In Marxian terms, which class is above the Bourgeoisie?

[cowslayer]

Marx describes the Bourgeoisie as the well educated, wealthy, middle class that controls the produced capital of a country.

But is there a class above this bourgeoisie? If it is a middle class, then who is the ruling class?

Sorry if this is ignorant, but I am still confused about Socialist theory.


Thank you!

[Glenn Beck]

There is none. Saying the bourgeoisie is "the middle class" is some bullshit they teach in American schools, among with several other blatantly false gems of intellectual apologia (kind of like the manipulative and fact-free arguments that Christian fundamentalists teach in an effort to 'refute' evolution among the general public).

The bourgeoisie is the ruling class of the capitalist era. They were a middle class during the feudal era under the land-owning aristocracy. Capitalism has now simplified the class structure to owners and workers, and the owners have all the power. The owners are the bourgeoisie, and the workers are the proletariat. The politicians and bureaucrats that manage the state under capitalism are either members of the bourgeoisie or agents of it.

[Robocommie]

Yeah, Marxist terms of class structure don't quite fit with the American concept of middle and upper class. Especially since a lot of folks in the middle class are proletarian, and a lot of folks are bourgeoisie.

It's like Glenn Beck said, the people Marx identifies as the bourgeoisie were the middle class of the middle ages, the merchants and craftsmen who lived in towns and cities, instead of the knights and lords, who were the upper class.

THAT upper class has since become more or less politically irrelevant in the Western world, and society is now controlled by the bourgeoisie. The word "bourgeoisie" actually derives from the Old French word "burgeis" which means "town dweller."

This is important because while before, under feudalism, farmland worked by peasants was the most popular method of gaining wealth, now it is capitalism, the trade practices made popular by those folks living in medieval towns.

Also I think it's funny that I just agreed with somebody named Glenn Beck. WTF?

[Drace]

There is none. Saying the bourgeoisie is "the middle class" is some bullshit they teach in American schools

Yeah, in my AP Euro class I was like WTF when my teacher said the bourgeoisie were the intellectuals, the lawyers, doctors, etc.

[ellipsis]

Reptilian overlords.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Glenn_Beck makes sense. (Clearly, the user).:)

There was, in feudal and pre-capitalist society, a powerful aristocracy, differing from the middle class, nouveau riche whom we now call the bourgeoisie.
Indeed, there still is an aristocracy, however where they once survived by absolute rule, protectionist economic policy etc., they have now - due to Capitalism - had to engage in exploitation via economic markets. Thus, they are one and the same with the bourgeoisie - their class interests are now aligned with them, rather than opposed, as they were in the 18th and 19th centuries.

[Jimmie Higgins]

The capitalists are the traditional middle class when feudalism was still around. So when right-wing politicians say the US is a "middle class country" I wonder if they get the double-meaning.

In feudal systems, the landowning aristocracy was the ruling class and the capitalists were under them and subject to many laws that hurt profit and the capitalists class interests... so they got rid of the aristocracy and built their own systems based on their class needs.

[jake williams]

To make things a little clearer for the OP - when Marx was writing, even in Europe feudalism and the aristocracy were still pretty powerful. He was writing historically, and he was only writing a few decades after the French Revolution. Times have changed since he was writing/since the time he was writing about, and the bourgeoisie has almost totally eliminated the aristocracy as a meaningful force, at least in Europe. (It's hard to say how Marxists should explain, say, the Gulf monarchies - is it a ruling aristocracy, or is the aristocracy a bourgeoisie, or what? Kings and princes are simultaneously capitalists, with almost all of the modern connotations and implications of the term.)

[Stranger Than Paradise]

The bourgeoisie is the ruling class and therefore is the group that holds the most influence and power in Capitalist society. There is no class above them.

[ellipsis]

Yeah, in my AP Euro class I was like WTF when my teacher said the bourgeoisie were the intellectuals, the lawyers, doctors, etc.

Well, that is how the term is used these days. Bougie etc. is common usage is "high-class, refined, white collar, etc.) The term has been corrupted from its original marxist meaning.

[Dave B]

Just for information James Burnham wrote an interesting book called the Managerial Revolution, worth a read, which claimed that ‘managerial technocrats’, for want of a better expression, would displace the orthodox capitalist class.

I suppose I am inviting another ‘not quite’ comment from Zeronowhere who seems to be following me around the world wide webb with it.

It was a spin off from Bruno Rizzi’s The Bureaucratisation of the World 1939, helpfully translated very recently apparently into English online by somebody called Adam Buick?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/rizzi/bureaucratisation/index.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/rizzi/bureaucratisation/index.htm)

Trotsky went ballistic apparently when he first read it; and there may be two versions or editions, but there is some dispute about that.

Both ‘books’ were important at the time as part of the analysis of Stalinist Russia and the nature of Fascism.

Managerial Revolution went on to inspire Orwells 1984 and the New Class by Milovan Djilas (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Milovan_Djilas).

The New Class theory booklet by Milovan Djilas (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Milovan_Djilas), not worth a read in my opinion, spilled over as well into the state capitalist debate. Eg

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1951/06/statecap.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1951/06/statecap.htm)

There was a bit of a thing and interest in the 1950’s from libertarians about the movement in Yugoslavia towards workers control and management of factories etc I think. About which I know little.

There is a review of the managerial revolution by Orwell below called ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’.

I assume it is the right one and have read it before but not checked this link.

http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh (http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh)


The Parecon people, Albert and Hahnel, developed their ‘co-ordinating class theory’ from reading The New Class by Milovan Djilas (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Milovan_Djilas).


Milovan Djilas (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Milovan_Djilas) didn’t credit Burnham as the originator of the idea, to Burnham’s annoyance, presumably as he had by that time become a non person after making the seamless transition from Trotskyism and Leninism to ‘neo conservatism’.


Perhaps as an empirical demonstration of his own theory that the two ideological systems of elitism were in fact fundamentally the same.


Of course the attraction of being in a long standing Marxist Party or the longest standing Marxist party, excluding our Deleonist ‘friends’, is that we have the archives on this kind of thing and ‘Oh that thing again’, best having been analysed when it was original I suppose.


.

[robbo203]

Just for information James Burnham wrote an interesting book called the Managerial Revolution, worth a read, which claimed that ‘managerial technocrats’, for want of a better expression, would displace the orthodox capitalist class.

I suppose I am inviting another ‘not quite’ comment from Zeronowhere who seems to be following me around the world wide webb with it.

It was a spin off from Bruno Rizzi’s The Bureaucratisation of the World 1939, helpfully translated very recently apparently into English online by somebody called Adam Buick?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/rizzi/bureaucratisation/index.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/rizzi/bureaucratisation/index.htm)

Trotsky went ballistic apparently when he first read it; and there may be two versions or editions, but there is some dispute about that.

Both ‘books’ were important at the time as part of the analysis of Stalinist Russia and the nature of Fascism.

Managerial Revolution went on to inspire Orwells 1984 and the New Class by Milovan Djilas (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Milovan_Djilas).

The New Class theory booklet by Milovan Djilas (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Milovan_Djilas), not worth a read in my opinion, spilled over as well into the state capitalist debate. Eg

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1951/06/statecap.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1951/06/statecap.htm)

There was a bit of a thing and interest in the 1950’s from libertarians about the movement in Yugoslavia towards workers control and management of factories etc I think. About which I know little.

There is a review of the managerial revolution by Orwell below called ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’.

I assume it is the right one and have read it before but not checked this link.

http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh (http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh)


The Parecon people, Albert and Hahnel, developed their ‘co-ordinating class theory’ from reading The New Class by Milovan Djilas (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Milovan_Djilas).


Milovan Djilas (http://www.revleft.com/wiki/Milovan_Djilas) didn’t credit Burnham as the originator of the idea, to Burnham’s annoyance, presumably as he had by that time become a non person after making the seamless transition from Trotskyism and Leninism to ‘neo conservatism’.


Perhaps as an empirical demonstration of his own theory that the two ideological systems of elitism were in fact fundamentally the same.


Of course the attraction of being in a long standing Marxist Party or the longest standing Marxist party, excluding our Deleonist ‘friends’, is that we have the archives on this kind of thing and ‘Oh that thing again’, best having been analysed when it was original I suppose.


.


Good stuff Dave B! Which reminds me - wasnt there an article that Adam Buick wrote for the Socialist Standard some years ago on James Burnham and the "Managerial Revolution"? A link to that would be much appreciated

[Die Rote Fahne]

the bourgeois are the ruling class.

The upper class is a part of that as well.

[cb9's_unity]

There is none. Saying the bourgeoisie is "the middle class" is some bullshit they teach in American schools, among with several other blatantly false gems of intellectual apologia (kind of like the manipulative and fact-free arguments that Christian fundamentalists teach in an effort to 'refute' evolution among the general public).

The bourgeoisie is the ruling class of the capitalist era. They were a middle class during the feudal era under the land-owning aristocracy. Capitalism has now simplified the class structure to owners and workers, and the owners have all the power. The owners are the bourgeoisie, and the workers are the proletariat. The politicians and bureaucrats that manage the state under capitalism are either members of the bourgeoisie or agents of it.

I have never once heard the contemporary bourgeois being called the middle class by any politically mainstream american. American schools actually barely recognize the existence of the bourgeoisie.

The american media and american schools base class solely off of ones income. Essentially anyone who is stably over the poverty line is considered middle class, no matter what their relationship to the means of production is. This infuriatingly leads most of the working class to be called middle class.

[Roquentin]

As hinted at by the poster above me, in the classic Marxist sense "bourgeois" mostly is largely independent of the criteria listed in the thread. Instead, it is based on a class' relationship to the means of production. The bourgeoisie is the class that has a monopoly on the means of production and can thus valorize capital through the exploitation of the workers.

Granted, Marx certainly didn't invent the term and it has other meanings, but I'm assuming that's one you're interested in.

[Dave B]

Following on from post 11;

the following response by Trotsky to Rizzi may be of some interest to the small and dwindling band of serious Trot readers in a sea of fakes, frauds, liars and charlatans.


It is as Ted Grant lamented, who had a 'deep' understanding of this kind of thing, when Alan Woods said;



"You know, Ted sometimes said to me that he didn’t know why Lenin and Trotsky wrote so many books. Nobody reads them"

http://www.marxist.com/revolutionary-ted-grant-memorial-meeting.htm (http://www.marxist.com/revolutionary-ted-grant-memorial-meeting.htm)

In the same link there are some other topics covered of recent interest on this list eg,


The German Soviet Pact and the Character of the USSR


Leon Trotsky The USSR in War (September 1939)

The Theory of "Bureaucratic Collectivism"




Shortly after the assumption of power by Hitler, a German "left communist," Hugo Urbahns, came to the conclusion that in place of capitalism a new historical era of "state capitalism" was impending. The first examples of this regime he named as Italy, the USSR, Germany. Urbahns, however, did not draw the political conclusions of his theory. Recently, an Italian "left communist,"

Bruno R., who formerly adhered to the Fourth International, came to the conclusion that "bureaucratic collectivism" was about to replace capitalism. (Bruno R. – La bureaucratisme du monde, Paris 1939, 350 pp.) The new bureaucracy is a class, its relations to the toilers is collective exploitation, the proletarians are transformed into the slaves of totalitarian exploiters.

Bruno R. brackets together planned economy in the USSR, Fascism, National Socialism, and Roosevelt’s "New Deal." All these regimes undoubtedly possess common traits, which in the last analysis are determined by the collectivist tendencies of modern economy. Lenin even prior to the October Revolution formulated the main peculiarities of imperialist capitalism as follows: Gigantic concentration of productive forces, the heightening fusion of monopoly capitalism with the state, an organic tendency toward naked dictatorship as a result of this fusion.

The traits of centralization and collectivization determine both the politics of revolution and the politics of counter revolution; but this by no means signifies that it is possible to equate revolution, Thermidor, fascism, and American "reformism."


Bruno has caught on to the fact that the tendencies of collectivization assume, as a result of the political prostration of the working class, the form of "bureaucratic collectivism." The phenomenon in itself is incontestable. But where are its limits, and what is its historical weight? What we accept as the deformity of a transitional period, the result of the unequal development of multiple factors in the social process, is taken by Bruno R. for an independent social formation in which the bureaucracy is the ruling class. Bruno R. in any case has the merit of seeking to transfer the question from the charmed circle of terminological copy book exercises to the plane of major historical generalizations. This makes it all the easier to disclose his mistake.


Like many ultra-lefts, Bruno R. identifies in essence Stalinism with Fascism. On the one side the Soviet bureaucracy has adopted the political methods of Fascism; on the other side the Fascist bureaucracy, which still confines itself to "partial" measures of state intervention, is heading toward and will soon reach complete statification of economy. The first assertion is absolutely correct. But Bruno’s assertion that fascist "anti capitalism" is capable of arriving at the expropriation of the bourgeoisie is completely erroneous.


"Partial" measures of state intervention and of nationalization in reality differ from planned state economy just as reforms differ from revolution. Mussolini and Hitler are only "coordinating" the interests of the property owners and "regulating" capitalist economy, and, moreover, primarily for war purposes. The Kremlin oligarchy is something else again: it has the opportunity of directing economy as a body only owing to the fact that the working class of Russia accomplished the greatest overturn of property relations in history. This difference must not be lost sight of.


But even if we grant that Stalinism and Fascism from opposite poles will some day arrive at one and the same type of exploitive society ("Bureaucratic Collectivism" according to Bruno R.’s terminology) this still will not lead humanity out of the blind alley. The crisis of the capitalist system is produced not only by the reactionary role of private property but also by the no less reactionary role of the national state. Even if the various fascist governments did succeed in establishing a system of planned economy at home then, aside from the, in the long run, inevitable revolutionary movements of the proletariat unforeseen by any plan, the struggle between the totalitarian states for world domination would be continued and even intensified.



Wars would devour the fruits of planned economy and destroy the bases of civilization. Bertrand Russell thinks, it is true, that some victorious state may, as a result of the war, unify the entire world in a totalitarian vise. But even if such a hypothesis should be realized, which is highly doubtful, military "unification" would have no greater stability than the Versailles treaty. National uprisings and pacifications would culminate in a new world war, which would be the grave of civilization. Not our subjective wishes but the objective reality speaks for it, that the only way out for humanity is the world socialist revolution. The alternative to it is the relapse into barbarism.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm)



.

[chegitz guevara]

The term bourgeoisie actually means, one who lives in a town, a burg. The German word is burgher, in French, it is bourgeoisie, in English, a "burgess." The term comes from the 13th century, roughly, so in that time, the nobility, knights, priests were all above the middle classes.

This class overthrew the old ruling classes and established itself as the new ruling class. In the Marxism, bourgeoisie = capitalist, and no one rules over them, although certain sectors of the capitalist class rule over the rest, i.e., finance capital is the One Ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

The new middle classes: professionals, managers, etc,. are petit bourgeoisie, or petty bourgeoisie in English. They run things for the capitalists, and many of them are drawn from the capitalist class, but Rizzi, Burnham and Djilas are all wrong about them being the new ruling classes. The ruling class destroys any middle class motherfucker who doesn't take orders, quickly and thoroughly.

[Winter]

Reptilian overlords.

lol.

That's one of those conspiracy theories that invalidates every other theory because it makes people who believe these theories look insane.

BUT...

Groups like the Bilderberg are real and are planning something wicked against the vast majority of mankind. This is consistent with the bourgeois agenda. This is a group of the most powerful, elite, wealthiest people of the world who do not wish to share the world with the "scum" of humanity. They just need enough slaves to keep the system going in order to benefit their own agendas.

The whole NWO thing is pretty consistent with the bourgeois agenda as well. Sure, internationalism may come about this way, but under the control of a bourgeois slave system. This is a scary alternative to the internationalism we strive for.

Essentially we would be blatant slaves with nowhere to run.

I know people like Alex Jones may be polar opposites to our ideologies, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[chegitz guevara]

Uh, no.