
FROM THE LEFT
It’s a capricious irony of history that the word bourgeois, which pinpoints the capitalist class, is perceived by nearly everyone, including the bourgeois themselves, as an epithet and is almost universally rebuffed!
Generally we conceive of the bourgeois in reference to their overemphasis on form and formality, in total contrast with the image of the bohemian radical. Bourgeois characteristics include emphasis on tradition, pretentiousness, conventionality, propriety, status obsession, respectability at all costs, an affected manner of speech and an overall comportment befitting such a description. The bourgeois personality is one of seeming rather than being.
To most ears both the noun and the adjective bourgeois ring negative and evil. Both upper and lower social classes detest that person and class. Bourgeois bastard! Fucking bourgeois! No wonder few people choose to identify themselves as bourgeois, preferring “middle class” or some such.
In this essay, I have in mind the socio-political meaning of bourgeoisie, the morally corrupt class that Marxism equates with the capitalist class. Precisely the corrupt bandit class of the USA to be saved by the great financial bailout of Wall Street. Which shows again that in the eternal class struggle the bourgeoisie is always the evil oppressor. The crucial distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the distinction between evil and good. Yet, the modern age is known as the epoch of the bourgeoisie, that is, of capitalism.
That is the great contradiction of our epoch. Since modern revolutions eliminated monarchies and simplified the class struggle, western society has been divided into two hostile camps: the bourgeoisie which runs things, and the proletariat which resists exploitation by it. The ethical pathos of Marxism is the exposure of exploitation of labor as the basis of human society.
One recalls that the bourgeoisie played the major role in the French Revolution. Since then, in the shape and form of the capitalist system, it has maintained the upper hand most everywhere, or sooner or later regained it, as in post-Communist East Europe. It has crushed the other classes and converted everyone else into wage earners. That is its nature.
For its prosperity the capitalist bourgeoisie depends on free trade. Except for down moments like today when things go haywire for free market capitalism, especially on deregulated and uncontrolled Wall Street and it turns back to the people to bail it out of the chaos it creates at regular intervals. Its survival depends on unending growth and constantly expanding markets, the continual acceleration and revolutionizing of production, political centralization and today in Europe and the USA on the exportation of jobs to the poor world. Meanwhile bourgeois (bandit) capitalism requires and has achieved the concentration of property and wealth in a few hands. That is its constant goal. It thrives on the incessant creation of new desires -- subsequently morphed into needs -- throughout the world. In that sense the bourgeoisie is through and through cosmopolitan.
Paradoxically, those primary requisites for the bourgeoisie’s existence provoke the resistance of the proletariat. It’s a vicious circle. In a great dialectic the survival needs of the bourgeoisie generate the resistance that can ultimately crush it. The resistance that according to Marxist theory will someday crush it. These days, there for everyone to see, for everyone to feel, the spreading sense of unease marking its successive economic-financial crises point to the eventual demise of bourgeois, bandit capitalism.
So why has it not already happened, one must wonder? Why hasn’t it collapsed long ago? Though the bourgeoisie-capitalist class is small and the proletariat wage earners an overwhelming majority, why don’t the exploited classes rebel and rebel, revolt and revolt, again and again? Why not? The reason is clear: the exploited classes are not only victims. They are also accomplices. Half victim, half accomplice. The historical paradox. The ruling class counts on this dichotomy to maintain the system. Divide and rule. Meritocracy.
Rewards for obedience. Two cars and bigger houses for staying in line. A system based on money, domination and fear. Religion too, but especially FEAR. Fear of fear. Fear of change. Fear, fear, fear. A fearful people is an obedient people. Today’s Americans are a sacrificed generation. Their illusion of true love has faded. Instead there is the feminine side -- seduction and sex ever before us, in all its forms. But love is not the question. For love you still need illusion and innocence. And we are a disillusioned generation. All of us. Only fiction remains. And our bitterness, jealousy and fear. That’s why you need an absolute, overwhelming desire to fight back. The only alternative is to flee into the mountains or the desert, 20 miles from anyplace. No banks, no commerce, no bureaucratic offices in sight. Or perhaps resort to walking the labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral in search of the final secret, the beautiful butterfly to change things.
At the same time there is a glut of everything in the Western world. Yet vampire bourgeois capitalism cannot cut back. Staggering, careening on its crazy course, it goes after more and more growth, to survive. It needs more and more production, more markets, more and cheaper labor, more consumers (while salaries everywhere are lower and lower so that consumption decreases), more power, more of everything, clearly unachievable forever. How fast can a man run, one asked after the new world record 100-meter dash at the Beijing Olympics? 9.5 seconds? Then tomorrow, perhaps 9 seconds. Then 8. But can it go on forever, faster and faster?
On the other hand, the European bourgeoisie is not to be confused with the American middle class. They are not the same thing. Sociologically, in the pejorative sense my wife means, both Italy and France are largely “bourgeois” North Europe is even more of the petit petit bourgeois category, East Europe and Latin America are by nature proletarian with a thin bourgeois-intellectual class at the top. The European bourgeoisie creates more culture, while in the USA because of social mobility (itself rapidly vanishing) culture and art can come from anywhere.
The bourgeoisie in feudal pre-revolutionary France was a specific class. Much wealthier than the lower classes, it lacked the privileges of the aristocracy against whom it made the French Revolution. It made its revolution in order to rip political power from the hands of the aristocracy and acquire its privileges. It became the new ruling class.
Since then it has incurred the hate and wrath of all other classes. Deregulation is not new. Bourgeois slogans have always been ‘no rules, no laws, all power to the middle classes.’ Compromise with other powers, yes, -- especially with organized religions and various forms of “democracy” -- but forever at the expense of the working classes.
In the bourgeois world anywhere and under any form of government workingmen are destined to remain forever workingmen.
The principle of private property is a religion that has nothing to do with homeowners. It refers to ownership of the means of production. That is great wealth and the political power to back it up. That religion was the economic basis of the French Revolution. That has never changed. For that same reason, the great Socialist revolution was always just around the corner, a hairsbreadth away. That again is the history of man.
Soon Marxism came along to pinpoint and define once and for all the bourgeoisie as the exploiting class, the class that obtains its income from capital and commerce. The bourgeoisie is the ruling class because it owns the means of production -- land, factories and resources.
Moreover it has the means of coercion of the lower classes. By control of police and army it is able to keep in line and exploit the work of wage earners who live only from their labor. Perhaps in no other major country do Marx’s theses more concisely describe the societal line-up than in the USA today. Therefore America cannot remain forever immune to the class struggle, quiet today, deathly quiet, mute, unvoiced, but potentially explosive.
Power in America is aware of the menace and the threat of the extension of the struggle for justice to all social classes, to el pueblo unido. Therefore the system’s perfidious use of terrorism and fear, religion, the American way of life and the future of our children to hoodwink the people.
One often hears the expression exploitation of labor. What does it mean exactly?
It’s basic. The heart of Marxism. Its validity is recognized most everywhere. The capitalist owner of the means of production pays wages and production costs and then sells the goods produced by labor, keeping for himself the difference between costs and sales. Part of his profit is Marx’s “surplus value.” It’s the size of his profit that creates inequalities. The point is the worker creates the wealth of the greedy capitalist, who squeezes the working man up to the limit, gaining thousands of times more than the worker can earn in a lifetime.
That is injustice.
The owner, the entrepreneur and his executives (here we mean also the real owners and CEOs of banks and funds, of stock markets, insurance giants, holding companies and the like) gain the maximum profit without actually doing any work. And he has the bourgeois government ready to bail him out when he fucks up, which his greed causes at regular intervals. That too is exploitation of labor. That is injustice.
Karl Marx used the word bourgeois to describe the social class that holds property and capital making possible exploitation. Though he recognized the bourgeoisie’s industriousness, he criticized its moral hypocrisy for its exploitation of other men. As time passed he came to use bourgeois to describe not only the class, but also its ideology: class society based on capitalism and labor. A society of the capitalist and the worker.
Members of the American middle class are marked by considerable diversity, who however tend to overlap. They prize non-conformity, innovation and independence and tend to comprise also the artistically creative part of the nation. Education is a chief indicator of middle class status. Education is fundamental to prepare members of the class for creative and leadership roles. For that reason, writers, educators, teachers, journalists, artists and the mainline media owners come chiefly from the middle class (es).
It is that middle class-bourgeoisie that has written the bulk of modern social and political history. The history most of us know best is their view of history. Now that history must be re-written. Everything must be reviewed. Everything must be revised. All of it -- World Wars I and II, the “forgotten” Korean War where it all started, the Cold War, the USSR, Stalin, Iran, Iraq. Everything. Especially 911. GW Bush in power is not the same thing as Reagan who set the scene. But something changed. What has changed? That is also a mystery that must be clarified.
Capitalism as an economic and social system can only work when there are new frontiers to discover. Since, as we have seen, new opportunities and eternal growth are basic requirements for capitalistic society and since they have been exhausted, I too believe America has completed its historic Manifest Destiny.
Generally we conceive of the bourgeois in reference to their overemphasis on form and formality, in total contrast with the image of the bohemian radical. Bourgeois characteristics include emphasis on tradition, pretentiousness, conventionality, propriety, status obsession, respectability at all costs, an affected manner of speech and an overall comportment befitting such a description. The bourgeois personality is one of seeming rather than being.
To most ears both the noun and the adjective bourgeois ring negative and evil. Both upper and lower social classes detest that person and class. Bourgeois bastard! Fucking bourgeois! No wonder few people choose to identify themselves as bourgeois, preferring “middle class” or some such.
In this essay, I have in mind the socio-political meaning of bourgeoisie, the morally corrupt class that Marxism equates with the capitalist class. Precisely the corrupt bandit class of the USA to be saved by the great financial bailout of Wall Street. Which shows again that in the eternal class struggle the bourgeoisie is always the evil oppressor. The crucial distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the distinction between evil and good. Yet, the modern age is known as the epoch of the bourgeoisie, that is, of capitalism.
That is the great contradiction of our epoch. Since modern revolutions eliminated monarchies and simplified the class struggle, western society has been divided into two hostile camps: the bourgeoisie which runs things, and the proletariat which resists exploitation by it. The ethical pathos of Marxism is the exposure of exploitation of labor as the basis of human society.
One recalls that the bourgeoisie played the major role in the French Revolution. Since then, in the shape and form of the capitalist system, it has maintained the upper hand most everywhere, or sooner or later regained it, as in post-Communist East Europe. It has crushed the other classes and converted everyone else into wage earners. That is its nature.
For its prosperity the capitalist bourgeoisie depends on free trade. Except for down moments like today when things go haywire for free market capitalism, especially on deregulated and uncontrolled Wall Street and it turns back to the people to bail it out of the chaos it creates at regular intervals. Its survival depends on unending growth and constantly expanding markets, the continual acceleration and revolutionizing of production, political centralization and today in Europe and the USA on the exportation of jobs to the poor world. Meanwhile bourgeois (bandit) capitalism requires and has achieved the concentration of property and wealth in a few hands. That is its constant goal. It thrives on the incessant creation of new desires -- subsequently morphed into needs -- throughout the world. In that sense the bourgeoisie is through and through cosmopolitan.
Paradoxically, those primary requisites for the bourgeoisie’s existence provoke the resistance of the proletariat. It’s a vicious circle. In a great dialectic the survival needs of the bourgeoisie generate the resistance that can ultimately crush it. The resistance that according to Marxist theory will someday crush it. These days, there for everyone to see, for everyone to feel, the spreading sense of unease marking its successive economic-financial crises point to the eventual demise of bourgeois, bandit capitalism.
So why has it not already happened, one must wonder? Why hasn’t it collapsed long ago? Though the bourgeoisie-capitalist class is small and the proletariat wage earners an overwhelming majority, why don’t the exploited classes rebel and rebel, revolt and revolt, again and again? Why not? The reason is clear: the exploited classes are not only victims. They are also accomplices. Half victim, half accomplice. The historical paradox. The ruling class counts on this dichotomy to maintain the system. Divide and rule. Meritocracy.
Rewards for obedience. Two cars and bigger houses for staying in line. A system based on money, domination and fear. Religion too, but especially FEAR. Fear of fear. Fear of change. Fear, fear, fear. A fearful people is an obedient people. Today’s Americans are a sacrificed generation. Their illusion of true love has faded. Instead there is the feminine side -- seduction and sex ever before us, in all its forms. But love is not the question. For love you still need illusion and innocence. And we are a disillusioned generation. All of us. Only fiction remains. And our bitterness, jealousy and fear. That’s why you need an absolute, overwhelming desire to fight back. The only alternative is to flee into the mountains or the desert, 20 miles from anyplace. No banks, no commerce, no bureaucratic offices in sight. Or perhaps resort to walking the labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral in search of the final secret, the beautiful butterfly to change things.
At the same time there is a glut of everything in the Western world. Yet vampire bourgeois capitalism cannot cut back. Staggering, careening on its crazy course, it goes after more and more growth, to survive. It needs more and more production, more markets, more and cheaper labor, more consumers (while salaries everywhere are lower and lower so that consumption decreases), more power, more of everything, clearly unachievable forever. How fast can a man run, one asked after the new world record 100-meter dash at the Beijing Olympics? 9.5 seconds? Then tomorrow, perhaps 9 seconds. Then 8. But can it go on forever, faster and faster?
On the other hand, the European bourgeoisie is not to be confused with the American middle class. They are not the same thing. Sociologically, in the pejorative sense my wife means, both Italy and France are largely “bourgeois” North Europe is even more of the petit petit bourgeois category, East Europe and Latin America are by nature proletarian with a thin bourgeois-intellectual class at the top. The European bourgeoisie creates more culture, while in the USA because of social mobility (itself rapidly vanishing) culture and art can come from anywhere.
The bourgeoisie in feudal pre-revolutionary France was a specific class. Much wealthier than the lower classes, it lacked the privileges of the aristocracy against whom it made the French Revolution. It made its revolution in order to rip political power from the hands of the aristocracy and acquire its privileges. It became the new ruling class.
Since then it has incurred the hate and wrath of all other classes. Deregulation is not new. Bourgeois slogans have always been ‘no rules, no laws, all power to the middle classes.’ Compromise with other powers, yes, -- especially with organized religions and various forms of “democracy” -- but forever at the expense of the working classes.
In the bourgeois world anywhere and under any form of government workingmen are destined to remain forever workingmen.
The principle of private property is a religion that has nothing to do with homeowners. It refers to ownership of the means of production. That is great wealth and the political power to back it up. That religion was the economic basis of the French Revolution. That has never changed. For that same reason, the great Socialist revolution was always just around the corner, a hairsbreadth away. That again is the history of man.
Soon Marxism came along to pinpoint and define once and for all the bourgeoisie as the exploiting class, the class that obtains its income from capital and commerce. The bourgeoisie is the ruling class because it owns the means of production -- land, factories and resources.
Moreover it has the means of coercion of the lower classes. By control of police and army it is able to keep in line and exploit the work of wage earners who live only from their labor. Perhaps in no other major country do Marx’s theses more concisely describe the societal line-up than in the USA today. Therefore America cannot remain forever immune to the class struggle, quiet today, deathly quiet, mute, unvoiced, but potentially explosive.
Power in America is aware of the menace and the threat of the extension of the struggle for justice to all social classes, to el pueblo unido. Therefore the system’s perfidious use of terrorism and fear, religion, the American way of life and the future of our children to hoodwink the people.
One often hears the expression exploitation of labor. What does it mean exactly?
It’s basic. The heart of Marxism. Its validity is recognized most everywhere. The capitalist owner of the means of production pays wages and production costs and then sells the goods produced by labor, keeping for himself the difference between costs and sales. Part of his profit is Marx’s “surplus value.” It’s the size of his profit that creates inequalities. The point is the worker creates the wealth of the greedy capitalist, who squeezes the working man up to the limit, gaining thousands of times more than the worker can earn in a lifetime.
That is injustice.
The owner, the entrepreneur and his executives (here we mean also the real owners and CEOs of banks and funds, of stock markets, insurance giants, holding companies and the like) gain the maximum profit without actually doing any work. And he has the bourgeois government ready to bail him out when he fucks up, which his greed causes at regular intervals. That too is exploitation of labor. That is injustice.
Karl Marx used the word bourgeois to describe the social class that holds property and capital making possible exploitation. Though he recognized the bourgeoisie’s industriousness, he criticized its moral hypocrisy for its exploitation of other men. As time passed he came to use bourgeois to describe not only the class, but also its ideology: class society based on capitalism and labor. A society of the capitalist and the worker.
Members of the American middle class are marked by considerable diversity, who however tend to overlap. They prize non-conformity, innovation and independence and tend to comprise also the artistically creative part of the nation. Education is a chief indicator of middle class status. Education is fundamental to prepare members of the class for creative and leadership roles. For that reason, writers, educators, teachers, journalists, artists and the mainline media owners come chiefly from the middle class (es).
It is that middle class-bourgeoisie that has written the bulk of modern social and political history. The history most of us know best is their view of history. Now that history must be re-written. Everything must be reviewed. Everything must be revised. All of it -- World Wars I and II, the “forgotten” Korean War where it all started, the Cold War, the USSR, Stalin, Iran, Iraq. Everything. Especially 911. GW Bush in power is not the same thing as Reagan who set the scene. But something changed. What has changed? That is also a mystery that must be clarified.
Capitalism as an economic and social system can only work when there are new frontiers to discover. Since, as we have seen, new opportunities and eternal growth are basic requirements for capitalistic society and since they have been exhausted, I too believe America has completed its historic Manifest Destiny.
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