I work 40+ hours a week, own property and investments, and also create things from raw materials that I personally mine, gather and grow on my own land. I do not think there is any place for me in Marx’s world; none of the classes he defined can hold what I am.
Too discriminatory for me; if I’m not eligible to give orders I’m unlikely to follow any.
That’s precisely how Engels defined petty bourgeois.
Who said anything about orders?
How do you define “accepting and supporting working class leadership”? If it does not involve harnessing one’s own volition to the direction of another, I do not understand anything we are talking about at all.
Edit: I’ve been reading a bit about petite bourgeois, and I don’t think it entirely fits. I own no shops, make no sales of anything other than my ideas and labor, and have no employees. I do advise other employees of my own employer, but they are not paid by me or supervised by me (except in the cases where they ask for my supervision, which is fairly common). If I were to become permanently unemployed, I would have to sell my land and other properties in order to survive.
First, it means accepting the leadership of the working class as such, not of specific individuals who happen to be working class. Second, accepting leadership doesn’t require becoming a slave. See pretty much any decent young adult fiction on the nature of leadership. Participating in a group that makes decisions democratically, based on the principle of advancing the interests of the working class, and adhering to the decisions made democratically, is more what I have in mind.
There are those who object in principle to even this sort of democratic decision making, but that seems to depend on an ideal of autonomy that I don’t believe is socially or even psychologically possible.
Then perhaps I misunderstood, because I assumed you meant you were mining and growing in order to produce commodities for sale. So you sound more like what I describe as a professional – which is part of the middle class, but not one that Marx talked about much, except in passing. Later Marxists tended to broaden the concept of middle class – in response to the way the class expanded and its role in mediating class conflict increased.
Lenin and company tended to talk a lot about the intelligentsia – which I’ve often thought might be something of a mistranslation, as it seemed to combine university students, professional intellectuals of various sorts, and much of what I’m describing as the middle class. I think that’s probably the nearest to discussing the sort of position you’re in, that I can think of.
Lenin’s intelligentsia is almost certainly what I am; as are you. But that category overlaps all of Marx’s classes - my friends are variously welders, short-order cooks, millionaire entrepreneurs, manual laborers, archeologists, landlords, musicians, blacksmiths, climatologists, and gas station attendants… all of whom are comfortable discussing things like phylogeny, theology, use of medical imaging equipment on fossils, brain imaging and meditation, and a million other topics. One of my friends has no bank account, no car, and works in a dollar store - but has an encyclopaedic knowledge of medieval and ancient history. He claims to worship Zeus. Another works as a lab assistant in a wet chemistry outfit, but has advanced degrees in anthropology and sociology.
Marx and Lenin did not live in a world where people had the choices and opportunities they have now, and it seems to me that unlike Kant’s, their philosophies no longer entirely fit the modern reality.
Counterpoint. (Link is to the POGO report itself but if you look around you can find some TL;DR articles about it.)
Yes, and we already have those laws. We need no more of them.
The laws which make politicians rich are: those which tweak some element of the tax or regulatory code to favor one sector or one corporation over another, or those which are easier/cheaper for big and/or established companies to comply with than for small companies or startups.
Ah. I see. All possible situations where common good could be improved by regulating corporations have been found and legislated for. We have reached the apex of all possible good laws, and at no point in the future of our country will we ever come across another situation where corporations should be regulated.
Guess it’s time to pack it in. The experiment known as “democracy” has succeeded, we can now inscribe our laws into stone, for they have created the perfect utopia.
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