The class which is the ruling material force of society is also it's ruling intellectual force. Which ever class that has control of material production also has control of the mental production. These ruling ideas are just ideal expressions of dominant material relationships and so the relationships which makes one class the ruling one and the ideas become dominant.
In a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are fighting for control, and where control is shared, the dominant idea has proven to be the doctrine of the seperation of powers and is expressed as an "eternal law"
The division of labour, which is one of the chief forces of history up till now, has been manifested into the ruling class as the division of mental and material labour. So basicly this class has one part that is the thinkers and the other part of the class that are more passive and receptive to the first half of the class and tend to be more active. Inside of this split class can create and develop opposition to one another.
In the course of history, we tend to split the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existance. During the time that the aristocracy was dominant, concepts of honour, loyalty, etc were dominant. During the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts of freedom, equality, etc were dominant. This comes to show that the ruling class itself on the whole imagines this to be so. Each new class that replaces previous classes that ruled before them are compelled and are merely in order to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of the society.
The class that is making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representitive of the whole of society. The whole mass of society is essentially confronting the one ruling class. It can do this because, to start with, its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes.
When the French bourgeosisie overthrew the power of the aristocracy, it thereby made it possible for many proletarians to raise themselves above the proletariat, but only insofar as they became bourgeois. This whole semblance, that the rule of certain class is only the rule of certain ideas, comes to a natural end as soon as class rule in general ceases to be the form in which society is organized. The conclusion has been reached that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract from these various ideas, the notion, etc, as the dominant force in history.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
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This section really focuses on how class needed to up rise against the bourgeoisie and make a statement for themselves. Meaning, they should not be controlled by the bourgeoisie, instead they should also have say in how they are being ruled in the labor force. Which I feel that the uprising benefited all of the proletarian workers, which set a way for many other things. It is almost like today, where our society creates unions to protect workers and their workers wages, and by the class making a revolution, it was a stepping stone for workers to stop being treated as they were.
ReplyDeleteI also believe that by these workers standing up for themselves, they finally got what is right. The way the labor force was treated because of the capitalists, was not in anyway fair to anybody. Also, by reaching this point in the workforce, I would assume that this is when workers general interests were taken into consideration, rather than being walked on from a day to day basis.