Cartertonian wrote:Indeed. This is the impediment that stops me in my tracks, no matter how far left any of the various political tests place me.
I simply do not and cannot accept that the proletariat - as per the Marxist definition - have any business being in control or in charge of anything. As my late father would have said, you don't leave the organ-grinding to the monkeys, or in more contemporary terms, you don't put the lunatics in charge of the asylum.
People develop the ability to lead by getting practice leading. Leadership is not an inherent quality, it is a consequence of a person's experiences. Capitalist societies don't give people very many opportunities to lead unless they are fortunate. There are always plenty of people able to take the next step up from working to managing.
Given the context of the times in which Marx et al were writing, it's unsurprising that there would be a philosophical and ideological backlash against the dehumanisation of the workers, rendering them little more than cogs in a machine. That was pretty horrific and inhuman and needed to be stopped.
Correction: needs to be stopped. You are incorrectly using the past tense when this is still going on. Even in western societies... even in the United States. You've never worked in the service sector before, have you? Just because labor laws prevent companies from working people twelve hours a day and require employers to act in a somewhat less blatantly horrific manner does not mean they have stopped alienating their workers and treating them as "cogs in a machine." In today's world, companies just shove their production overseas so they can continue to treat people as slaves.
Again, in the context of its time, perhaps the Russian revolution needed to happen, but the people who took the reins in the wake of said brutality were not boiler-suited and booted factory workers or, where they had been, they were clearly a cut above their erstwhile labouring colleagues.
Yes, the Bolsheviks staged a coup and took power away from a burgeoning system that pretty much was run by local councils. That's history.
Which brings us back to alternative definitions of class - beyond these ridiculous economic determinants.
Class is defined by one's relationship to the means of production. That classification works pretty well.
Take the military. I can tell in a matter of minutes whether a soldier has the makings of an officer.
So what? Socialist institutions would operate differently. The officers that serve well in an authoritarian institution like the military wouldn't get anywhere in a democratic institution like a socialist collective.
Only a very few will make that particular grade. Transfer that analogy to society.
Why? Society is not a larger version of the military. People who made great military officers often make terrible managers--if they can't adapt the leadership skills they developed as officers to a more democratic style of management in the private sector. Consensus-building is more important in the private sector. It's an essentially vital skill if we were living in a socialist society.
How many of your boiler-suited and booted proletariat would make the grade in any kind of social leadership position?
The virtue of a socialist system would be that the people capable of being leaders would actually have an opportunity to become leaders, while the ill-suited but overqualified would get shuffled back down. When leadership is determined by consensus rather than bureaucratic structures, competent leadership tends to be the result. That's not
absolutely true, but it is an observable tendency. A consensus-driven model for promotion may lead to less great leaders, but it leads to a lot more competent leaders.
About the same proportion I would guess.
If institutions were more open generally, we would probably find a great many more people capable of being competent leaders... because more people would have leadership experience. More people would have grown up with some level of leadership responsibilities. Moreover, the people electing leaders would have a
lot more experience learning how to judge the leadership qualities of others. If the norm in society was for groups to elect leaders, then not only would people have more leadership experience, people would also have more
voting experience.
But, in the Marxist analysis, you guys would still classify that small proportion who have the wit to do anything about it as still working class.
Not so. As they became managers, they would not be workers. Why? Because their relationship with the means of production would change. Class isn't definite; a person's class can change as their relationship to the means of production change.
and what are these values and morality of the bourgeoisie...apart from complete bollocks?
You're expressing that yourself with your insistence that you can tell a soldier from an officer candidate at a glance. Sure, you probably can look at someone and talk with them a bit and figure out if they have the sorts of values and bearing that would lead to being a good officer. Or, in other words, values and bearing that are in-line with your organization's expectations.
In the specific case of the bourgeoisie, those values include things like a willingness to put profits over people, a willingness to submit to authority above you, inculcated impressions of superiority over the poor, etc.
And why, by association, are the values and morality of the proletariat in any way superior?
They're superior
for the proletariat because they are self-defined. Classes define values that work to their own benefit.
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