Understanding Class

A 21st century class analysis that reference earlier social and economic versions.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• class
• socal
• economic

[tintintabulations]

What a prescient analysis. I'd like to hear more about the collapse of the what used to be called the New Middle Class or the technocratic elite of the 20th century.

Also, check out a recent article in Newsweek ('The Scary New Rich'; 8 March 2010) about the emerging "illiberal" global middle class.

[eltechno]

Why thank you! I like it myself.

Understand, this not a work of original genius. This is just an (now 3.5 YO) update of the thinking employed by the political economists who invented the New Deal. If you ever wonder why the New Dealer came down so hard on Wall Street with both tax policy and regulations, understanding this class analysis will explain it.

Anyway, if you like it, pass it around. It is really interesting how those guys saw the world.

And I AM working on an update.

[TolstoyKafkaEvsky]

You contest that before the industrial revolution classes were more simplistic, but Marx shows us that it is actually the other way around. He suggests that society had a more complex order in say the middle ages (Vassals, fiefs, guild masters, knights, apprentices, journeyman, Burgers, ect.) Where as today our classes are ever more simplified into 2 opposing forces. Bourgeoisie and proletariat. And wouldn't you say that class analysis is NECESSARY to discover if any class is being OPPRESSED?

[eltechno]

Marx was dead wrong about many things. But his errors of class analysis are perhaps the MOST damaging. His bourgeoisie / proletariat description left out two VERY important groups of producers—farmers and manufacturers.

[eltechno]

And so his followers declared war of these groups—murdering millions of Kulaks for the "crime" of knowing how to grow food, triggering a famine during Mao's Great Leap Forward that killed at LEAST 30 million, and bungling manufacture so badly that with a few exceptions like the Kalishnikov, there was nothing made in a Marxist country that any sane consumer would want to buy.

[eltechno]

My guess is that if you still find Marx's class analysis compelling you have never grown enough food to feed yourself (much less feed others) nor have you ever built anything more difficult than say, an IKEA desk. Because once you have mastered these socially necessary skills, Marxist analysis is quickly reduced to village idiot status.

[mikem1234]

When Marx was describing industrial civilization, he wasn't saying all societies have this class structure. He was only saying the class structure develops and changes over time. It's not simply "the elite" and "the people." Most of human history has been lived in hunter-gatherer groups with not much stratification....

[Hundpiraten]

Everything ugly in a marketers perpective

[MultiSmartass1]

@eltechno Marx was correct about history and life being a class struggle but he was naive about bourgeoisie and the proletariat. What Marxism needs to be done is updated for the 21st Century. The predators are the financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies and the producers are both the working and middle classes.