bourgeoisie

Historically the middle class in European society arose when a new commercial class emerged with interests which could not be identified with those of either the landed aristocracy or the peasants. The bourgeoisie as a social class were a body of merchants that sprang up in the cities of the feudal world in the 12th century. As the medieval feudal system in agriculture and the craft-guilds in industry gave way to a more complex capitalistic organization, it was inevitable that radical changes should take place resulting in the emergence of a new social stratum and the merchant class came into power. Bankers arose to supply the capital and credit needed for large scale enterprises. Wage system replaced private craftmanship, the fellowship of the master-apprentice relation gave way to an economic cleavage of employer and employed.

This middle class bourgeoisie adapted themselves to feudalism and bit by bit achieved economic dominance. The former serfs were emancipated but lost their direct access to the means of production. Thus, the growing capitalists found in them their needed workers, the wage earners, the proletariat. The bourgeoisie stood in a new position as the middle class between the peasants and the land-owner nobility in the countryside. By capitalizing on this new labor and trade dependance, the economy was based on commerce, favoring capital investment and treating labor as a commodity.

The French Revolution was the combined work of the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals. The intellectuals also realized that unless a new principle of cohesion could be found, the world prepared by the bourgeoisie would be an anarchical one in which man would fight man. Marx saw the unfit, the human waste, not as the poor or the economically powerless, but the bourgeoisie capitalist, because he is in a hopeless disagreement with the indications of history.

The ideology of the modern times is a bourgeois ideology and a way of life that tries to serve God and mammon both. For the bourgeois Calvinists, the "struggle for life" and "the survival of the fittest" are welcome slogans. The dominant bourgeoisie became increasingly ambiguous towards established religion; religion, and the aristocratic class which found its protection in religion, was no longer an important adversary. The selfish materialism and arrogance of the puritan Calvinists as the chosen elect blended perfectly with the bourgeois mentality, so in essence, capitalism was made into a religious ideal and ultimately, the devouring beast. Calvinism has always been a middle-class religion in the bourgeois sense and by its very dynamism had created a climate of progress and conflict in which the individuals were set against one another as wage slaves and masters. The result is the modern political parties in America where the class struggle becomes unimportant.

Tillich - The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie. In defiance of the obvious, the bourgeois press is still attempting to maintain the illusion of a "democratic" distribution of capital investment. The domination of the weak by the strong, of the many by the few, of the toilers by the exploiters is a basic law of bourgeois democracy. What sets the United States from other countries is merely the greater scope and the greater heinousness in the contradictions of its capitalism. These contradictions have created a facade of freedom and popular control, and by educating men in the ways of bourgeois politics, conditions them to accept the status quo willingly.
[46, 75, 94, 103, 152, 185, 206]



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