Social Class
Canada, and I guess most democracies, styles itself as a classless society. This seems to have two prongs. On the one hand we don't have an aristocracy - that is a class of people who inherit their social position. On the other hand we don't have Marxist classes like bourgeoisie or proletariat.
Both are obviously false - Kings and Queens and Royals enjoy enormous prestige though the influence of these aristocrats is greatly diminished. One rarely encounters them as well.
Marxist classes clearly do exist but nobody wants to talk about them. Popular culture acknowledges social class in songs like Born In the Boondocks - a ballad about a poor man who falls in love with a rich man's daughter which was socially forbidden. Marx had a different idea about class.
For Marx, a person's class was determined by their role in a productive economy. The working class or proletariat performed the actual labour that society needs. The capitalist class or bourgeoisie owned the means of production and hired workers to work for a wage. The capitalist made a profit by selling the worker's production for more than they paid the workers in wages.
Each class had interests. The proletariat was interested in high wages and shorter working hours and safe working conditions. The capitalist class had almost diametrically opposed interests These weren't personal interests - they were interests imposed by a person's place in the economy.
Communists took that class relationship to be fundamentally antagonistic and worked to destroy that system. Things didn't work out well though there were successes. By all accounts communist China was way better for its people than the Kuomintang but they rapidly moved to a new concept of class - the Party became the ruling class and everyone else was a worker who did what they were told.
Attacking a ruling class directly turned out to be a bit like whack-a-mole. The process of destroying one ruling class creates a new one.
Liberal democracies seem to be an attempt to reduce class antagonisms rather than eliminate class. The capitalist class was somewhat constrained by democratic processes that greatly improved the lot of the working class. For a while it worked. My own lifetime may correlate to a time when liberal democracies were working.
That seems to be collapsing.
Leninists created a vanguard of people consciously united by their shared class interests. In a way a democracy needs a population united by a shared interest in making democracy work. Without that shared interest then the rich people take over again.
Democracies depend on values like free and open discussion, a wide tolerance for various ways of living, a freedom from want, and mundane things like accepting the outcomes of elections and paying your taxes.
Over time I've seen those values erode. Now the unity needed among democratic citizens has been eroded by various sorts of information silos that barely talk to each other.
It's no coincidence that that correlates to a rise of so many super billionaires whose interests are manifestly not ours. They know they are wrecking the planet and trying to move to Mars before that happens.
What do you think?
I open the floor.
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.