- cross-posted to:
- socialistbooks@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- socialistbooks@lemmygrad.ml
It's free, it's online, it's right there.
Set a timer for 5 minutes, and that's how long you will read for. You don't need to commit to reading the whole thing.
Just 5 minutes.
Please just do it.
Thanks, this provides a lot of good insight.
I guess my confusion came from my limited Marx reading, but in the manifesto he defines the petty bourgeois as something like tradesmen that own there own tools, or small shopkeepers or entrepreneurs. They do own some means of production, in that they have something, that has value and cost money, that assists in their work. A modern day example in my mind is a mechanic, who has to own $10,000 in tools to be able to work on a car on their own.
As differentiated from the wage-laborer, who has their own skill and body alone that does the work. For example, a mechanic that goes to work for a big company, and the company owns all the tools.
Marx doesn't differentiate between a base wage labor class and a priveledged wage labor class. They are the same to him, in my interpretation.
One of the middle quite you provided there mentioned the labor aristocracy. I think this is the concept that I was missing. It is not petit-bourgeious as Marx defined, but a priveledged worker class.
I also am careful to say worker class rather than proletariat, because my interpretation is that the proletariat requires class consciousness, and this is not a given for all wage laborers or workers.
In Settlers, the author names all slave-laborers as proletariat and all white wage laborers as petit-bourgeious. I would say that yes, all slave laborers probably had class consciousness and were part of the proletariat. However, I think that labor aristocracy might be a better term for the white wage-laborers that are named here. Not part of the proletariat because their chud-minds have no need for class consciousness, since their relative comfort if provided by the status quo. But from an economic perspective not part of the bourgeoisie, since they do not own capital.
I could be totally wrong in this interpretation as well. I don't know.
Thoughts?
Yes I agree that Sakai could have used labour aristocracy instead of petite bourgeoisie when describing the white wage labourers.
But as I was writing that sentence, I thought of how, perhaps, there is another dimension to this?
The slave labourers could not escape slavery. Their parents were slave, they were slaves, their children were slaves etc. There was no foreseeable escaping of this slavery (until later on in history). And so, they could never have gotten close to owning the means of production, not even the small amount that the petite bourgeoisie have.
This would be in contrast to the white wage labourers, which technically could escape their working class nature, no matter how rare. I think in one of the chapters Sakai mentions how some white Europeans became indentured servants for a few years, in return for the travel fees/visa, with the hopes of becoming landowners themselves after a while. This freedom is not granted to the slave-labourers. There was no such future for them.
So yes, the white wage labourer and slave labourer has the same relationship to the means of production at the present moment, but that doesn't mean that in the future, the white wage labourer couldn't become closer to the means of production. This doesn't make the white wage labourer a petite bourgeoisie, but they clearly have different chances/opportunities compared to the slaves.
Maybe that was the difference that Sakai wanted to put down? But I'm still not sure why Sakai didn't use the term Labour aristocracy, since the term was already around then, first theorised about by Lenin in "Imperialism: The highest stage of Capitalism".
If I'm recalling correctly from chapter 4, this situation of inheriting land basically ended during the 1840s. But the white workers being non proletariat did not.
I think Sakai wanted to stress the class awareness of the white workers, and didn't want to confuse the issue of who is in the proletariat. That is, the slave labourers were class aware, very much so, and so comprised the proletariat. The white wage labourers considered themselves petit-bourgeois, and so were not class aware, therefore not part of the proletariat - even if, functionally, they should be.
Maybe Sakai just didn't like the term labour aristocracy for some reason - or, like in that really interesting dictionary you posted earlier, defined the labour aristocracy as part of the petit-bourgeois.
Perhaps it is the class awareness aspect, seems most explanatory to me.
Thanks for the good conversation btw, it was v.productive!