Re: Forwarded from Anthony (on fascism)

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: Forwarded from Anthony (on fasc,
el 16 Jul 00, a las 19:41, Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx dijo:

>
>
> "Workers World, Chicago Bureau" wrote:
>
> > >No, the petty bourgeoisie are
> > >(fundamentally) exactly that: small businesspeople (with farms,
> > >shops, etc.).  On the one hand, they have little real power in
> > >society and are oppressed and driven out of business by the big
> > >bourgeoisie.  On the >other hand, their "social being" as far as
> > >their livelihoods is concerned is >tied
> > to the market; they dream of becoming large bourgeois; they exploit
> > >labor
> > >when possible, although they don't have the capital to exploit very
> > >>many laborers.
>
> True. I agree with your definition of petty bourgeoisie. My point was
> that, in the final analysis, petty bourgeois is a *bourgeois* by
> virtue of his/her class position. S(he) is not a proletarian. A petty
> bourgeois is not separated from the means of production as a worker
> is. Marx says in the Manifesto that petty bourgeois fluctuates
> between proletariat and bourgeoisie and "ever rebelling itself as a
> supplementary part of bourgeois society" and adds that "as modern
> industry develops they will completely disappear as an independent
> section of modern society; to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture
> and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen".
>
> >
> > >Now, when you try to apply these categories to situations other
> > >than >fully developed capitalist countries with a mature class
> > >structure, I think >you are undoubtedly going to run into problems
> > >if you don't make >adjustments.

This is a very very very insightful observation. Argentina, probably
the most proletarianized country in Latin America, is at the same
time the most "petty bourgeois" one.

In this country, and elsewhere in the Third World (or what-you-call-
them, we know what kind of animal we are talking about), the
situations that arise call for great imagination and boldness, and a
decission to reject any dogmatic attempt to apply ready made analyses
which to a certain extent are just "consequences" of a theoretical
model that abstracts the conditions and experiences of countries
where the classes of modern capitalism have developed in a more or
less unhindered way.

What is usually known as the "Argentinian middle classes", a
distinctive trait of Argentina as well as Uruguay (which we are being
forced to lose under the dictatorship of the current, self-
ingurgitating, final implosion of our dependent capitalisms), are not
exactly the same thing that the model would describe.

These classes are (or, rather, were) a rather undifferentiated mass
of small shop owners, practitioners of the liberal professions
(engineers, doctors, lawyers, first and foremost; architects deserved
a special status due to the "artistic" side of their business), white
collars and other dependent people dedicated to control and non
manual jobs.  A good deal of this mass of "middle class", in fact,
lived out of the earnings of the differential rent provided by the
fertile Pampa soils as State employees, teachers in the once
expansive (and inclusive) public schooling system, and so on.

Others simply spent their life away doing nearly nothing at public
offices through the good help of some political godfather. This was
quite common in Buenos Aires City and the so much idolatrized Jorge
Luis Borges had no problem in accepting such a job at a minor public
library during the 30s. The interesting arrangement would not stand
the test of Peronism, when Borges was (brutally? let us read further)
transferred to the inspection of  chickens and hens. In fact, and in
my own opinion, this was a slight punishment for the man who
portrayed the Peronist workers (that is, the actual Argentinian
working class) as a mob of criminal, racist, anti-Semite dark souled
stinking rapists in his tale "La fiesta del monstruo".

Borges himself, the poet laureate of oligarchic establishment, was
not an oligarch, but rather a petty bourgeois of mixed Argentinian
and English roots. But so were a host of less fortunate people,
mostly trying to eke out a living in the midst of the misery and mud
of the infamous Argentinian 30s, and still other layers, of small
farmers who exploited Creole agricultural workers and struggled in
order to get the ownership of the land so that they would not have to
go on paying rent to the landowners. This petty bourgeoisie began to
transform itself only during the late 40s and the 50s, when a new
economy, oriented towards the domestic market, appeared under
Peronism.

During the 60s and 70s, in a process that is almost finished now but
still goes on, the Argentinian middle classes were subject to a slow
process of differentiation. The decissive years were the ones between
1966 and 1975, probably. This period saw the old middle classes split
in two (the hyperinflation of 1975 and the indexation laws that
shortly after followed may be signalled as the decissive moment). On
the privileged side there remained the "have" middle classes, on the
side of the losers, the "have nots".  These, the wage earning middle
classes, have been approaching the level of living of the manual
workers at a steady pace, while the few "winners"  spent their
earnings travelling abroad, going to purchase tours in Miami (or in
Uruguaiana, if they were not wealthy enough), or simply investing in
one financial bubble after another in the myriad swindles that
appeared in Argentina after the 1976 coup.

Today, these "middle classes" are finally transformed in two
different things. But the lower ranks of these classes do not weld
with the manual workers (who had -on the other hand- arrived at
better living standards than the lower middle classes themselves
during the late 40s and early 50s, thus showing that it is not just
wages which define the divide). There are many issues at stake here,
and to a certain point the color divide is still somehow operating.

The color divide in Argentina, however, does not have the meaning
that it has in the USA. But will go on some other day. It is late,
and I am tired.

A hug to all,


Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxx
NUEVA DIRECCIÓN ELECTRÓNICA DESDE EL 10 DE JULIO DE 2000
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