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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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There's a reason communism is the bourgeois ideology par excellence.

As a linguist, this is one of the best examples of linguistic drift I've ever read.

The 1800s communists and bourgeois would have obviously disagreed with this sentence (because communism was about stripping the bourgeois of their power and giving it to the working class).

But you're not using these terms how Marx and his contemporaries used them. The way I'm reading you is that: the bourgeois is idealized by the DINK couple who works an email job and got a degree in "gender-studies"; communism may-or-may-not be the traditional purely economic theory, but it likely has incorporated a lot of generic social leftism (that we would expect to be taught in a gender-studies program).

Is it really "drift" though?

Even in the 1800s, communism tended to be more popular amongst students, intellectuals, and the idle rich than it was amongst farmers and factory workers.

Lenin (yes that Lenin) laments this in his own writing and cites it as one of the reasons that a vanguard party is neccesary. You see, the problem with giving power directly to the working class is that they will use it to persue thier own interests rather than those of the revolution. The implications of the interests of the proletariat differing from those of the revolution appearing to have been either lost upon or intentionally side-stepped by Lenin and subsequent communist thinkers.

Incorrect, I am using these terms in the same ways Marx and communists in general originally used them. I am however saying something that communists sought to hide about themselves for tactical reasons.

Marx and Engels themselves were of bourgeois extraction (the latter the son of a wealthy factory owner, no less), and most of the original communist intelligentsia were too. Communist social theory seeks to abolish such class distinctions through a unification of all of society into a classless whole. It isn't inherently against the bourgeoisie (Marx himself says as much).

However, Marx saw the victimisation of the proletariat as a powerful force ready to be captured, which is why he and his contemporaries designed polemics against bourgeois rule (really capitalist rule) because they thought that a proletarian revolt would be the best vehicle for their revolutionary social engineering project.

However however, Marx's original predictions that the proletariat would be amenable to his revolution has proven false, and thus communists have had to seek different strategies, most famously abandoning the capture of economic classes for socio-cultural minority causes. But the original verbiage has stuck and become contradictory.

Your typical gender-studies student attacking "the bourgeoisie" which she ostensibly belongs to is engaging in an ancient lie devised for a defunct political stratagem. Meanings change, symbols don't.

In all this, a neutral observer of communism will notice a pattern emerging of a revolutionary vanguard made of educated bourgeois counter-elites that is looking for a popular coalition to drive against their internal class enemies. And this makes communism, in a bout of irony that would have immediately sent me to the worst of gulags, a bourgeois ideology. Perhaps the most bourgeois ideology. One would have to argue whether it is more or less characteristic than Liberalism, its progenitor, but that's a whole different can of worms.

Interestingly, the points I'm making were at one time part of Soviet politics, Bukharin and the NEP supporting "right" were really supporters of the peasantry against the cities whose more influential urbanite population is quite literally what the term originally designates.

You're right that there's a lot to say about the linguistic drift of the term, but it went the other way around of what you're thinking. Marx's politics made the term for urbanite (bourg literally meaning city) which he used into a political category and epithet. In moving to designate email-job "coastal elites", it is merely returning home.