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Production, centralization, and the relevance of 19th century labels to 21st century society

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Changing ownership of the means of production and ensuring that the representatives of the people do not suffer a bourgeois bureaucratic hangover regarding their pre-eminence does not do away with the fundamental quality of the production that is performed by individuals and small groups. I argue that we need to question the relevance of continual production. We need to question the need to produce enough. For there will never be enough. Production that aims at satisfying the needs of a population will only contribute to the growth of the population and its needs and wants. Emphasizing continual production leads us to aggregate disparate groups and individuals and our fuels need to serve/fight these aggregations. Our daily routine does not comprise mainly of acts that help us (or others) identify ourselves with such large organizational structures. In other words, the macrodiscourses of suppression, change, revolution do not directly engage with the lived experiences of individuals engaged in production. Marx visualized a national centralization of the people’s efforts from the bottom-up, something I find very difficult to relate to. Not in the least because it is not possible but because any attempts to aggregate the struggles of men, women, and children must acknowledge the individualized context of such action. To cut a long story short, I am a federalist and have a problem with the notion of a centralization that occurs from below because such centralization is induced through persuasion that seems inorganic. An induced process of social change assumes a hierarchy of knowledge in society.

Who constitutes the proletariat today? Given that the proletariat and the peasant classes are called to join hands in revolution, one would expect some similarity between these classes with respect to their conditions, lifestyles and suchlike. To what extent are the proletariat and the peasantry similar (or, dissimilar) today? Imagine a circumstance wherein all members of society actually become a part of the bourgeoisie and come to possess private capital. Is such a circumstance possible? If it is possible then is it probable? What role will/does technology play in the absorption of the proletariat into the bourgeois classes?

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