Bourgeois Society (or “capitalism”) Bourgeois Society is the social formation in which the commodity relation – the relation of buying and selling – has spread into every corner of life. The family and the state still exist, but – the family is successively broken down and atomised, more and more resembling a relationship of commercial contract, rather than one genuinely expressing kinship and the care of one generation for the other; the state retains its essential instruments of violence, but more and more comes under the sway of commerical interests, reduced to acting as a buyer and seller of services on behalf of the community. The ruling class in bourgeois society is the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production as Private Property, despite the fact that the productive forces have become entirely socialised and operate on the scale of the world market. The producing class in bourgeois society is the proletariat, a class of people who have nothing to sell but their capacity to work; since all the means of production belong to the bourgeoisie, workers have no choice but to offer their labour-power for sale to the bourgeoisie. This system of buying and selling labour-power is called wage-labour and is characteristic of bourgeois society, though it has been around since the Peasant Revolt of 1381. The classic form of wage labour is payment for work by the hour or week. Nowadays many workers work on the basis of contracts and piece-work but these forms only disguise the underlying relationship, which remains that of wage-labour. Money and all forms of credit reach their highest development in bourgeois society. As a result, life in bourgeois society “happens” to people in much the same way as the weather happens to people, with money flowing around apparently according to its own laws. To put this another way, in bourgeois society there is a “fetishism” of commodities;– just as tribal peoples believed that their lives were being determined by trees and animals and natural forces possessing human powers, in bourgeois society, peoples lives are driven by money and other commodities, whose value is determined by extramundane forces; instead of ethics and morality being governed by traditional systems of belief and imagined spiritual forces, there is just the ethic of cash-payment. NB: The German for “bourgeois society” is bürgerliche Gesellschaft, and this is usually translated into English as “Civil Society”. See Engels discussion of the translation of bürgerliche Gesellschaft in his Letter to Marx, 23rd September 1852. This phrase was originally meant to refer to that “war of all against all” that grew up outside of both the state and family, governed only by money. Nowadays, “civil society” is frequently used to denote that domain outside of the state and business – voluntary association of various kinds.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 22:50:58 +0000
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