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To: Dr. Frank
Though they've never been a part of my everyday vocabulary, I learned those terms in world history.
51 posted on 01/30/2003 10:55:31 PM PST by tiki
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To: tiki
["bourgeois", "proletarian"] Though they've never been a part of my everyday vocabulary, I learned those terms in world history.

Congratulations. So did I. We all did. (For some reason it's deemed quite important to teach all American kids about Marxist terms and assumptions.)

And that's where these terms belong: in history. They have little relevance for our society, today, not much more than does the term "centurion" or "vassal".

Sure, I was taught that "proletarian" meant "working class" while "bourgeois" meant "middle class". I never fully understood this though. The problem is that in America, generally speaking, our "middle class" works, and our working class enjoys a "middle class" lifestyle. So it just doesn't compute. I tried to understand those terms, and I tried to read Marx and all, but something just didn't compute.

But it still goes on: teacher writes "proletarian = working class, bourgeois = middle class" on the chalkboard and 95% of the kids nod their heads so that they seem smart. Lesson learned. Well, what can I say, I wasn't one of them. That's because I actually tried to think about what these definitions meant, and I realized that they were nonsense in our society. Grouping hordes of people into large, vaguely-defined, stereotypical categories so as to perform simplistic analyses on them while ignoring individuals is really more of a 19th century kinda thing anyway. I was never comfortable with the whole exercise myself.

67 posted on 01/30/2003 11:50:52 PM PST by Dr. Frank fan
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