/lit/ - Literature

>>18779810
Originally, the term 'bourgeoisie' etymologically referred to burghers, those that lived in chartered towns reserved for market exchange. Legally, in the middle ages, the burghers came to encompass not just urban artisans - tended to own little more than the tools of their trade - but also proprietors, owners of property privately, or apart from, the princely estate.

What's important about the "bourgeoisie" is that as labor becomes exchangeable as private property, the privileges traditionally reserved for those of a certain amount of wealth as a consequence of the ownership of property could now be asserted for everyone who sold their labor for a wage.

So... "proletarians" - wage-laborers - are bourgeois, and the terms in which they assert their rights as laborers, they do so as proprietors of labor. As bourgeoisie!

The problem is that, in advanced industrial production, the development of the division of labor, instead of creating more jobs and raising wages, does the opposite of that; as property in production is divided into, on one hand, the wage-labor of the proletarian, and on the other, the means of production of the the capitalist. Wealth inequality isn't the problem, but rather the consequence, of the separation of bourgeois and proletarian, which is more than the division between wage-laborer and capitalism, but the contradiction wherein the very rights that protect workers also enables their exploitation.

For Marx, something more is needed than bourgeois right - and that's where the critical concept of the proletariat emerged; not as the most oppressed class, but rather as the class that embodied how the industrial revolution ruptured the very premises of modern freedom. Whether or not Marx was right or wrong in his prescriptions is ultimately secondary to the reality he aspired to reveal: the crisis of civilization, which continues to haunt us to this day.

>>10331166
Example of social realism by Diego Rivera. He was married to Frida Kahlo.
Detail of his painting Man, Controller of the Universe.