# Was Marx right? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [December 27, 2010, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529 "2010-12-27T17:12:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 8:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/141 "2010-12-31T08:02:35Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > If merchants, manufacturers, and bankers are not bourgeois, what are they? What manufacturers? And American merchants and bankers in those days were mostly petty-bourgeois (owning their own modest means of non-agricultural production and actually working it themselves), and, more importantly, mostly marginal in numbers, function and power compared to the landed. That didn’t last long after the Revolution (despite the hopes of Jefferson), but it was clearly the case at the time. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 8:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/142 "2010-12-31T08:05:44Z")
> [@FinnAgain](#): > > Brilliant factual refutation Glutton. > Truly. In this case, yes, indeed it is. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 8:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/143 "2010-12-31T08:30:20Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > What manufacturers? And American merchants and bankers in those days were mostly petty-bourgeois (owning their own modest means of non-agricultural production and actually working it themselves), and, more importantly, mostly marginal in numbers, function and power compared to the landed. That didn’t last long after the Revolution (despite the hopes of Jefferson), but it was clearly the case at the time. Fair enough, but if you look at the structure of the economy at that time it becomes quite clear that this was the result of conscious British policy, rather than a reflection of any natural process of economic development. American manufacture was restricted by British law, and exports of goods were restricted to the British market alone. Nonetheless there _were_ manufacturers (mainly artisans like blacksmiths and shipbuilders), as well as merchants and bankers (which you yourself admit were bourgeois), and they only way they could develop further economically was through throwing off the political yoke they had been bound with. The bourgeoisie in America existed prior to 1776, and by 1776 they were quite conscious of their political aims as a class. Therefore the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, and as its aim was the political liberation of an economic and social class, it is class struggle. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 8:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/144 "2010-12-31T08:35:21Z")
Oh, and I do admit I imperfectly understood the British side of the equation. Feudalism had very little to do with it, but insofar as taxes and duties went to support the monarchy (which was and is a holdover from feudalism), it was not completely absent from the picture, either. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 8:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/145 "2010-12-31T08:38:37Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > Nonetheless there _were_ manufacturers (mainly artisans like blacksmiths and shipbuilders), as well as merchants and bankers (which you yourself admit were bourgeois), and they only way they could develop further economically was through throwing off the political yoke they had been bound with. Quite true, and well-known to the Founders, and not ignored in their speeches; but, if you know the history of the time, it is extremely hard to believe such economic ambition was a principal reason, even a subconscious one, for their going to war. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 9:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/146 "2010-12-31T09:03:56Z")
Oh, come _on_. How could it not be conscious if it was well-known to the Founders and wasn’t ignored in their speeches?! ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 9:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/147 "2010-12-31T09:06:29Z")
And just because _you_ find it hard to believe doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Personal incredulity and all that. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 9:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/148 "2010-12-31T09:13:00Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > Oh, come _on_. How could it not be conscious if it was well-known to the Founders and wasn’t ignored in their speeches?! I did not say they were unconscious of it. I said that winning a chance for America’s merchants and manufacturers to make a lot more money wasn’t a principal **motive** for the war, not even subconsciously. Even the bourgeoisie sometimes take political action for non-economic reasons. ---
**Author:** ![handsomeharry](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9c0ed/32.png) [@handsomeharry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/handsomeharry)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 9:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/149 "2010-12-31T09:15:14Z")
> [@cricetus](#): > > Ah, make fun of Karl all you want. He’s still funnier than Zeppo. Big woo-hoo! Fidel Castro is still funnier than Zeppo! Best wishes, hh ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 9:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/150 "2010-12-31T09:33:17Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Even the bourgeoisie sometimes take political action for non-economic reasons. Explain, then, the phenomenon of the ‘solemn covenant’ as evidenced [here](http://books.google.se/books?id=2bsTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA258&lpg=PA258&dq=%22solemn+covenant%22+concord&source=bl&ots=TJX74vhBqE&sig=mFyiY0WVk3LIMp17b58WOTvaFmo&hl=sv&ei=9aEdTYjpNMih8QO3u8GXBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22solemn%20covenant%22%20concord&f=false). Seems as though plenty of people were aware of the economic limitations placed on them by Britain well before 1776, and took political action for those reasons. Do you therefore assert that those economic reasons suddenly ceased to apply, or dropped from the public consciousness, as of July 4, 1776? ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 9:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/151 "2010-12-31T09:46:03Z")
Or, as an afterthought, what about the Boston Tea Party? Was that solely for non-economic reasons? ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 9:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/152 "2010-12-31T09:54:13Z")
It also occurred to me to go back and look at the OP because, frankly, I’d forgotten what the original question was. Marx didn’t predict the death of the middle classes. When he wrote the _Manifesto_, almost sixty years after the last great bourgeois revolution in Europe, he opened it up by describing [what was already going on](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm): > [@](#): > > Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. ---
**Author:** ![Muffin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muffin/32/4341_2.png) [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 10:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/153 "2010-12-31T10:59:43Z")
> [@cricetus](#): > > Ah, make fun of Karl all you want. He’s still funnier than Zeppo. “Make the rich pay.” Marx “Make the rich play.” G. Marx ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2010, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/154 "2010-12-31T14:30:52Z")
> [@](#): > > Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. Well, **that** didn’t last long . . . Since Marx’ time, class conflict in the industrialized world has almost always involved more than two sides. The upper working class, rightly or wrongly, rarely sees any interests in common with the lumpenproles and often interests in conflict, the white-collar middle class rants against organized labor and wants to distance itself from the proles and is ready often as not to ally with bourgeoisie against them, etc., etc. And intraclass ethnic/racial/cultural divisions complicate the picture still further. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2011, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/155 "2011-01-01T19:52:41Z")
What, exactly, defines the ‘upper’ working class? And do you have any responses to my previous questions about political actions taken for clearly economic reasons just before the outbreak of the American Revolution? ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2011, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/156 "2011-01-02T00:01:15Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > What, exactly, defines the ‘upper’ working class? And do you have any responses to my previous questions about political actions taken for clearly economic reasons just before the outbreak of the American Revolution? IIRC, the merchantilist laws predated the Revolution by a couple of decades; what got the colonials literally up in arms wasn’t having to pay a tax on tea, it was that the British Parliment could unilaterally impose it. The colonials had only to look to Ireland and Scotland for examples of how entire countries could be reduced to imperial possessions of the homeland by for example literally being taxed to pay for the soldiers occupying their country. If the American Revolution was a “class war” fought by the American bourgeoisie, it was mainly over their being excluded from the _ **British** _ bourgeoisie, who had represenation in Parliment while the Americans did not. Sorry **Olentzero** , but IMHO you’ve fallen into the trap of ideologically redefining all possible evidence to fit the tenets of your theory. The “beauty” of Marxism is that anything and everything, interpreted through Marxism, is proof that Marxism is true. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2011, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/157 "2011-01-02T00:12:36Z")
And which was therefore political action taken over economic issues. Which **BG** disputes. You’re asserting that I’m redefining evidence to fit the theory without actually stating _how_ I do so. I would greatly appreciate it if you would. My point is exactly that: the mercantilist laws predated the Revolution by at least a couple of decades, so therefore the political actions up to and including the Revolution had an economic basis. It is impossible to assert that the actions taken up to 1776 could have economic reasons but suddenly on July 4th those economic reasons suddenly ceased to apply. I have no doubt that the American bourgeoisie would have been quite satisfied to gain representation in Parliament and carried the matter no further, but since Parliament and George III remained intransigent on the issue, they found they had no choice but to give Empire the finger and go their own way. It was class struggle. ---
**Author:** ![Muffin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muffin/32/4341_2.png) [@Muffin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Muffin)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2011, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/158 "2011-01-02T00:31:32Z")
So what it comes down to is that from a Marxist’s point of view, everything is class struggle, therefore Marx was right. “Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.” Thackeray ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2011, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/159 "2011-01-02T00:37:50Z")
> [@Muffin](#): > > So what it comes down to is that from a Marxist’s point of view, everything is class struggle, therefore Marx was right. Heh. All kidding aside, what set of events could, hypothetically, falsify the stuff? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2011, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529/160 "2011-01-02T01:26:15Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > What, exactly, defines the ‘upper’ working class? [Fussell,](http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293928051&sr=1-1-spell) again, is no sociologist, but I think he got that in one: > [@](#): > > My researches have persuaded me that there are nine classes in this country, as follows: > > ## Top out-of-sight Upper Upper middle > > ## Middle **High proletarian** Mid-proletarian Low proletarian > > Destitute > Bottom out-of-sight > > \ > . . . Proceeding downward [from the middle class], we would normally expect to meet next the lower-middle class. But it doesn’t exist as such any longer, having been pauperized by the inflation of the 1960s and 1970s and transformed into the high-proletarian class. What’s the difference? A further lack of freedom and self-respect. Our former lower-middle class, the new high proles, now head “the masses,” and even if they are positioned at the top of the proletarian classes, still they are identifiable as people things are done to. They are in bondage – to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast food, consumer schlock. Back in the 1940s there was still a real lower-middle class in this country, whose solid high-school education and addiction to “saving” and “planning” maintained it in a position – often precarious, to be sure – above the working class. . . . These former low-white-collar people are now simply working machines, and the wife usually works as well as the husband. > > The kind of work performed and the sort of anxiety that besets one as a result of work are ways to divide the working class into its three strata. **The high proles are the skilled workers, crafstmen, like printers.** The mid-proles are operators, like Ralph Kramden, the bus driver. The low proles are unskilled labor, like longshoremen. **The special anxiety of high proles is fear about loss or reduction of status: you’re proud to be a master carpenter, and you want the world to understand clearly the difference between you and a laborer.** The special anxiety of the mid-proles is fear of losing the job. And of the low proles, the gnawing perception that you’re probably never going to make enough or earn enough freedom to have and do the things you want. > > * * * > > **But high proles are quite smart, or at least shrewd. Because often their work is not closely supervised, they have pride and a conviction of independence, and they feel some contempt for those who have not made it as far as they have. They are, as the sociologist E. E. LeMasters calls them and titles his book, Blue-Collar Aristocrats (1975), and their disdain for the middle class is like the aristocrat’s from the other direction. . . . Like other aristocrats, says LeMasters, these “have gone to the top of their social world and need not expend time or energy on ‘social climbing.’” . . .** > > Since they’re not consumed with worry about choosing the correct status emblems, these people can be remarkably relaxed and unself-conscious. They can do, say, wear, and look like pretty much anything they want without undue feelings of shame, which belong to their betters, the middle class, shame being largely a bourgeois feeling. . . . > > * * * > > High proles are nice. It’s down among the mid- and low proles that features some might find offensive begin to show themselves. These are people who feel bitter about their work, often because they are closely supervised and regulated and generally treated like wayward children. . . . Andrew Levinson, author of The Working-Class Majority (1974), invites us to imagine what it would be like to be under the constant eye of a foreman, “a figure who has absolutely no counterpart in middle-class society. Salaried professionals often do have people above them, but it is impossible to imagine professors or executives being required to bring a doctor’s note if they are absent a day or having to justify the number of trips they take to the bathroom.” . . . > > The degree of supervision, indeed, is often a more eloquent class indicator than mere income, which suggests that the whole class system is more a recognition of the value of freedom than a proclamation of the value of sheer cash. . . . One is a mid- or low prole if one’s servitude is constantly emphasized. Occupational class depends largely on doing work for which the consquences of error or failure are distant or remote, or better, invisible, rather than immediately apparent to a superior and thus instantly humiliating to the performer. > > Constantly demeaned at work, the lower sorts of proles suffer from poor morale. As one woman worker says, “Most of us . . . have jobs that are too small for our spirits.” > > * * * > > At the bottom of the working class, the low prole is identifiable by the gross uncertainty of his employment. This class would include illegal aliens like Mexican fruit pickers as well as other migrant workers. Social isolation is the norm here, and what Hoggart says of the lower working class in Britain applies elsewhere as well: “Socially . . . each day and each week is almost unplanned. There is no diary, no book of engagements, and few letters are sent or received.” Remoteness and isolation, as in the valleys of Appalachia, are characteristics, and down here we find people who, trained for nothing, are likely out of sheer despair to join the Army. > > Still, they’re better off than the destitute, who never have even seasonal work and who live wholly on welfare. They differ from the bottom-out-of-sights less because they’re much better off than because they’re more visible, in the form of Bowery bums, bag ladies, people who stand in public places lecturing and delivering harangues about their grievances, people who drink out of paper bags, people whose need for some recognition impels them to “act” in front of audiences in the street. When delinquency and distress grow desperate, you sink into the bottom-out-of-sight class, staying all day in your welfare room or contriving to get taken into an institution, whether charitable or correctional doesn’t matter much. I think you’ll agree that, as I said, we rarely find much sense of class solidarity, and sometimes we find actual hostility, from the high proles so defined as to those below them. (The above was written in 1983, but IMO that does not make it significantly dated. The class structure of American society has changed far less from then to now, than it did from, say, 1965 to 1983. '83 was around when such things seemed suddenly and unaccountably to **stop** changing (to the disappointment of radicals but rather to the relief of the majority). They didn’t really stop changing, of course, but dramatic social upheavals did stop; since then, the middle class has been declining very definitely and steadily, but by an attrition almost too slow to notice – and too slow to threaten its cultural continuity, so that we still have essentially the same middle class as we had in the 1950s, even though it now comes in more colors, just as Britain still has essentially the same aristocracy it had in the 18th Century, even though most of its members are descended from 19th-Century parvenus. But that’s another discussion.) I recall you have asserted in the past, IIRC, that there are only two classes in America, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the difference is that the first has to live by work or welfare and the second has independent means. (Which would make proles even of Fussell’s upper-middles, or most of them.) That is defensible in a way – at least, pointing out that very real and all-important yet generally ignored dividing line between the two has value – but you must acknowledge that, as stated, it is very much a minority viewpoint. > [@Olentzero](#): > > And do you have any responses to my previous questions about political actions taken for clearly economic reasons just before the outbreak of the American Revolution? None as yet. You may be right, I’ll have to review your link – and other relevant posts in this thread – and get back to you. I still believe, as I said, that even the bourgeoisie sometimes take political action for non-economic reasons (using “non-economic” to mean “not for the sake of personal or class profit”); but perhaps not in this particular case. A superficial glance offers no grounds to doubt my position that winning a chance for merchants to make more money was not a **principal** motive for the Revolution. The most persuasive analysis of those motives that I have read to date is Michael Lind’s in [_The American Way of Strategy._](http://www.amazon.com/American-Way-Strategy-Foreign-Policy/dp/0195341414/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293928899&sr=1-1) > [@](#): > > Many people remember vaguely that the American Revolution had something to do with taxes. A few remember that the issue was whether the power to tax lay with London or the American colonies. But this was a surrogate for the real issue: preserving the American way of life. > > In the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the British colonists in North America developed a distinctive way of life quite different from that of their British cousins. Something like Britain’s aristocratic society endured in the South and parts of the Northeast. But in general, colonial society was characterized by a degree of middle-class prosperity and widespread property ownership unknown in any other society in the world. Not only were America’s yeoman farmers, artisans, and merchants better off than most Britons and Europeans, but also the cost of government was much lower. > > The trouble began in the aftermath of the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War) of 1754-63. The British imperial government insisted that the colonists pay more of the costs of their own defense. The colonists, however, feared that the London parliament was trying to destroy the system of colonial self-government that had grown up in the preceding generations. They remembered that the London parliament had destroyed the Scottish parliament in 1707 (it would eliminate the Irish parliament in 1801). They feared that the same thing was now happening to them. They would pay ever higher taxes, even as their colonial assemblies lost authority to the London parliament. As a result, British North America might come to resemble Ireland or Scotland, impoverished countries were absentee landlords held vast tracts of land and where major decisions were made by well-connected aristocrats and merchants in London with little or no accountability to the people whom they ruled. > > \ > > This history may be familiar but the point is not. For Americans, the independence of the United States from Britain and its organization as a democratic republic was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end was the safeguarding of the communal right to self-government and the individual liberties that the British settlers in America had already enjoyed for generations under British rule. Americans adopted their own strategy for defending the American way of life against imperial centralization – independence as a democratic republic – only because their first choice, self-government within a federal monarchical empire, was rejected. Democratic republicanism and national independence were only two of several possible methods for preserving what by 1776 was the traditional American way of life, characterized by personal liberty, widespread property ownership, low taxes, and an inexpensive military. But **not** characterized by any expectation of making vast fortunes in manufacturing or foreign commerce. That lay in the future. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529.md?page=7) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-marx-right/565529.md?page=9)