Middle Class

[Black Sheep]

What do the separate leftist currents propose for what will/should happen about the middle class?

Because they are a quite important part oftoday's society.

Also didn't Lenin use to say that whoever gets the middle class to his side will win ?

[bcbm]

Middle class is related to one's economic status, not one's relationship to the means of production, so it is a meaningless label to us.

[TheDevil'sApprentice]

What the media calls the 'middle class' is part of what we call the working class.

[Charles Xavier]

Under modern capitalism there is only the middle class according to its ideologists. You are either middle class, lower-middle-class or people like bill gates, upper-middle class.

But the word middle class originates from a time when the bourgeioisie were the middle class, there was a class below them and a class above them (the nobility).


But class is not income, class is relation to the means of production.

The Proletariat are those who work for a living earning a wage. The Bourgeoisie are the ones who own the means of production (factories, banks, airports, grocery stores, etc.), then there are two other classes, there are the lumpen-proletariat, which are those who are thieves, beggars, criminals of sorts. And the Petty-Bourgeioisie, (small business owners and the peasantry, and in some cases professionals who run their own practice)


The Petty-Bourgeoisie are usually reactionary, on the part that they are under capitalism more and more being steamrolled over and turned into the proletariat, to save themselves from financial ruin, they would have to turn back the wheels of time. Those that are revolutionary are so on realization that they will turn into the proletariat. But we must be patient with the peasantry and petty-bourgeioisie winning them over.

[JimmyJazz]

That's only if you accept the "common" usage of the term "middle class" pushed by the capitalists and their media in the U.S.

The real "middle class" under capitalism is the petit-bourgeoisie.

Really? I always thought the petit-bourgeoisie was purely small capitalists, whereas the middle class was people like lawyers, middle managers and bosses, etc.--people who are both exploiting agents for the ruling class and themselves exploited by it.

[Yehuda Stern]

I think it would be more accurate to define middle class as the professional and higher-educated petty-bourgeoisie. But since it's hardly part of the classic Marxist class definitions, this usage is probably pretty controversial.