Research talk:x4mer/FinalClass01
Question
- How do we know the petty bourgeoisie is not the final class of humanity before the abolition of classes? (question)
Prompt
How do we know the petty bourgeoisie is not the final class of humanity before the abolition of classes?
At the very start of a Marxist revolution, Leninist parties come to exist by building up people who have some amount of expertise in historical patterns, organizing, and dialectical materialism. The central party of a given region watches other movements and attempts to predict how to get all the workers' movements organized into one large structure that is capable of resisting any remaining non-proletarian movements and creating a workers' state. Then, during the later stages of that process the central party tries to join up with the most class-conscious workers to create a vanguard between the central party and the masses of workers which will be able to meaningfully run a government by the people. Stalin's Marxism stops at recognizing this overall 3-level structure as the workers' state, while Trotskyists want the middle vanguard to break out and realize its own government that removes any bureaucratic elements, structures, or processes of the original central party, and perhaps eventually abolishes it. At some point in the process of the middle vanguard taking over and becoming "central" the dictatorship of the proletariat is created, which enables multiple workers' states to link together.
The problem with this is that in First World countries people are very spread-out and movements are often too sparse and isolated to join up effectively. In the early stages of attempting to form a Leninist movement, very few people have any incentive to care about Marxism or Materialism at all, while just a few Marxist theorists argue about it. Meanwhile, all the movements that form locally are generally anarchist, and very anticommunist; they will fixate on abstract notions of taking "institutions" (social structures) ranging in size from a workplace to a nation-state and carrying out operations of leaking information about the structure's misdeeds and pressuring the structure from the outside until it is either destroyed or contains only individuals that perform the behaviors the people outside consider moral.
People like Lenin and Krupskaya believed in the power of education to transform the people toward Materialism and toward the proletariat. But what's been observed in First World countries is that as people get more educated they get more willful. Peasants are very willing to go along with combining everyone into a workers' state, but once a country is full of industry and educated people they all become obsessed with "the individual" and no individual ever getting second priority in a movement or else wrecking all the world's movements and governments until said political factions start out with the same concept of an ideal society. I see a lot of talk in First World countries that their civil rights movements have actually "discovered" important truths that parties aren't allowed to forget, but all of these findings are basically incomprehensible to any Leninist or Dengist party in the Third World, and frequently dismissed as total nonsense. The charitable perspective there is that when people start talking about how LGBT+ people and women's movements to attempt to burst open the Soviet Union or China have taught everyone that progressive movements are combinations of demographics excluded from society that refused to settle for any incorrect picture of them, the efforts of workers to industrialize society and pay for later generations' education have changed society just like Lenin and Krupskaya said. The strange thing is that when countries become educated and industrialized the whole process of starting a Leninist party becomes completely divorced from the people. Countries fill up with product categories, jobs run out, people become educated anyway, and then a significant majority of people just do not understand Marxism or often Materialism at all, and everyone has trouble being good enough to join a group of Leninist theorists but also "knows" that if Leninist theorists will be busy arguing amongst themselves and won't be ready to interact with them for the next 30 years they "have to" create theories of social movements solely on the basis of Liberal-republicanism and anarchism. The more this progresses, the harder it gets for Leninist theorists to actually predict social movements at all to the point of correctly predicting a meaningful crisis of capitalism capable of joining them, and the more nightmarishly difficult it gets for Leninist theorists, the harder it is for workers to become conscious of how to organize everybody around them and become the middle vanguard that keeps a traditional Leninist workers' state going. As far as I understand Lenin thought there was a gradient from workers to Leninist theorists and the middle vanguard was just workers slowly becoming more educated toward the point of optionally becoming Leninist theorists; if they don't become theorists, then the entire nation-wide organization at once still disciplines people and "learns" almost as if it was a living thing. But in the first world it seems like there is just one big antagonism developing between Leninist theorists who want to organize people and seas of educated people and tiny contractors who don't desire being organized and are fighting them. The ICFI seems to have a hypothesis that gig workers are the proletariat but because of all this I doubt that's true. It looks to me like whole First World economies are just transforming into the petty bourgeoisie and developing petty-bourgeois consciousness. But it also looks to me like this is the natural endpoint of people going through education and industrialization like Lenin wanted them to. Countries full of peasants want to build a republic to fight off colonialism but countries full of workers eventually start to understand the concept of taking control of their own destinies as a population and that they can't wait for Leninist theorists to arrive and help them but instead have to educate themselves and be responsible "now" to become the kind of proactive, informed people who would become Leninist theorists... but then this understanding simply transforms them into the petty bourgeoisie and thwarts Leninist parties. What if Marxism has been wrong and the proletariat is actually an anomaly while socialist transition inevitably restores the petty bourgeoisie? How would we know the difference?
Usage notes
- You are allowed to post LLM prompts as nickels (the part you wrote), as long as they stay in one of the
namespaces and there are no direct quotes from response text. Concisely describing abstract propositions that turn up several times inside response text is fine. - It's recommended you include all of the AI's "references", such that each prompt becomes a sort of 'combination nickel' that happens to cover twenty links instead of one. If any of the pages referenced are already nickels, you should link the nickel page.
Links
- Thread ID (for search purposes):