Yet this antiquated theory/terminology is what the hard left presents us. Any wonder it doesn’t sell? Any economic approach that denies human nature is doomed to fail. (Witness the War on Drugs, in which self-described capitalists deny that capitalist theory applies.)

To a rural New Englander, and it holds in rural Utah as well, there are few corporations and fewer factories– and capitalism means something very different: a willing buyer and a willing seller engaging in commerce so that both can feed their families. I can’t say that there are no economic differences between people where I come from, but there is little “means of production” apart from each person’s labor. My friend the contractor started out as a carpenter; now he employs carpenters, some of whom will go on to become contactors. Are we all bourguoisie? All proletariat? Both, or neither?

At the macro level, theories of how and why things work are important (and usually inadequate). But at the base, where individuals interact, it’s pretty irrelevant. Governments and corporations come and go, but people need to conduct commerce to survive. When Walmart has long crumbled and the American empire has fallen, I’ll still need to provide a service to a farmer in exchange for food that he/she produced with his/her own labor– an exchange between relative equals.

Proyect mentions in the article that his wife’s PhD was on such crises.

“This year my wife completed a PhD dissertation on whether three financial crises (the most recent involved the LTCM debacle) supported the hypothesis that the U.S. was in decline. In general agreement with the Gindin perspective, she demonstrated how each crisis was exploited by the American bourgeoisie to further its own interests globally, even though the resolution always involved new contradictions and dangers.”

Jon’s article is excellent. I don’t claim to understand it totally either. The gold standard always seemed odd to me, an agreement that a metal was the central store of value. Not sure if that is doable now, even if it were a good idea.

But the definitions get so much blurrier today. An actor making $1 million a movie who doesn’t own the production company is technically working class according to Marxist theory. And does stock ownership mean you own the means of production and thus become ruling class? The class definitions are not nearly as clear as they were in Marx’s time.