Ideology and Class Division 

There are three essential ways of human life: aboriginal, village/town, urban.

* * * * *

Aboriginal: familial bands within tribal, cellular units. No private property in “means of production”; no class division.

* * * * *

Village/town life:

Villagers lived within their vernacular domain-of-life, with its local culture. To varying degrees (differing from time-to-time and place-to-place) their fate was subject to influences from the “higher” domains of Authority (state, empire, kingdom, fiefdom) and Church. The aristocrats, lords and priests participated in history, macro-level culture, transportation, communication, literature (i.e. they were literate, whereas few villagers were).

Usually the land was formally owned by (or subject to confiscation by) agencies of the higher authorities. Villagers might have some degree of ownership of parcels of land or a sense of their “own” plot of land via usufruct/identification. In town, the bakers, millers, cobblers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, etc. owned local, community-based means of production - producing for the community or local (bounded) market.

So villagers were subject to a macro level class division (the state and church hovering above), but at the micro level of the village or town there were, for the most part, communitarian-scale (modest) differences of status and wealth. To the extent that there was a sense of local class division at all, it was subjective and personal. This defined the experience of life for the vast majority of people for the five thousand years between the onset of civilization and the modern period.

* * * * *

Urban life:

Urban life was the exception rather than the rule until the Industrial Revolution. It has now enveloped the vast majority of humankind. Within it, ownership of means of production is atomized, unbounded, and impersonal. It is market-oriented rather than community-oriented (the notion of “free enterprise” involves a modern urban sensibility of the owner being free of ties and constraints; free of communitarian loyalties or responsibilities). Class division is everywhere and always an objective ("cold") factor of life.

The ideology of socialism arose in reaction to the paradigm of urban-industrial class division. Socialism posited ownership of means of production as the essence of the problem. Social, rather than private, ownership was specified as the key to liberation ... “the next abolition” (after abolishing ownership of people (slavery), take the next step to abolish ownership of means of production). Its ideological formula: Eliminate the capitalist class, abolish class division, and hold means of production in common such that everyone would be of one class and we would “work for ourselves.”

When revolutions were carried through by socialists, anyone not adhering to the ideology could see that the actual result was state ownership and control. People all worked for the state. And class division was not, in fact, eliminated. A new form of class division arose between: (a) the small layer of the state-based power elite; (b) the higher-level bureaucracy (managers, professionals); (c) everyone else. There was broad equality within the latter class, the vast gray mass of the proletariat - which had no ideology about that condition constituting its “liberation”!

Comments