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Elsie H.'s avatar

When I said that I'm unusual in that I have gentility without cash, what I meant is that I'm a poor person with rich parents, which is to say that I'm not clearly proletarian, but I'm not clearly bourgeois, either. The thing is, because of generational shifts in political ideology, what with Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s, an historically large portion of young people in the West are in this strange boat, that is, being poor people with rich parents.

I mean, yes, obviously, Bourdieu talked about this to some extent as "forms of capital", and, obviously, I know that, yes, Bourdieu was a mixed bag, in that, among other things, his analysis of less-monetary but no-less-beneficial relations to power very quickly got recuperated as the corporate-HR "check your privilege" media spectacle we know and love...

So I guess my point is that when you say that identifying as LGBTQIA or using the specially flavored Pride flag of the month is "bourgeois", it kind of comes across as saying that angry 19-year-olds on Twitter—who still may very well have, for instance, been cut off financially by their rich parents for being gay (this did not happen to me, but it very much happens to others)—are "bourgeois" solely for all of the non-monetary capital they received up until that point.

Which is to say that calling terminally online trans kids drowning in student-loan debt "bourgeois" is about as coherent or Marxist as calling people "bourgeois" for eating fresh vegetables or whatever.

So anyway maybe don't call the rando teenagers who are mean to you online "bourgeois" if you want anyone to take your legitimately Marxist class analysis seriously?

And maybe recognize that Late Capitalism has done a really good job of muddling inter-generational class reproduction and, as a consequence, has done a really good job of muddling materialist class analysis under the terms of a German dude writing in 1850s London?

Maybe recognize that materialist conceptions of class inherently dialectical, so the contradictions liberals abuse in order to recuperate Marxist concepts are kind of just part of the dialectic, and that trying to squeeze people into Victorian-era class definitions at this people is farcically idealist?

And then maybe recognize that being a tragicomic farce is really not a great way to achieve any meaningful structural change in the direction of a Communist society?

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