{"id":29993,"date":"2015-02-01T04:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-02-01T09:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29993"},"modified":"2016-09-29T10:44:56","modified_gmt":"2016-09-29T14:44:56","slug":"the-diminishing-applicability-of-marxs-view-of-the-class-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/01\/the-diminishing-applicability-of-marxs-view-of-the-class-system\/","title":{"rendered":"The diminishing applicability of Marx&#8217;s view of the class system"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.theinterim.com\/issues\/society-culture\/elite-ideology-as-class-warfare\/\" target=\"_blank\">Rick McGinnis<\/a> on the steadily reducing relationship between the class system as described by Karl Marx and the modern world:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I blame Karl Marx for a lot of things, but after inspiring some of the most destructive and blood-thirsty governments in modern history, his most abidingly destructive legacy is hobbling our understanding of the word \u201cclass.\u201d For as long as I\u2019ve been alive, when almost anyone talks about the class system they end up invoking images frozen somewhere in the middle of the European 19th century.<\/p>\n<p>Arrogant entitled aristocrats and heartless mill owners; upright bourgeois, dispirited workers and peasants. It\u2019s a world of frock coats and cloth caps and sunless terraced slums under smoke-filled skies, and while it\u2019s a useful image if you want to start a discussion about the Industrial Revolution, it doesn\u2019t do much to help describe the fluid, amorphous, endlessly adaptable way that class works in the modern world \u2013 and probably always has, even if one writer managed to fix the word to a tether at a spot roughly between Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.<\/p>\n<p>Which is why I don\u2019t have much hope that Joel Kotkin\u2019s <em>The New Class Conflict<\/em> (Telos Press, 220 pages) will do much to budge our discussion of class to a point somewhere closer to the world of suburbs, computers, megamalls, and package vacations. It\u2019s not that Kotkin\u2019s book doesn\u2019t struggle \u2013 mostly successfully \u2013 to make a discussion about class relevant, but that decades of framing class in antique trappings has made the word and everything it invokes seem anachronistic, or even irrelevant, to modern people and especially Americans.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Whether intended or not, Kotkin points out that encouraging people to live in crowded cities not only stifles the ownership of private property that\u2019s been a mark of increasing mass material prosperity for two centuries, but it re-creates a renting class at the mercy of moneyed landowners that he describes as a \u201cnew feudalism.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>H\/T to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fivefeetoffury.com\/2015\/01\/26\/rick-mcginnis-elite-ideology-as-class-warfare\/\" target=\"_blank\">Kathy Shaidle<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rick McGinnis on the steadily reducing relationship between the class system as described by Karl Marx and the modern world: I blame Karl Marx for a lot of things, but after inspiring some of the most destructive and blood-thirsty governments in modern history, his most abidingly destructive legacy is hobbling our understanding of the word [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,25,7,53],"tags":[780,86,1076],"class_list":["post-29993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-economics","category-history","category-politics","tag-communism","tag-criticism","tag-karlmarx"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7NL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29993"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29995,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29993\/revisions\/29995"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}