Max Sawicky wrote:
> > Now if I buy
> > stock, even one share, it would mean that at the age of 44, I will have
> > stepped out of the proletariat into the bourgeoisie (as the pettiest of
> > petit bourgeois, to be sure) . . .
I must have missed (luckily) the post this nonsense comes from. It is a strange malady, this desperate attempt to escape from class analysis into some sort of subjective never-never land in which the most trivial matters can be dignified as "class."
>
> Rubbish. Numerous union members have pension plans
> which own stock. If they are bourgeoisie, then the
> definition loses all meaning.
Max is kind to call it rubbish. It is more like malicious rubbish. Similar views provided the basis upon which the SDS weather people erected their bizarre political theories. A local weatherwoman (I unfortunately financed her trip to a conference in Texas) drove down with some Chicago Weathermen and came back out of her mind. She later argued that the "American Working Class" was so incorrigibly racist and imperialist that the U.S. could achieve socialism only under occupation from the P.L.A.
>
> If you work all your life at a modest standard of
> living, accumulating modest wealth, you are not
> bourgeoisie by any sensible definition.
In fact that "modes wealth," consisting only of postponed consumption, is actually part of variable capital in a marxist sense, which the capitalist class steals today for its own purposes, returning it in dribs and drabs to the retired.
>
> I have a friend who invented some little gadget
> that made him rich at the age of 40 or so. He
> has retired now, in his early 50's. He's a
> legitimate candidate for bourgeoisie.
Yes. But technically, I suppose he is (1) a member of that sub-division of the capitalist class called "rentiers" and (2) depending on how rich his rich is, probably only a very small capitalist. (I suggest that petty producers -- the best translation of petit bourgeois -- who merely retain their own surplus value -- and small capitalists might be called "petty bourgeois" as an indication of perhaps politically relevant "status" as opposed to class.
>
>
> So relax, you're still among the wretched of the earth.
>
> Cheers, MBS
Cheers to you to MBS.
Carrol