Fuser and CWR are, of course, correct.
First and foremost, the thread goes into Baristas. Someone that often makes minimum wage, working part time, selling his or her labor in order to pay bills. It's working class.
Second, let's throw a few more definitions out there:
Lenin, explaining this concept to peasants, wrote:Bourgeois means a property-owner. The bourgeoisie are all the property-owners taken together. A big bourgeois is the owner of big property. A petty bourgeois is the owner of small property. The words bourgeoisie and proletariat mean the same as property-owners and workers, the rich and the poor, or those who live on the labour of others end those who work for others for wages.
Plaro wrote:Okay, well how about some CEOs who manage means of production but do not own it.
Marx wrote:In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.
But all and all, fuser is ultimately correct to point out that, "class is defined by your relationship with the "'means of production.'"
This is something I'm realizing people just don't get about Marxism. Nobody drew a big elaborate picture of exactly what the future was going to be like. Marxists analyze conditions of the past and present and then draw conclusions. It's an ideology in the sense that Epicurian thought and Adam Smith's capitalism are ideologies. Not in the sense that Plato came up with a perfect society idea that could not be translated onto Earth by Dionysius II, or latter-day libertarians look to the perfect system in their minds to come falling to Earth.
We examine material conditions in a dialectical way and come up with solutions. We're not promoting a single wonderful governmental system that Marx put together before he died as a prophet. We're using his (and others) line of reasoning to examine the past and present. As such, we look at how people relate to various systems past and present. Thus, we look at the relationship to the means of production rather than assuming we have these steady building blocks that we can manipulate. This nature of the thought is the very reason we Marxists tend to fragment into countless groups instead of goosestep lock-step onto a glorious libertarian or fascist future.
Or maybe CLR James contrasts the analytic verses the Platonic schools of thought better than I do:
CLR James wrote:It was not that the Greeks had such simple problems that they could work out simple solutions or types of solutions which are impossible in our more complicated civilizations. That is the great argument which comes very glibly to the lips 26 of modem enemies of direct democracy and even of some learned Greek scholars. It is false to the core. And the proof is that the greatest intellectuals of the day, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others (men of genius such as the world has rarely seen), were all bitterly opposed to the democracy. To them, this government by the common people was wrong in principle and they criticized it constantly. More than that, Plato spent the greater part of his long life discussing and devising and publishing ways and means of creating forms of society, government and lay which would be superior to the Greek Democracy. And yet, Plato owed everything to the democracy.
He could think and discuss and publish freely solely because he lived in a democracy. We should remember too that the very ideas of what could constitute the perfect society he was always seeking, came to him and could come to him only because the democracy in Greece was itself constantly seeking to develop practically the best possible society. It is true that Plato and his circle developed theories and ideas about government and society which have been of permanent value to all who have worked theoretically at the problems of society ever since. Their work has become part of the common heritage of Western Civilization.
But we make a colossal mistake if we believe that all this is past history. For Plato’s best known book, The Republic, is his description of an ideal society to replace the democracy, and it is a perfect example of a totalitarian state, governed by an elite. And what is worse. Plato started and brilliantly expounded a practice which has lasted to this day among intellectuals — a constant speculation about different and possible methods of government, all based on a refusal to accept the fact that the common man can actually govern. It must be said for Plato that, in the end, he came to the conclusion that the radical democracy was the best type of government for Athens. Many intellectuals today do not do as well. They not only support but they join bureaucratic and even sometimes totalitarian forms of government.
The intellectuals who through the centuries preoccupied themselves with Plato and his speculations undoubtedly had a certain justification for so doing. Today there is none. What all should study first is the way in which the Greeks translated into active concrete life their conception of human equality. The Greeks did not arrive at their democracy by reading the books of philosophers. The common people won it only after generations of struggle.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!
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