• duderium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I feel like options are drying up for petite bourgeois scum. Restaurants can’t compete with fast food chains (shitty as they are), climate change is fucking the resource extractive petite bourgeoisie (lobstermen for instance), and now the haute bourgeoisie is snapping up every housing unit in the country. Proletarianization is inevitable for the petite bourgeoisie (which usually turns to fascism as a result) while the proletariat and labor aristocracy will have no reason to expect anything positive from capitalism. There will be no upward mobility—revolution will be the only way out.

    • EffortPostMcGee [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

      It comes from the Manifesto, where Marx talks about how this represents the beginning of the movement towards class struggle. Still, it seems very prescient to what is happening in the west.