Did Marx underestimate the power of the middle class ?

[limpyhobbler]

7. hmmm pretty interesting

In this chapter it seems like Marx intends to deliver an exposé on various competing socialistic movements and offers his analysis of them.

There is one in the list that seems particularly relevant to our modern situation, and to this question of the role of the middle class, is in Chapter 3 Part 2

Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

So I think he's talking about a capitalist tendency that offers hope, and limited material improvement, to some workers, while at the same time maintaining the the basic relationships of production and organization.

In that last bit he seems to get snarky, when he says how in this tendency every capitalist maneuver is sold to the working class as being for the good of the working class.


Very interesting. Thanks for the link. Haven't had a chance to look at the others yet.