kromando33
13th January 2008, 08:42
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. - Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto.
I was just reading the manifesto and came to this, and I thought it's very relevant in view of a few topics on this board recently relating to the 'proletariat' and the role of other classes, and indeed the opinion of some that Maoism was a rural-liberation movement. In fact it's simply that Marx observed the lower middle classes were simply fragments of those old feudal classes due to be destroyed because the bourgeois needs them to come into the cities to feed their productive need for capital.
So indeed, for us communists, 'Proletarians', this is the modern urban industrial class, are the only progressive class because they are the only class that advances with human civilization, the rest merely want to 'preserve' that which they had. So indeed Mao did not see hope in the rural class, but instead as you know made massive effort to proletarianize the Chinese peasantry, which is where alot of the class struggle came from; not from the bourgeois- China at that time had a very small bourgeois that was not to emerge until well into the century, instead the 'class struggle' under Mao was between the small proletariat plus revolutionary peasants who 'wanted' to be workers, against the reactionary sectors of the peasant population.
So my point for discussion is simple, the 'proletarianization' of the middle-peasant classes came after the revolution, at the behest of the proletarian state, but is this possible? Are the middle-lower classes a reliable ally in class struggle, or is their desire to return to the old feudal-religious relations too reactionary? Must the population be more proletarianized before revolution is ripe, must the 'two-camp' paradigm of Marxist class struggle be more evident. Marx of course says in the manifesto that the more classes are pulled into the urban proletariat, the more antagonistic their relationship with the bourgeois will become, having revolution all the more likely.
My point of discussion therefore also relates to the so-called 'uneven development' of the world, from the Third World and imperialist countries, which have differing levels of working class and bourgeois in their population.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. - Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto.
I was just reading the manifesto and came to this, and I thought it's very relevant in view of a few topics on this board recently relating to the 'proletariat' and the role of other classes, and indeed the opinion of some that Maoism was a rural-liberation movement. In fact it's simply that Marx observed the lower middle classes were simply fragments of those old feudal classes due to be destroyed because the bourgeois needs them to come into the cities to feed their productive need for capital.
So indeed, for us communists, 'Proletarians', this is the modern urban industrial class, are the only progressive class because they are the only class that advances with human civilization, the rest merely want to 'preserve' that which they had. So indeed Mao did not see hope in the rural class, but instead as you know made massive effort to proletarianize the Chinese peasantry, which is where alot of the class struggle came from; not from the bourgeois- China at that time had a very small bourgeois that was not to emerge until well into the century, instead the 'class struggle' under Mao was between the small proletariat plus revolutionary peasants who 'wanted' to be workers, against the reactionary sectors of the peasant population.
So my point for discussion is simple, the 'proletarianization' of the middle-peasant classes came after the revolution, at the behest of the proletarian state, but is this possible? Are the middle-lower classes a reliable ally in class struggle, or is their desire to return to the old feudal-religious relations too reactionary? Must the population be more proletarianized before revolution is ripe, must the 'two-camp' paradigm of Marxist class struggle be more evident. Marx of course says in the manifesto that the more classes are pulled into the urban proletariat, the more antagonistic their relationship with the bourgeois will become, having revolution all the more likely.
My point of discussion therefore also relates to the so-called 'uneven development' of the world, from the Third World and imperialist countries, which have differing levels of working class and bourgeois in their population.