Stop being Dogmatic - The age of the "bourgeois" is over.

[Belleraphone]

The age of the corporation is in.

I'm sick of seeing everyone complain about how the bourgeois are oppressing the working class. When Marx wrote his manifesto, this would be true. Think about who the bourgeois are now. The bourgeois are more or less middle class - Small business owners, doctors, engineers, lawyers, merchants. While these to a extent might keep the worker down, it is incomparable with the power of the corporation. The corporation influences our government to a perverted degree, they go into third world countries and force peasants off their land, they dump their waste in peasants backyards in far away India. The middle class is not doing this, this is the corporations.

Even when talking internationally, the corporate power is enormous. While the middle class in the West would be considered elite when you compare it on an international scale, the bourgeois are not the reason the world is living in poverty. It is corporations and corrupt leaders. The bourgeois fuel corporate consumerism, but the bourgeois did not make a conscious effort to become gluttonous pigs, it was imposed on them.

Our ideas are not dogma (save for our Stalinists) - they are a science. Since we are rational and reasonable, we need to update our debates and our rhetoric to the 21st century and realize what the new threat is.

[Seth]

You do realize "the corporation" is simply collective capital? True, individuals owning the MOP is rare today. But it's irrelevant.

[Belleraphone]

You do realize "the corporation" is simply collective capital? True, individuals owning the MOP is rare today. But it's irrelevant.
It's very relevant, you can't keep screaming about the bourgeois when corporations are ran by a oligarchical collectivists that are in the top one percent. The way in which corporations confuse and undermine the workers is also very different than that of the bourgeois.

[Tablo]

It's very relevant, you can't keep screaming about the bourgeois when corporations are ran by a oligarchical collectivists that are in the top one percent. The way in which corporations confuse and undermine the workers is also very different than that of the bourgeois.
Corporations are collectively owned by the bourgeoisie. It isn't hard to understand.

[tir1944]

The bourgeois are more or less middle class - Small business owners, doctors, engineers, lawyers, merchants.No,corporations are owned by people.

[Belleraphone]

Corporations are collectively owned by the bourgeoisie. It isn't hard to understand.
Lol? Look at the stockholders. They are not owned by the middle class, they owned by the elites. Even if they were owned by the middle class, they still have very little control over what the corporations do.


More like the owners of these corporations,rite? No, I don't. It's held by the top one percent. NOT the middle class.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=WMT+Major+Holders

[o well this is ok I guess]

The bourgeoisie haven't been the "middle class" since the feudal age.
At the time Marx wrote, the bourgeoisie were not the middle class but the ruling class.
The small business owners and such (the "middle class", as you understand them) have never been part of the high bourgeoisie.

[eric922]

I could be mistaken, but weren't the groups the OP listed such as small shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, etc. considered petite bourgeois, even in Marx's time? I thought bourgeois referred to the major capitalists.

[Tablo]

Think about who the bourgeois are now. The bourgeois are more or less middle class - Small business owners, doctors, engineers, lawyers, merchants.
Doctors, engineers, and lawyers? Those are primarily petite-bourgeois and proletarian(yes). Being bourgeois means one owns the means of production and only a handful of those in these professional careers do.

[Belleraphone]

Doctors, engineers, and lawyers? Those are primarily petite-bourgeois and proletarian(yes). Being bourgeois means one owns the means of production and only a handful of those in these professional careers do.

Wow, I had never heard of the petite-bourgeois. I always assumed it referred to the the factory owners that owned a single factory (As opposed to today where a corporation owns hundreds of factories.) I think I've been using a different definition than Marx has been using, nevermind.

[Seth]

It's very relevant, you can't keep screaming about the bourgeois when corporations are ran by a oligarchical collectivists that are in the top one percent.

Yes I can, and Lenin did just that. So much for a "new" "21st century" take, no?

[Zealot]

Oh Hai Ron

No seriously, wtf are you smoking, corporations are owned by the bourgeoisie and middle class is a bourgeois definition to keep you happy about being neither rich or poor

[Belleraphone]

Yes I can, and Lenin did just that. So much for a "new" "21st century" take, no?
I'd say it's still new, the corporation as it existed today did not exist back then.

[La Comédie Noire]

The stock market is just the social organization of the capitalist class, which allows them to move their capital freely around the world while mitigating the risks of liability and profit loss, with the aid of legal entities such as corporations.

[¿Que?]

As much as people hate to talk about the "laws of capital(sim)" or whatever, my understanding is that it is a system in which capital tends to accumulate into the control (power) of a smaller and smaller few (the 1%). We cannot go back to a golden past before corporations existed. Dismantle them, and new ones will form. We need to change the economic system to one in which the means of production are controlled by the working classes and the poor who employ their labor on them on a daily basis. Economic systems would become democratic and non-hierarchical.

[Belleraphone]

Oh Hai Ron

No seriously, wtf are you smoking, corporations are owned by the bourgeoisie and middle class is a bourgeois definition to keep you happy about being neither rich or poor
Yeah sorry, I read Marx in English and not in Spanish (my native language) so I just used the Spanish-English dictionary whenever I came across a word I did not know.

[Zealot]

Yeah sorry, I read Marx in English and not in Spanish (my native language) so I just used the Spanish-English dictionary whenever I came across a word I did not know.
Ok my bad, I'm pretty sure there are some Spanish translations around.

[Belleraphone]

Ok my bad, I'm pretty sure there are some Spanish translations around.
If I never read in English, my English would not be as good as it is today and that would be a problem since I now live in America.

[black magick hustla]

The age of the corporation is in.

I'm sick of seeing everyone complain about how the bourgeois are oppressing the working class. When Marx wrote his manifesto, this would be true. Think about who the bourgeois are now. The bourgeois are more or less middle class - Small business owners, doctors, engineers, lawyers, merchants. While these to a extent might keep the worker down, it is incomparable with the power of the corporation. The corporation influences our government to a perverted degree, they go into third world countries and force peasants off their land, they dump their waste in peasants backyards in far away India. The middle class is not doing this, this is the corporations.

Even when talking internationally, the corporate power is enormous. While the middle class in the West would be considered elite when you compare it on an international scale, the bourgeois are not the reason the world is living in poverty. It is corporations and corrupt leaders. The bourgeois fuel corporate consumerism, but the bourgeois did not make a conscious effort to become gluttonous pigs, it was imposed on them.

Our ideas are not dogma (save for our Stalinists) - they are a science. Since we are rational and reasonable, we need to update our debates and our rhetoric to the 21st century and realize what the new threat is.
on the contrary, it is a weak analysis to just rail on about "corporations", makes you seem a weak willed liberal. capital is a social reality and it certainly goes beyond "corporate america" or whatever the fuck naomi klein spineless liberals go on

[Belleraphone]

on the contrary, it is a weak analysis to just rail on about "corporations", makes you seem a weak willed liberal. capital is a social reality and it certainly goes beyond "corporate america" or whatever the fuck naomi klein spineless liberals go on
What are you talking about? No need to personally attack me. I know capital is a social reality, I was just trying to make that it was in the hands of corporations now.

[Jose Gracchus]

No, it is the evolution and consolidation and centralization of capital, that produces corporate entities, and governs their operation. It is fatuous to speak of "the hands of the corporations."

[Die Neue Zeit]

As much as I hate to say this, the OP has a point, though.

There are varying definitions of "bourgeoisie," and some definitions of it make it mutually exclusive from "the capitalist class." Marx's evolving definition departs somewhat from sociological takes on, say, the French Revolution's bourgeoisie (when lawyers were bourgeois?).

[Jimmie Higgins]

It's all about the relationship of the means of production, not the way those means are organized or managed that defines classes. The capitalist ruling class controls the means of production collectively though the arrangements of how they do that changes.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The age of the corporation is in.

I'm sick of seeing everyone complain about how the bourgeois are oppressing the working class. When Marx wrote his manifesto, this would be true. Think about who the bourgeois are now. The bourgeois are more or less middle class - Small business owners, doctors, engineers, lawyers, merchants. While these to a extent might keep the worker down, it is incomparable with the power of the corporation. The corporation influences our government to a perverted degree, they go into third world countries and force peasants off their land, they dump their waste in peasants backyards in far away India. The middle class is not doing this, this is the corporations.

Even when talking internationally, the corporate power is enormous. While the middle class in the West would be considered elite when you compare it on an international scale, the bourgeois are not the reason the world is living in poverty. It is corporations and corrupt leaders. The bourgeois fuel corporate consumerism, but the bourgeois did not make a conscious effort to become gluttonous pigs, it was imposed on them.

Our ideas are not dogma (save for our Stalinists) - they are a science. Since we are rational and reasonable, we need to update our debates and our rhetoric to the 21st century and realize what the new threat is.

The phenomenon you've described is the higher stage of Capitalism: capital has become MORE concentrated in the hands of globalised, imperialistic corporations. So yeah, you don't tend to have so many individual owners of the MoP now, they are executives in corporations with lots of share ownership via that company.

Imperialism is the highest form of Capitalism, and that is the stage we are in now.

[Rafiq]

It's very relevant, you can't keep screaming about the bourgeois when corporations are ran by a oligarchical collectivists that are in the top one percent. The way in which corporations confuse and undermine the workers is also very different than that of the bourgeois.

What's different, then?

[Belleraphone]

Rafiq, Stammer and Tickle summed it up for me. Basically this whole thread was me being terrible at English because I just used the non-political definition of bourgeois.

Although Stammer and Tickle, isn't fascism a higher form of capitalism than imperialism? We don't have domestic fascism yet.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

No, fascism is something that shares a vector with Capitalism; in that, when analysing society from a Marxist perspective, fascism and Capitalism both share the perpetuation of class antagonism, imperialism and wage exploitation, there is thus some overlap. But in many senses fascism is of course a kind of war-time Capitalism that, philosophically, is a break from what you might call peace-time Capitalism ideologies of economic liberalism, conservatism and 'liberal democracy' and so on.

Imperialism is the highest form of Capitalism in that, as scarcity takes on a greater role in the problem of the production and allocation of goods, and as domestic scarcity in particular becomes a problem due to mounting, ever-more serious crises of Capitalism reducing employment and productivity, Imperialism is fashioned as a way for Capital to both plunder other parts of the world for scarce resources to solve the aforementioned problem, and to exert greater, more centralised control over the means of production; a good example of this is globalised corporations taking the place of smaller, 'one-man' controlled domestic companies.

[CAleftist]

What are you talking about? No need to personally attack me. I know capital is a social reality, I was just trying to make that it was in the hands of corporations now.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-aVyKkhQGZWM/TValINEO7EI/AAAAAAAAAM8/NbeCbTaqUEU/s1600/east_india_company.jpg

http://image.dieselpowermag.com/f/10774572+w750+st0/0809dp_03_z+how_to_make_biodiesel_from_algae+stand ard_oil.jpg

And many other examples...

[L.A.P.]

Lol? Look at the stockholders. They are not owned by the middle class, they owned by the elites. Even if they were owned by the middle class, they still have very little control over what the corporations do.

No, I don't. It's held by the top one percent. NOT the middle class.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=WMT+Major+Holders

You obviosuly don't know who the bourgeoisie are. The small business owners you speak of are the petite bourgeoisie and the elites you reference are the bourgeoisie.