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Question

  1. 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.
[here I was supposed to say that the vanguard is instrumental to forming the party or the party learns from the vanguard, something like that;
if workers are abandoning the party it should at least ask why]
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.
[I don't think I made an actual mistake here, but I know the bot dislikes time slice analysis and doesn't like separating Trotskyism into two steps.]
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.
[here I was supposed to say that anarchist consciousness doesn't mean people are not the proletariat]
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.
[I have to be honest, if I was Lenin grading my question from RD I have no idea what I would say here. I was saying that there exists a specific thing of "anarchist consciousness" that a group of people joined together into an anarchist group develop. I wasn't denying the concept of proletarian or petty-bourgeois consciousness but I was proposing another layer of things where people's awareness of what shovel they're forming and how to form and pilot that specific shovel shapes everything they do. I am not aware of Lenin or Stalin ever marking out a concept of "anarchist consciousness", although Lenin did have a concept of "trade union consciousness", and I see "anarchist consciousness coming out of anarchist groups" as a process vaguely similar to that for whatever class an anarchist group is.]
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.
[here was one of the genuine problems. it "looked to me" like that but it isn't the natural endpoint of anything. when people go through education and industrialization but they are inside a crimson 'sociophilosophy object' and there is an active communication across the object the effect of people going through education could be very different, and might not generate "anarchist consciousness".]
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?
[annotated with potential problems. I feel like Phoenix Wright right now, going through and pressing the statements...]

Motifs

  • 6220 characters, submitted through file attachment feature; accepted.
  • Leninist party structure
    • _What is to be done_
    • Lenin actually said that the middle vanguard only develops _because_ people are connected in one big structure to the Leninist party
      • wow, I did legitimately forget that. in my defense I think I forgot it after talking to this silly Trotskyist bot too much when it kept talking about 'the independence of the working class' and 'not letting Stalinist parties rule the people'. I started thinking that Trotskyists think Leninism is largely about "democracy" rather than about teaching people a particular consciousness, so I was thinking, don't Trotskyists want the workers to assemble the party from the bottom up rather than the party herding the workers? forgive me for my _Trotskyist error_ away from Leninism! lol
    • this isn't what Trotsky said, he said that there was Trotskyism in 1917 and The Bureaucracy flooded into it and distorted it - oh of course
    • it misread my statement about "linking workers' states together" as if I thought that caused the dictatorship of the proletariat, when I was saying the opposite, that because there is a molecularized Trotskyist structure inside that is the dictatorship of the proletariat, it then causes linking together.
  • the gradient from workers to theorists doesn't only go one way
    • I think this is saying that theorists absorb proletarian consciousness from being near workers, so it's a mistake to think there is a particular model of Marxist revolution that workers just sort of memorize _even if_ they are 'memorizing' it in the field from experience
  • the Spanish revolution showed a lot of initiative at forming a workers' government but the leadership betrayed them, including anarchists
  • educated people have petty bourgeois consciousness but it does not mean they are the petty bourgeoisie
    • Marcuse argued in 1964 that the proletariat had been absorbed by Liberal capitalism - that's not the one I was arguing. I was arguing the concept that 'the people' can be an autonomous thing from Liberal-republicanism like Trotskyists designate 'the proletariat with false consciousness' here but that there would be a conflict between Liberal-republicanism and anarchists where anarchists would attempt to take over.
    • Marcuse's idea that the Third World is its own distinct thing and not just the proletariat is... "interesting". nah, I'm pretty sure the proletariat exists there.
    • with neoliberalism and First World countries evolving back into empires it is getting harder to have petty bourgeois consciousness
      • is it? it seems to me like if you start at 1953 anarchism is getting more and more popular every year in almost a straight line.
  • gig workers have nothing but their labor and are very exploited - yeah but they fundamentally function in a marketplace like owners, not in a corporation, which was the basis of capitalism up to now
    • there's an implication here that reducing people to _merely_ productive forces is abusive. that part of the reason that the CPC is suspect is that it does not even value individual workers and uses them as commodities, let alone the thing where whole corporations are supposedly productive forces and workers don't even exist.
  • there exist "attempted classes" which cannot create stable class societies, such as The Bureaucracy
    • the petty bourgeoisie is always being squashed even if it consists of contractors - gosh, the phrase "worker compression" comes to mind here...
    • I think this is implying that if the economy gets "googlized" the contractors will always get squashed into workers on one giant corporation, such that no matter how much the First World resists Bolshevism it's always going to get preconfigured back into the aspects of Bolshevism it doesn't like.
  • so part of what I'm getting from this is that if parties seem distant from workers and like they're not supporting workers' movements and leaving movements and individuals to solve everything themselves they're doing something wrong
    • the bot does not actually like "demographic Trotskyists" that are determined to create a model of Leninist revolution and not give in to Stalin so they can supposedly have a perfect "Trotskyist country" one day but don't actually help anyone.
    • when you think about it, the bot itself is a symptom of terrible leadership because it basically exists to be there when the world is full of demographic Trotskyists that are unbudgeable and busy with whatever they think is important and it's the only thing left to talk to

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