It is said that, just before the Sino-Soviet split, Nikita Khrushchev had a tense meeting with Zhou Enlai at which he told the latter that he now understood the problem. “I am the son of coal miners,” he said. “You are the descendant of feudal mandarins. We have nothing in common.” “Perhaps we do,” murmured his Chinese antagonist. “What?” blustered Khrushchev. “We are,” responded Zhou, “both traitors to our class.”
That being said, I don't think you could realistically be a bourgeois communist while still maintaining your wealth and exploitation. But really, is there such a huge difference between a landlord collecting income out of their tenants' pockets, and politicians living off taxes? Genuine question, my best answer is that the difference is the landlord is directly placing themselves in a position where they provide no value at all to society and still leech off of people who need housing, while politicians at least nominally are civil servants.
It just pisses me off when people analogize their position immersed in imperial capitalism to the people at the leading edge of the revolutionary struggle. There are far more radicals who were seduced by capital than the other way around.
Zhou Enlai wasn't bourgeois. He was part of the bureaucratic class which doesn't have a good analog in Western society. The closest equivalent would be some kind of government employee since the bureaucratic class traditionally served the imperial court or were otherwise part of the imperial bureaucracy. And even the bureaucratic class had tiers to it. His particular family wasn't that high up within the imperial bureaucracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_Enlai
That being said, I don't think you could realistically be a bourgeois communist while still maintaining your wealth and exploitation. But really, is there such a huge difference between a landlord collecting income out of their tenants' pockets, and politicians living off taxes? Genuine question, my best answer is that the difference is the landlord is directly placing themselves in a position where they provide no value at all to society and still leech off of people who need housing, while politicians at least nominally are civil servants.
It just pisses me off when people analogize their position immersed in imperial capitalism to the people at the leading edge of the revolutionary struggle. There are far more radicals who were seduced by capital than the other way around.
Zhou Enlai wasn't bourgeois. He was part of the bureaucratic class which doesn't have a good analog in Western society. The closest equivalent would be some kind of government employee since the bureaucratic class traditionally served the imperial court or were otherwise part of the imperial bureaucracy. And even the bureaucratic class had tiers to it. His particular family wasn't that high up within the imperial bureaucracy.
still made for one of the greatest owns of all time.