I hope it won’t bore you too much to hear a little bit about Marxist theory. Apparently Das Kapital bores actual, self-identified “Marxists” too much, because they seem to be completely illiterate in the language of their own wrong ideas.
As the traditional, voter-appealing apparatuses of the Democratic Party continue to go either insane or inane, something particularly alarming happened. The most important and politically powerful union federation in American history, the AFL-CIO, produced and published a video about the need to “seize the means of production” alongside emojis of “bread and roses” (an achingly beautiful poem worth looking up). The video features self-identified “Marxist roofer” Dan Whelan explaining why taxonomizing class in America by lower, middle, and upper income levels is wrong. “Class is actually determined by a person’s relationship to, or ownership of, the means of production.”
Thing is, Marxist class theory is theory because it is a prediction about the world post-industrial capitalism would inevitably produce. That late capitalist world-to-come has just the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The world of Marx’s 19th century had two more classes (plus, of course, an aristocracy and monarchies proper, though for ideological reasons this wasn’t included). Namely, the deplorable lumpenproletariat and the petite bourgeoisie, people who own means of production but don’t employ anyone — er, exploitatively extract their labor without compensating them for its true value. Think shopkeepers or small business owners.
Now, because Marx was extremely wrong, modern Marxists prattle on about “late capitalism” in spite of the fact that the great mass of modern Americans are not proletarians trying to throw off their chains, but, in fact, something closer to a petite bourgeoisie than anything else in the taxonomy. I don’t claim to know Whelan’s life, but almost any roofer is a member of the petite bourgeoisie. As to the means of production, you don’t see a lot of plantations these days. And the death of the American factory is something workers and AFL-CIO members generally rue, not celebrate. Watch the whole video and you will hear such solidarity-building rhetoric as “the working class: the job they perform is irrelevant.”
The idea of a “middle class” isn’t a fiction peddled by “the rich and the media” to drive a “wedge” between high-earning laborers and their low-earning working class brethren. It emerged because the exact phenomenon Marx said would not and could not come about came about: high-earning laborers leading dignified and happy lives under capitalism. It’s not surprising to see Marxists getting this wrong. It’s just surprising to see them getting Marx so wrong.
