Anyone else feel the traditional Marxist focus on "class warfare" isn't productive in the first world?
The core concept at the heart of the Marxist proletariat/bourgeois distinction is that although the idea of a "class system" where certain people had more rights than others had been discredited during the Enlightenment, it still existed within society; in certain contexts, some people had the right to perform violence against others (or call in agents of the state to do that violence) because of their right to property. This ability - to control access to the MoP and extort from the workers part of their product - would become the core of the world economy. Hence, the "class system" was not abolished and it was the duty of the lower class, those without property, to overthrow it.
However, the bourgeois/proletariat class distinction is a lot more nuanced than the traditional nobility/peasantry distinction. The bourgeoisie's right to his property extends not from his identity but from that property; this means he can transfer the property, of course, but it has other repercussions. For instance, property can be owned by corporations, rather than individuals. Corporations are of course their selves owned, so the result is that someone can be an "owner" of 1/10000th of a glue factory, for instance. That someone will gain a 10000th of the value the administrators of the factory will be able to extract from its workers (and its consumers through advertising and leveraging monopoly, and the collective through pollution) after wages for the administrators/cost of insurance/taxes/research and development are subtracted. Thus, that person certainly does exploit wage labor, but it is such a minimal amount of income! They will still have to engage in wage labor to support themselves (or else rest on previous income, if they're retired, for instance), where they will be exploited themselves.
In the first world, this person's situation is that of a great deal of people. People are made to save money and to invest that money into financial assets, which means they're indirectly taking part in exploitation of the proletariat. Of course, the first world is not the entire world, and one can just call every denizen of the first world a "bourgeoisie" if they look at how material wealth is systematically torn from the third world and moved to the first, but this is a simplistic solution. What it would propose as a resolution to capitalism is a World War; this would cause immense destruction of the MoP and thus a decline in what communism would be able to provide to people, is unlikely to succeed given the massive military advantages of the first world, and might not even destroy capitalism even if the imperialized powers were victorious; they might just take their opportunity to become the new imperialists. Moreover, as English-speaking imageboard users ourselves who predominately come from the first world, this might not even be in our own interests. Finally, even if the first-third world distinction was eliminated and everyone everywhere owned a 10000th of a whatever factory, it wouldn't somehow make capitalism not flawed, even though it would make everyone "bourgeois".
It's important that we continue to point out the class character of capitalism, but it's also important that we don't misinterpret it. The truth is that people can act as both bourgeoisie and proletariat. For instance, take stock brokers. Stock brokers basically indulge in pure parasitism and bourgeois behavior while they're in the course of doing business, but then they turn around and act as proletariat as they're forced to give some of the wealth they have leeched to the owner of their firm. A great many 1st worlders are in a business of this variety.
So, rather than focus on achieving "justice" for the proletariat, why don't we focus more on pointing out the flaws our system, stemming from class conflict, inherently has? An enormous amount of wealth is wasted by capitalism by allowing people to be socially unemployed (unemployed or "employed" in a position of pure parasitism like our stock broker), by forcing engineers to work in secret and not cooperate, by encouraging the creation of goods of no utility but showing that their owners are wealthy, and by firms continually stealing from the commonwealth to enrich their selves through pollution, advertisement, and other influences. Isn't this approach better than making things into a battle of a "good" side and a "bad" side that are pretty nebulously defined?
