There isn't any bourgeoisie anymore. If there ever was. It is the corporation that uses capital now. And those companies are owned by diversified shareholders -- who often include among their ranks the workers themselves.
Except "ownership" isn't really the right word. Diversified shareholders don't look and act like owners. They don't use their property, don't monitor it, and, in fact, don't really care much what happens to it, so long as they get dividends and can sell their shares for a profit.
In fact, it's fair to say that no one really owns the corporation. The people who run the corporations, meanwhile, the managers and directors, well, they get paid wages, too. And the people who decide where capital gets allocated -- they're on wall street, and have motives altogether different than whether a particular business succeeds or not.
So who's the bourgeoisie, then?
When one goes to think about a Marxist kind of political economy, one has to remember Marx's most important point -- it's concentrating on dialectic relationships. it's concentrating on materialist history.
It's the economic system, not the evil, amorphous, unidentified "theys." It's the social and economic forces that lead to the formation of corporations -- which are, in their essence, social and economic relations among workers and among capital providers (who are, in this age of public corporations, also workers).
So why do socialists hold up banners screaming in outrage that "GE paid no taxes!!!" when GE isn't, in fact, a real person. It's a group of people doing stuff in concert, hopefully to make a profit. This entity that didn't pay taxes, well, it's just a social machine. A machine that hires workers. And pays dividends to its shareholders -- who are also workers.
Rather, what is more despicable about corporations is that they make public messes and they don't pay for the clean up. Those costs are distributed among all of society, while the profits are kept by the corporation's specific constituencies -- workers, executives, shareholders, and creditors.
The activists, however, aren't the only people who like to personify business organizations. Our laws treat corporations like they're people, too. They enter into contracts and they pay taxes. Recently, our supreme court even granted them free speech rights.
It's time to get back to the nuts and bolts. We all need to acknowledge what's really going on, so we have a prayer of changing things. This means we can't string up some goldman sachs insider trader and stone him and call it finished business.
This goes much deeper.
