This comment got a bit away from me lol, I just love talking about marxism too much I guess 😁 Please do tell me if it’s just too long for you to read or doesnt make sense or whatever.
A society is defined by how it produces and survives. When we talk about an “agrarian society” or “nomad society”, “hunter gatherers” etc. we talk about how a group of people produced food. When we talk about slave or feudal or capitalist society we talk about the relationships that people enter into in order to produce. It is not possible to work, or be compelled to work outside of society. Until we have socialism nothing compels us to work outside of social classes. I wouldn’t be working if my bourgeois didn’t compel me to. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
The great leaps in society have all been defined by changes in how we produce which compelled us to reorganise ourselves. Once we learned to domesticate wheat we stopped wandering and settled. We learned to make stone, bronze, iron tools and every time society was restructured. The steam engine revolutionized (literally!) our whole society since suddenly the work had to be divided into smaller parts. No longer could one laborer own all the tools required for their work themselves, they had become too expensive. The spinstress on the farm could no longer compete with the machines and so people began migrating to the cities since that is where the work was. This gave rise to the merchant class who became more powerful the more they gained control over the means of production until they overthrew feudal society for a more liberal approach at organising production. But as the wealth and control is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, as the petite bourgeois “middle class” shrinks and is thrown into the proletariat we will soon have to reorganise our society again. Especially since the global south is starting to band together and awakens as to where their oppression comes from. What will we do without our cheap labor?
“One cannot be bourgeois if one does not live amongst others whom they can subjugate” indeed! Now you’re thinking in dialectics 😁 We define social classes in terms of eachother and liberation of one is done by abolishing the other. There are no slaves if there are no slaveowners which is why people fought the slaveowners in order to free the slaves. No serfs where there is no nobility and no proletariat (employees) where there are no employers (bourgeoisie).
Ha! I was trying to refer to the idiom without being verbose, not leaving those blanks as variables.
My point was that you took out the most salient part of that quote. That communism is defined not by social classes but by “ability” and “need” is its defining characteristic. Because at the moment people are not getting what they “need” but rather what they “earn” which in the best of cases matches up, but does not always (or indeed not often, if we look at most capitalist societies currently in existence). And what they “earn” is defined by the contract they entered into with their employers. This means that the laborer wants to maximise what they sell their labor power for, whereas the employer wants to minimise what they buy the labor power with. This is what is called a contradiction in dialectics.
These contradictions are how we define social classes and the resolvement of these contradictions (their “synthesis”) is what we are most interested in. The merchant class and the feudal class for instance were marked by the contradiction that the merchants wanted to be able to sell to whomever they pleased (they wanted a free market), whereas the feudal class wanted to amass without having to buy. Whoever was under their jurisdiction had to give them a share, was taxed simply for being within their jurisdiction. Which differs from taxes today which have to justified by how they are necessary for the survival of the government and the state. The lords didn’t need such a justification, “my land my rules”. This contradiction came to a head and got resolved by the abolishment of the feudal class (or at least by bringing it to heel and under the rule of the bourgeoisie). The synthesis of feudal society was a capitalist one.
I guess my take is that what determines a society is more how “ability” and “need” are defines, that way the social structure is not oversimplified to a single one-sided relationship.
Yes! Welcome to dialectics!! It is indeed not a one-sided relationship! The employer needs our work and we need access to the means of production! This mutual need is how capitalism operates.
This comment got a bit away from me lol, I just love talking about marxism too much I guess 😁 Please do tell me if it’s just too long for you to read or doesnt make sense or whatever.
A society is defined by how it produces and survives. When we talk about an “agrarian society” or “nomad society”, “hunter gatherers” etc. we talk about how a group of people produced food. When we talk about slave or feudal or capitalist society we talk about the relationships that people enter into in order to produce. It is not possible to work, or be compelled to work outside of society. Until we have socialism nothing compels us to work outside of social classes. I wouldn’t be working if my bourgeois didn’t compel me to. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
The great leaps in society have all been defined by changes in how we produce which compelled us to reorganise ourselves. Once we learned to domesticate wheat we stopped wandering and settled. We learned to make stone, bronze, iron tools and every time society was restructured. The steam engine revolutionized (literally!) our whole society since suddenly the work had to be divided into smaller parts. No longer could one laborer own all the tools required for their work themselves, they had become too expensive. The spinstress on the farm could no longer compete with the machines and so people began migrating to the cities since that is where the work was. This gave rise to the merchant class who became more powerful the more they gained control over the means of production until they overthrew feudal society for a more liberal approach at organising production. But as the wealth and control is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, as the petite bourgeois “middle class” shrinks and is thrown into the proletariat we will soon have to reorganise our society again. Especially since the global south is starting to band together and awakens as to where their oppression comes from. What will we do without our cheap labor?
“One cannot be bourgeois if one does not live amongst others whom they can subjugate” indeed! Now you’re thinking in dialectics 😁 We define social classes in terms of eachother and liberation of one is done by abolishing the other. There are no slaves if there are no slaveowners which is why people fought the slaveowners in order to free the slaves. No serfs where there is no nobility and no proletariat (employees) where there are no employers (bourgeoisie).
My point was that you took out the most salient part of that quote. That communism is defined not by social classes but by “ability” and “need” is its defining characteristic. Because at the moment people are not getting what they “need” but rather what they “earn” which in the best of cases matches up, but does not always (or indeed not often, if we look at most capitalist societies currently in existence). And what they “earn” is defined by the contract they entered into with their employers. This means that the laborer wants to maximise what they sell their labor power for, whereas the employer wants to minimise what they buy the labor power with. This is what is called a contradiction in dialectics.
These contradictions are how we define social classes and the resolvement of these contradictions (their “synthesis”) is what we are most interested in. The merchant class and the feudal class for instance were marked by the contradiction that the merchants wanted to be able to sell to whomever they pleased (they wanted a free market), whereas the feudal class wanted to amass without having to buy. Whoever was under their jurisdiction had to give them a share, was taxed simply for being within their jurisdiction. Which differs from taxes today which have to justified by how they are necessary for the survival of the government and the state. The lords didn’t need such a justification, “my land my rules”. This contradiction came to a head and got resolved by the abolishment of the feudal class (or at least by bringing it to heel and under the rule of the bourgeoisie). The synthesis of feudal society was a capitalist one.
Yes! Welcome to dialectics!! It is indeed not a one-sided relationship! The employer needs our work and we need access to the means of production! This mutual need is how capitalism operates.