Vivek Chibber
Very big, but it was even bigger in the Chinese Revolution, as you can imagine. One of the essays that Mao Zedong is most famous for is his analysis of classes in the countryside. There was a conceptual problem of what to make these people in the middle.
This is what the New Left did the best work on. More than anyone else, it was Erik Olin Wright, my own teacher — but there were a lot of people in the 1970s who did really good work, and they came to mainly the same conclusion. Alan Cottrell, Guglielmo Carchedi, all these people worked on the conceptual problem and came to the same conclusion, that the middle class has elements of both classes in it.
Here they were really just coming back to what Lenin had said himself and what Mao had said. So there’s a history of, I think, fruitful engagement with the conceptual problems.
If you literally mean that classes don’t exist except for the consciousness and the politics, you don’t even know where to go. You could walk into a C-suite and say, ‘Hey, man, it’s time for the revolution.’
The theoretical problem was that everybody understood Marx to be saying, or rather making a theoretical prediction, that as capitalism went on over time, the petty bourgeoisie would disappear. It would disappear because shopkeepers would not be able to compete against the retail activities of large manufacturers. The manufacturers themselves would start selling their own goods. And then the artisanal classes, owner-operators like carpenters or plumbers or janitors, would also fall under the hammer blows of the greater efficiency of large corporations.
The expectation was that as you see capitalism developing over time, this middle class would become proletarianized. And it would fall into the working class until you only had two groups left standing — capitalists and workers. Now, that didn’t…
Auteur: Vivek Chibber
