"All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air."
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
really, people should re-read this. i mean, what is one to make of the "bourgeois ideologists" if not that marx believed that those who shaped ideology were part of the bourgeoisie? (i mean, he says as much numerous times elsewhere.)
"Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole."
then there's this bit: "The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If, by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat."
wow! like, there are classES and they can be reactionary and stuph.
blows my skirt up, it does.
kelley
(whoops! isn't this why I'm not a leninist?)