Just a basic sketch of how society is structured in a bourgious society, and a comparison to what an actual classless society would look like, which some may notice differs considerably from what you get the impression way too many middle class people are probably thinking of when they start blithering about how we're living in a "classless society".
And strictly speaking the communist society should be represented by a line, not a block, as social brownian motion would occur only in one dimension, rather than two (no up/down motion basically because there's no "up" from which one could tell "down" from, and thereby navigate by) but blocks are prettier.
Shall post again at some point with diagrams for the inter-relationships between the classes (according to marx, engels, the Lenin/Trotsky tradition (am currently a trotskyist) and the structual differences between various bougious social states (using states in the sense of "phase transitions" and states of matter, not nation states for once) just because I'm kinda tired of seeing people waft their gums at me about "class" without the slightest conception of what they're talking about, and also I can attack kosian politics, which is always fun.
The hyperthetical underneath the classless state is there because to my knowledge nothing that truly even begins to approach the marxist prole controlled Communist State (the one set forth and described in The Manifesto of the Communist Party) has existed yet - but as it took several millenia from the creation of the idea of democracy to the modern social democracies with their universal suffrage and some small amount of consensual democracy, that's hardly surprising, especially considering how vague marx was.
And of course the classless society will have its own problems, but at least one of them won't be the fact that society is designed expressly to screw the majority of people in it over for shits and giggles, and then maybe thousands of homeless won't die on the streets every year.
3 comments:
I passed the chance to comment when I could say something nice, so now I'm just a nag with ho counterweight, but
'socialist' state, cuz communism arrives when the state has shriveled up for lack of purposes, and then history ends or begins depending on which Marx toss-off you prefer.
so now I'm just a nag with ho counterweight
Is that a metric ho or an imperial ho?
'socialist' state, cuz communism arrives when the state has shriveled up for lack of purposes, and then history ends or begins depending on which Marx toss-off you prefer.
Yeah, I tend to forgo the whole "end of history" nonsense, when marx starts going on about the inevitability of history I tend to phase out until he gets interesting again (though of course I can waffle about evolutonary systems and thermodynamic equilibrium to come up with something vaguely similar, but it's got something akin to science behind it rather than marx's dubious grasp of history) anyone who predicts the end of history or science or art or culture, is merely making it quite plain that they've got no imagination whatsoever.
Of course the communists of that period will be the arch conservatives, muttering about how there was none of these trans-historicalists ruining everything back in the day.
Sorry I was aiming for 'no,' but I am entirely too impatient to 'preview.' But how could I help but degrade myself abjectly given my gender investment in patriarchal expertise.
Don't ask me where, because I (blush) have one of those big blue 30 volume sets of the works that they used to print in East Germany, but Marx also identified communism as the BEGINNING of history, because for the first time consciousness would direct social development.
Innumerable problems have arisen from people taking these off the cuff remarks and assuming that Marx meant something, like scientific eternal verities, when he said it. He takes different perspectives on questions at different times, and those perspectives lead to different characterizations.
The oddest take on class in Marx, strangely enough, is in the Manifesto. The working class is the objective base, but the conscious form of the revolutionary movement is the nation. And at that time, Marx (and Engels, we don't want to forget Engels), were still writing Hegel's account of the history of European nations. So they viewed the Polish national movement as pretty much inherently democratic, but dismissed the South Slavs, down in the Balkans, as already consigned to oblivion and their struggles as somewhere between pointless and reactionary.
To go back to the very beginning of the first post, I should have said, "so what have you been and are you reading along these lines?"
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