Bourgoise vs Proletariat

[ScukMafioso]

Which would you consider yourself to be? And how much do you agree with the marxist's views of capitalism? Is society ineivatably going to slip into communism as the class structure collapses? Is it really a viable notion that one day, everyone will own the means of production in our world?

Hmmm...

[gumOnShoe]

So long as there is money, no that won't happen. Perhaps, maybe, as the internet becomes more centralized and we move to a credit based system, it might be closer, but so long as anyone is greedy and pools money in one place it can't work. The very belief that you are entitled to something, which is so ingrained into life makes it near impossible. If you can't make recourses, products, and energy infinite (or large enough), it doesn't work.

[Tribal]

I have never heard of any of those. Care to clarify?

[142201]

I'm in the upper-lower-middle class. What does that make me?

[Lost-Chances]

I think, because society always strives to be in control or under-control, we'll never have pure communism. We'll always want someone to lift the burden of responsibility and we'll always want a bigger pay-check for less work. There may be a "psychological experiment" (in quotations because it's got it's flaws in terms of validity) about somewhere which at one point a prison was a commune (don't ask). The experiment was shortly stopped afterwards after some people began planning to take over the place and to rule it as militaristic society with dictatorship.

Then, as Gum said, people are greedy as fuck and always want more.

[SoulMaster71]

Give humans a chance, and not all of us will think in terms of "the good of the whole". Only man tempered by society, culture, even spirituality (though that's as easily corrupted as any philosophy or any political system) can think that way, but of course those things are the first to go the day after the revolution. As long as man has greed, communism will fail. Capitalism, on the other hand, will bring some people great wealth, but not everyone, and there's a major problem in capitalist economies with the children of the wealthy inheriting their wealth to the exclusion of the "common" people who want to rise. So the question is how best to balance the two: free enterprise without monopolies forming where competition provides any benefit, where does competition benefit the economy in the first place, allowing the poor to rise up without total redistribution of wealth.

My dad's a self-employed professional, so I'm bourgeois or petty-bourgeois by birth, and in most of my thought. Middle-class from day one, ya know?

[Tancrisism]

My father is a plumber and my mother was a bookkeeper who rarely had money, so I'd be a prole.

DOWN WITH THE BORZHWA

What's denoted as complete communism is, like others have already said here, pretty much impossible in our lifetimes, and without the right pre-conditions (and there are many) it will be impossible in the next generations too. What's odd is that sections of Marxist theory, especially the traditional writings and their offspring through the years, actually do take this into account. History's diluted the whole act for a lot of people, and as a whole it's been highjacked by Lenin, Mao and characteristics of Stalinism. They're certainly not completely related to each other as individuals, but it's how we define the process now, even as we continue to eat inofrmation on a regular basis. The damage has been done as far as that is concerned.

The closest ideals I believe are contained within the more tradiotnal pre-conditions, which granted would take a lot of sacrifice even in today's most prosperous society to take off, as well as an enormous paradigm shift amongst those with power... and you know, they tend to be the least likely to want to go along with huge societal paradigm shifts, for very good reasons obviously. It's not a great way of putting it, and I'm being so so brief in this. Note I don't have any methodology either, and if the people are looking for change, they will want it to change their immediate surroundings. With who and what is there right now though, I do believe that actions can be taken to enhance the standard of living all over the world over time, hopefully to move on to something more global, but yeah, one step at a time here.

I'm probably not making sense, but it's my view nonetheless. That doesn't say much about me.

I'll admit right now that there is one aspect of Marxist theory that has not aged well, and many thinkers are struggling to cope with this. It's the middle class. Like you bring up in the thread title itself, Marxism is actually less about class and more about capitalist structure (built up so much more by Louis Althusser and related people, but I'm not fond of a lot of his structuralist based stuff so I tend to stay away at times), and as soceity developed under capitalism, Marx himself believed the middle class individuals would dissipate into one of the two other structures. As this quick paragraph says, from here:

The issue of the middle class or classes appears to be a major issue within Marxian theory, one often addressed by later Marxists. Many Marxists attempt to show that the middle class is declining, and polarization of society into two classes is a strong tendency within capitalism. Marx's view was that the successful members of the middle class would become members of the bourgeoisie, while the unsuccessful would be forced into the proletariat. In the last few years, many have argued that in North America, and perhaps on a world scale, there is an increasing gap between rich and poor and there is a declining middle.

Obviously it's not happened that way. Interestingly though, the middle class that's vibrant in today's developed societies provides some ground for "intellectual bourgeosie" or whatever term's currently being used... and that some of these groups are seen as almost essential in some sort of revolution to some, however minor. With increasing economic tensions, we'll be seeing how it pans out, but this is to me why change could be possible. No immediate change to communism in one nation, or worldwide at this time: that's the big issue with Marxist-Leninism and its offspring, and of Socialism In One Country, etc.

Right! I do love theory, however wrong I might be here.

At 10/15/09 02:39 PM, Lost-Chances wrote: There may be a "psychological experiment" (in quotations because it's got it's flaws in terms of validity) about somewhere which at one point a prison was a commune (don't ask). The experiment was shortly stopped afterwards after some people began planning to take over the place and to rule it as militaristic society with dictatorship.

That's the Zimbardo study right? It's unbelievable how frequently I run into that study online and elsewhere. I bumped into it in psychology classes, but yeah, it's important in what it symbolises. I think it's overwhelmingly personal amongst the participants to show any real correlation with society though. It says more to me about assigned roles in particularly extreme circumstances, hence why it's so infamous. I believe it was controlled that way (I'm very sketchy on the details now, shut me up if I'm wrong) and so if you were to have counter-change in real life, the problems would be almost minimal. I don't know.