Re: [Marxism] DISILLUSIONED WITH MARXMAILers!

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Lause wrote:
> 
> As with much of this silliness, the social description smudges into an
> implicit set of ideological values....

At one time petty producers made up a huge sector of the population:
farmers, attorneys, doctors, independent merchants, plumbers,
carpenters, all sorts of small businesses (that were _really_ small, so
the owner worked in them). But even 100 years ago large numbers of those
who thought of themselves as belonging to this category were badly
mistaken. Hurstwood in Dreiser's Sister Carrie is in lifestyle certainly
a petty producer (or petty bourgeois if you will, or "middle class").
But when he lost his paycheck he was almost immediately on a rapid slide
into pauperism.

Today a sector of the proletariat is very highly paid -- but like
Hurstwood a hundred years ago, their sense of themselves as "middle
class" (or as, according to religious marxists, "petty bourgeois") is
badly mistaken.

Spontaneous working-class consciousness (even among very  _poorly_ paid
workers) is more apt than not to be the consciousness we label "petty
bourgeois," but the source of that consciousness is another and
important question.

Carrol


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