BOURGEOISIE AS RULING CLASS

Is the Bourgeoisie really the Ruling Class?

Is the bourgeoisie really the ruling class?

Introduction

A ruling class is the one that controls the distribution and appropriation of surplus resources; and therefore, has economic power (feudal nobility, landowners, industrial bourgeoisie, and financial bourgeoisie) and political power. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are the basic classes of a capitalist society. The aim of the bourgeoisie was to acquire “freed-up” surplus capital with a minimum paid up, by all means of exploiting wages of labor. This essay will provide a debate and discussion on whether the bourgeoisie was a ruling class (X, 2011,, 0).

Discussion

Bourgeoisie was the ruling class in capitalist society has owned the most important and decisive of production and living off of exploiting wage labor. Bourgeoisie is a term of French origin, used in political economy to identify the social class composed of the inhabitants of the “villages”, i.e. new parties that emerged in the city late middle Ages in Western Europe, and is not characterized by feudal lords and serfs, and who belonged neither to the privileged classes (nobility and clergy) and the peasantry (Harrisson, 1999). Their socio-economic functions were those of merchants, craftsmen and practitioners of so-called liberal professions. As a class, the bourgeoisie emerged from the womb of feudalism during the period of primitive accumulation of capital as a result of being deprived of means of production to the direct producers, which became wage laborers. Among the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are antagonistic contradictions, irreconcilable interests are radically different, which causes the bitter struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie for the establishment of the dictatorship of the working class, by the liquidation of capitalist property and the establishment of socialist ownership of the means of production. For the elements that compose it, the bourgeoisie is heterogeneous (Barber, 1955) (X, 2011,, 0).

Under imperialism, all the main layers of the nation were interested in annihilating the unlimited power of the monopoly bourgeoisie. During this period, they become allies of the working class, in addition to farmers; large sections of employees and a considerable portion of the intelligence of the state. In developing countries, who have freed themselves from colonialism, the nature of rational bourgeoisie had a dual character. In the colonial and dependent countries, its progressive role had not been exhausted; the national bourgeoisie participates in solving general tasks posed by the revolution against imperialism and feudalism (Lockwood, 2009).

As it sharpens the class struggle inside the country, as it intensifies the contradictions between the workers and wealthy statuses, the national bourgeoisie begins to swing toward imperialism and domestic reaction. In passing from capitalism to socialism, there came a situation in which the bourgeoisie were compelled to demonstrate compliance with the proletarian state the means of production. The socialist state, under the appropriate conditions can use different forms of state capitalism to develop the economy, and strengthen the socialist sector of production. With the building of socialism, all the economic conditions underlying the existence of the bourgeoisie ...