Comment Re:Perhaps the wording was obtuse? (Score 1) 39
In the first place, I'm offering brief quotations as linkage to the fully quoted passage, rather than in-lining my remarks.
OK, thank you for the clarification. I wasn't sure based on what you wrote if you stopped where you thought the idea of the statement ended, or if you stopped there just to highlight that sentence without doing a longer quote.
In the case of the Communist Manifesto, a single sentence is usually a single thought. Sometimes a single thought is spread over multiple sentences in this document but I don't think I've seen him ever write a sentence where he incorporated multiple thoughts - or at least, not thoughts that hadn't been introduced earlier in the same chapter. In this vein is it acceptable for me to then assume that if you raise a question by quoting a part of a sentence that you want to discuss the entire sentence (at least, unless explicitly stated otherwise)? I just want to make sure I understand what questions you are raising and how, here.
And in the second place, I'm just really not sure that the bourgeoisie ever accomplished Marx's stated outcome:
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
I guess it makes partial sense if you consider the transition of some of these professions from ones involving patrons to commission musical works, or endow universities.
I would argue from my experience that the only one from that list who is not manipulated at the whim of the market is the priest. I have not seen the market as a tool that benefits anyone from the lower economic echelons.
That said, this smacks of an evidence-free charge to make the bourgeoisie into bigger super villains, or something.
I wouldn't say he's trying to make them into "villains", he is trying rather to show what happens when one class of people has unchecked dominance over another and the dominated class has close to no opportunity to change it on their own. This may, again, be human nature - but that is what made the idea of communism so revolutionary as it hadn't been done before (and arguably still hasn't been done).