Originally posted by
[email protected] 14, 2007 10:55 am
So Marx' class definitions are wrong/outdated?
No, just the oversimplifications repeated by some "Marxists". Marx needs to be constantly updated, of course, and the materialist method he developed applied to new situations.
But before modifying Marx's ideas - it's a good idea to understand them first. And before applying the materialist method, it's necessary to know facts about the material situation one is analyzing, in this case property and relations of labor in agriculture.
The founders of modern communism, Marx and Engels, had a complex analysis of farmers, or peasants.
Farmers are a spectrum of classes. Some own little land and do wage labor or rent land. Others own more, and live by their own labor on their own land - but are probably exploited by the banks, and the agribusinesses they buy from and sell to. Others own more means of production than they can work with their own labor, and exploit wage-labourers or tenant farmers. There's a lot of fuzziness in all these categories.
Only the last are, well, exploiters, petty-bourgeoisie. (Keep in mind that's what petty-bourgeois means, small bourgeois, petty exploiters, cockroach bosses.) The first are close to the working class.
As always, I suggest reading the Marx, etc., for yourself, rather than trusting somebody else's watered-down oversimplified version.
Engels: On the Peasant Question in France and Germany (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/peasant-question/ch01.htm)
The Demands of the Communist Party in Germany (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/03/24.htm), widely distributed during the 1848 revolution, also take up the situation of the peasants.
A past thread where I gave some stats on present-day farmers in the U.S. (http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=53689&st=0&#entry1292132422) I would encourage everyone to learn more about the economic situation of farmers before making assumptions.
As for engineers, managers, and whatnot: there are a lot of professionals who obviously are not just selling their labour-power, because they earn a lot more than the value of any kind of labour-power. To take one example, medical schools and the AMA deliberately limit the number of their graduates in order to keep doctors' salaries up. It would seem in this case ownership of a medical degree is a sort of revenue-producing property of its own. That may be true of some other formal degrees as well.
There are a lot of gray areas here as well, exactly where people stop being workers and become part of the professional middle classes can be hard to define.
But this is not some wholly new social layer; just a greatly expanded one. Marx mentions lawyers, bureaucrats, and whatnot in Capital and elsewhere, usually as hangers-on of the capitalist class, fed with a share of the bosses' profits.