New Rule for Democrats after the election.

[inthebrain]

Democrats following the election on Tues must put "class" on our domestic agenda. Everything we do going forward when discussing Iraq, Economics and Social Policy must revolve around class disaparities.

It's that simple.

Moving forward, the red states will not be won unless this discussion is put on the national agenda. I'm not talking about looking at America in terms of the middle class being a class onto their own. They are a class that has everything in common with the poor and zilcho with the rich. Folks who are consider themselves middle class needs to stop acting as if the wealthy leadership of this country is going to value them because they consider themselves middle class.

We all occupy the same puddle of mud in this society. Until a discussion is held on class in this country we will get no where on health care and the minumum wage.

[TheFarseer]

1. Totally

Kitchen table issues all the way. Healthcare, outsourcing/jobs, education, the debt, and getting people's family members back home from Iraq.

[whistle]

2. A discussion on class absolutely must include this topic....

<snip>
I -- BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS <1>

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The history of all hitherto existing society <2> is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master <3> and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
<More>
<from> Karl Marx and Frederick Engels "Manifesto of the Communist Party - 1848"

http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html

[smalll]

4. Oh dear. I agree with the OP 100% but please, no Marxism!

Only by talking about class-based economic issues can the Democrats re-connect with the majority of America, and shed their upper-middle-class lattes-and-volvos image.

But Marxism just doesn't make sense anymore, history has proven it wrong, especially wrong in the type of quote you posted.

Marx made a lot of sense, but here's I think what history has shown. Marx saw that in most of history, the nobility/peasant class dichotomy was all-important. But the rise of the bourgeoisie was not just the rise of a new, exclusive, hierarchical class. The bourgeois, in fact, IS the modern man. The Marxist concept of the proletarian, which seemed to make a lot of sense in the 19th century, makes almost no sense today. In all of the West as well as in other developing and developed parts of the world (like Asia) the mass man IS a bourgeois, with bourgeois habits and attitudes. Marx in fact understood that the bourgeoisie WAS a radical and revolutionary class at one point in history; his idea of the proletariat taking over that revolutionary and tranfomational role proved itself to be a mirage. The bourgeoisie is STILL the "avant garde" in world history.

[whistle]

5. Well, that may not be the case as this newly evolved bourgeoisie

...class still needs to exploit the proletariat <workers> while supporting the capitalists <Bush's base>

<snip>
The Class Structure of Capitalism
Another of Marx's predictions was the disappearance of the independent small business sector and self-employed professionals. This was not so apparent when Marx was writing. The England of Marx's time was known as a "nation of shopkeepers." Now England, like the rest of the capitalist economies, is a nation of employees. In the U.S. in 1948, small business owners, self-employed professionals and farm owners received 20.2% of U.S. income. By 1989 the income share of this - now much smaller - group had shrunk to 9.6%.

One of the implications of this trend, according to Marx, was that fewer and fewer people would identify with the interests of the capitalists; that capitalism would suffer from political weaknesses as the number of its supporters diminished. However, the disappearing middle class of Marx's time was replaced with growing high and high-middle income sectors composed of managers and professionals working for large firms and government agencies. For the most part salaried, they are not a middle class in the classical economists' sense. But income itself seems to have a powerful formative influence on social attitudes. So far, at least, most of the high and high-middle income groups have supported the retention of capitalism. <More>

http://distance-ed.bcc.ctc.edu/econ100/ksttext/marx/marx.htm

[smalll]

6. Your exerpt posted brings up

the rich-get-richer/poor-get-poorer issue in a Marxist sense - the idea that the petit-bourgeoisie is destined to fall back into the proletariat (and trigger the Revolution by doing so). I agree with the last part about what the middle class is today, and that "income itself seems to have a powerful formative influence on social attitudes." But I continue to think that seeing the average American as a bourgeois rather than as a proletarian makes the most sense today.

What can help the average American today then? (to return to the OPs basic point) I'm not anti-capitalist, but I think there are things the Democrats could do with political power that could improve the lot of the average person. Capitalism HAS made us all richer, but we face certain discrete problems that should be addressed: 1)An increasingly regressive tax system (thanks to Bush). Make taxes fairer. 2) The cost of health care in this awful insurance-based system we face today. Socialize medicine. And 3) The cost of housing. This problem has exploded because yes, the rich ARE getting richer, very much richer, and many more people are getting rich, so housing prices have risen into the stratosphere, and show no signs of really correcting themselves. We need a lot of approaches to this problem as I see it, including encouragement of new technology to build housing cheaper, as well as perhaps even a step to the "right" to ease regulation on construction and on rental practices, and also some old-fashioned state-sponsored housing built for the average family.

If we could just ease the tax burden on the average American and make medicine and housing affordable again we could revive the reality of the American Dream.

[whistle]

7. "...ease the tax burden on the average American...

... and make medicine and housing affordable again", that's the rub!

Bush has locked the country and states in a debt burden that will assure higher taxes at all levels for the next several generations of working class Americans. The housing specualtion bubble burst will send millions of Americans into bankruptcy. Healthcare and medical insurance which already focuses on giving the greatest level of quality care to the wealthiest 20% of Americans and ignoring the bottom 20% altogether, will become even more selective leaving the rest of Americans pay even a greater share of their income for medical care while having to rely on quacks and medical charlitans.

[Union Thug]

3. Spot on. Class is vital. n/t

[paparush]

8. Yes Yes Fucking Y E S!!!!