Obama's Real Change: Destroying the Middle Class

Originally posted by finnegan
Great. Now you can explain to me how you conflate the middle class with the minority of wealthy people who own the means of production. It seem likely that what you mean by the middle class differs from what I do.

Czarist Russia was in many ways similar to the present US. The wealthy didn't represent the bourgeois productive worker, the class that Karl Marx constantly attacks. The wealthy then and now had earned their money, but it was and is the middle class bourgeois that pays the taxes and is resented by the poor. The ones in the cross hairs then and now are producers, not those with old wealth. It isn't Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, or Oprah Winfrey that people jealously hate. It is their boss, who may earn 3 times what he pays them, but works almost 24/7.

The means of production aren't owned by the 1% most wealthy in America. Most of the most productive and innovative companies are privately held, and run by individuals. Of the others the ownership is by millions of stockholders who are not wealthy. Most are middle class and seek a secure retirement via investing. I don't conflate anything. I see reality, and don't try to alter it to suit an agenda.

Originally posted by normbenign
Czarist Russia was in many ways similar to the present US. The wealthy didn't represent the bourgeois productive worker, the class that Karl Marx constantly attacks. The wealthy then and now had earned their money, but it was and is the middle class bourgeois that pays the taxes and is resented by the poor. The ones in the cross hairs then and now are ...[text shortened]... esting. I don't conflate anything. I see reality, and don't try to alter it to suit an agenda.

The industrial revolution transformed Britain first and Russia not until after 1917. Prior to that, as Marx argued, wealth and power was attached to the ownership of land. So Czarist Russia was totally unlike the present USA except of course in the degree to which power and wealth were concentrated into a small part of society selected by heredity and not merit. If you recognise that, then we are making progress.

The people attacked by social groups are indications of their measure of political awareness. You are quite right that workers will often attack the person they can see who earns only a few times what they earn and never appreciate that their true enemy is so vastly wealthy as to be outside their social world entirely. Marx set about trying to educate them out of this political error.

Marx - or at any rate, the Marx who wrote Capital - was not interested in people as individuals and so he was not interested in rich people as such. He was interested in the power of capital itself and the way in which productive relations were organised to benefit the owner of capital at the expense and to the severe detriment of the wage earner. His bourgeoisie were the owners of capital. He predicted that capital had a tendency towards concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands as competition was a process that over time would favour concentrations of economic power.

I am not at all unaware of the role of small and medium sized enterprises in a developed economy nor in the vast spread of people today who directly or indirectly benefit from stocks and shares. However, I think you may need reminding that this wide distribution is in fact being skewed more and more to favour a very small group of extremely rich people, and that the share of wealth and income controlled by other parts of society worldwide and not least in the USA is in serious decline. Similarly, small enterprises are indeed continually squeezed by large dominant rivals in conditions of unfair competition. Marx himself recognised and discussed often the creative destruction that accompanies competition and technological innovation. Yesterday's IBM is displaced by Microsoft which may be seeing its own place disrupted. All that is solid melts into air.

How the 1% hold their wealth is a moot point for now. I suspect you will find they own quite a lot of financial assets. For the middle class who indirectly own or benefit from such assets in their savings and mortgage policies and pension funds, this does not alter their status as wage earners in Marx's class system. There may be more of them numerically but as a proportion of the invested wealth, the amount they own is not greater than the amount owned by the 1%. Check those figures sometime.

Be that as it may, you are making a serious error in identifying the middle class with the Marxist concept of the bourgeoisie and you are not entitled to your own private and personal definition of terms like this. Marx did not attack a middle class which did not even exist for the most part - see again what I wrote above. Your claim is absurd.

Originally posted by normbenign


The means of production aren't owned by the 1% most wealthy in America. Most of the most productive and innovative companies are privately held, and run by individuals. ...

The means of production aren't owned by the 1% most wealthy in America. Most of the most productive and innovative companies are privately held, and run by individuals.

Of course start-ups are privately owned. What is your point? So why are their owners not capable of being members of the 1% club either presently or in prospect? For the US population, that is something like 4 million people and I fail to see why the list of the most wealthy owners (those who "succeed" ) cannot be accommodated within that number. Obviously that leaves room for perhaps 40 million Americans to be in the top 10% of wealthy people. As you know, the way an entrepreneur can become wealthy is to build a company and then sell it. All those hard working, diligent little owners have this ambition. They achieve this by ensuring that they screw their employees for every penny they can. It is rare for an owner to share much of the resulting wealth with the workers who helped them achieve it. They sell the workers as part of the ongoing concern. For some time they may "earn" only a few multiples of their employees' wages, plenty of them fail as they discover that capitalism's dream can go very sour, and a huge proportion of small business is not earning an awful lot and not run terribly well, but that is part of the deal for someone setting out in business.

There is no reason why your statement has to refute the evidence regarding the ownership of the means of production.