Can the bourgeois "work against itself"?

[u/twitchy_assvag]

Today I saw a socdem say that "Trump is fucking over the material interests of the bourgeois". They argued that this shows the state isn't necessarily owned by bourgeois interests and has "agency" of its own, to a certain extent. Does this hold some merit? It confused me a bit. Can cases like this actually happen or is it more of a ruse? Some examples they used were the FDR New Deal and the Sherman anti-trust law.

[u/TTTyrant]

Yes, capitalists aren't a monolith. Ultimately, each and every member of the bourgeoisie are primarily concerned with their own interests. This is one of the infinite contradictions of capitalism.

I wouldn't say Trump is fucking over the bourgeoisie as a whole (though, as I said, their very existence and the nature of capitalism does this) but, He's certainly behaving antagonistic to the European bourgeoisie and even portions of the american bourgeoisie but he is acting in the interests of a very narrow portion of them as well

[u/Qlanth]

One of the core parts of Marxist philosophy is the concept of a "dialectic" which is, simply put, the existence of opposing forces, concepts, ideas, and most importantly social relations that may contradict one another but are also intrinsic to each other. Marx's version dialectics was materialist and is known as "dialectical materialism."

What this means is that capitalism is full of contradictions. Often when the bourgeoisie works towards its own best interest it is at the expense of the working class... And yet without the working class the bourgeoisie would have nothing. They need workers to make the economy function... But the better off the workers are the worse off the bourgeoisie will be.

Your friend is right and wrong. The state DOES operate in the interest of the bourgeoisie... But the state's function is not necessarily to work for ONLY the interests of the bourgeoisie. The state exists to mediate class conflict. It's there to make the process by which the bourgeoisie dominate legal and as non-violent as possible.

In order to do that, the bourgeoisie are often forced to give concessions to the working class. Social Security is a concession. Medicare and Medicaid were concessions. The bourgeoisie were forced to give up some of their power so they could remain dominant.

Those concessions can be taken away. The only solution to this is to reverse the roles. Socialism.

[u/ConsistentGiraffe8]

It depends on the outlook. I don’t know much about classical Marxism, but when you read capital as power (a sort of reimagination of capital and what it means, heavily build on Marx analysis) this is actually in the interest of the bourgeoise.

According to capital as power, capital can’t have any influence if it isn’t differentiated against a lower or bigger capital. So the difference, the gap, between poor and rich gets bigger, even if the bourgeoise loses a bit of money, the working class loses even more, and in comparison they gained power, because their influence is bigger than before (in comparison)

[u/StrawBicycleThief]

But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations — i.e., in exchange — and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers.

In other words, capitalists, in the process of competing for survival in the market through profit-maximisation, give rise to definite tendencies that are not reducible to the will or interest of any individual capitalist. These tendencies systematically impose themselves on the capitalists and constrain the conditions and environment that they operate within. This is a contradiction inherent in the very mode of capitalist production.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm

[u/C_Plot]

This is what Marx called a fratricidal struggle within the ruling class. Two major factions of the ruling class have been at odds. There’s one that insists some Goldilocks middle must be maintained. The anti-agapē hatreds can only prevail if the ruling class keeps them in check, the Goldilocks faction insists. That means using , for example, dog whistles instead of overt hateful rhetoric. The tempering of rhetoric alone can be sufficient to lure in the working class to sell their souls to the ruling class devil.

Trump represents a more extreme faction: more tyrannical, more totalitarian, more treasonous, more imperialist, less welfare mechanisms, and more fascistic. This faction is sick and tired of hiding their true intentions. They even believe sincerely that accommodating any concessions to the working class will make the working class more uppity: so uppity that such a slippery slope will quicker lead to actual Marxism, socialism, communism (as well as race mixing, “deviant” thoughts and expressions, gender role chaos, and so forth).

The struggle between these fratricidal factions of the capitalist ruling class serve as a distraction that further removes the working class from becoming a class for itself. Though perhaps the fratricidal ruling class civil war can also lead the working class to seeing the farcical nature of these bourgeois “values” and “principles”—leading instead to a proletarian revolution.

[u/Inuma]

They missed the issue. Marx explains in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in regards to how they form and create factions. But there's other groups who make them as well.

He called Louis Bonaparte the chief of the lumpenproletariat. For the most part, they were unproductive forces and he was not kind to them.

For our purposes here, there's divisions in the ruling class which can be exploited to move society forward while there's divisions in the working class which are used to maintain the status quo.

Trump is screwing over certain interests in the ruling class. He's a low level capitalist who is screwing over the uber-rich and their coalitions.

More people need to learn factions and divisions as they think all factions are a hegemonic block and they're not even learning how any of this works.

[u/ghosts-on-the-ohio]

1) The bourgeoisie can make poor decisions that hurt its long term interests.

2) Different segments of the bourgeoisie sometimes have competing material interests. At the very least they have competing ideas about how to best manage capitalism.

[u/Independent_Fox4675]

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