From the NYT’s “labor reporter.”
Me, when I’m in a ‘Just Make Shit up’ contest and my opponent is the NYTLol… As if Marx didn’t write over 50 articles and at least two larger essays, specifically discussing the role of petite bourgeois in the revolution (due to the fact that his best fucking friend was petite bourgeois), and that his major theoretical departure from Proudhon (literally the first major theoretical difference between communists and anarchists) is that Marx recognized that the small craftsman or artisan would always aspire to the petite bourgeois, and therefore could not be the revolutionary class, with them unfortunately instead having to first be broken upon the wheel of capital and proletarianized, as opposed to Proudhon, who thought that the stress upon the small craftsman or artisan, with their skilled labor, would create within them the revolutionary consciousness required for revolution.
The idea that Karl Marx thought that they were a dying class is hilarious, he just knew that they will always be subjected to the whims of larger firms and capital markets, making them among the most precarious and thus reactionary of classes.
Edit – Also, small time doctors are a dead fucking class in the U.S. with the large medical firms, universities and hospitals effectively charging, and regulating them out of existence. Unless you are counting quacks like acupuncturists and chiropractors. The only ones I know that exist outside of that are dentists (and even they are being swallowed by the day into larger capital conglomerates at higher rates than ever) and the occasional physical therapist, but the local family practitioner is gone and fucking dead.
So not only were they wrong about what Marx thought, they are wrong in that the larger long-term theoretical economic trends that Marx described were and are correct (which Marx would have had no real way of actually knowing outside of inference.)
I think a lot of doctors can still be thought as small time artisans. If they work for something like a hospital they’re typically on contract rather than full time employees. It’s just more efficient this way since doctors can shared pooled medical equipment and resources with this model
I absolutely disagree. If they do not own their own means of production, therefore they are not artisans, it’s literally the definition.
By your definition, the X-ray technicians are also artisans.
The hospital owns the equipment and employs the doctors. How they employ them is not how class distinctions are made.
Maybe, but from my loose understanding of the workplace their class character doesn’t seem very strongly working class. They move around and work pretty similarly to how an artisan would
Their relationship seems a lot closer to “renting” out the equipment like how a craftsperson would rent their workshop/studio/storefront nowadays. But instead of paying money, doctors pay a tiny tiny autonomy charge to follow the hospital’s structure of how things work
If we’re talking about specifically America, doctors have essentially positioned themselves as a cartel and are holding the general public hostage for their services and labor, and they collaborate with hospitals and clinics (the government, in this cartel analogy) to fleece us because the hospitals , insurance companies, and the government need doctors to survive and profit themselves
Expert artists in the past being hired by the wealthy and given materials (expensive paints, sculpting materials, etc.) to complete their contracted work may be the closest profession to modern day doctors in terms of class relationships, except doctors are a necessity for the hospitals to make any money
Doctors are being proletarianized as private equity absorbs more and more healthcare. There’s still a lot of private practice and hybrid structures that are petty bourgeoisie or pretty close.
Even with salaried doctors, though, it’d be a mistake, I think, to claim they have the same class interests as most hospital staff or other workers. In the US specifically, and for now.
Professional-managerial still seems to me to be the best signifier to describe the subclass of highly-educated people with high salaries. They have easy access to petty-capitalist and landlordist mechanisms, and benefit from them passively, even for ones that don’t personally meet the definition of petty bourgeoisie. I don’t think their position aligns very well with a typical understanding of artisan.
My point though, is that it is the structures themselves that are producing these reactionary doctors, not that the medical practice itself is inherently reactionary. And it is precisely because they are in the precarious arena of being at risk of losing their protected class status, as they are fully proletarianized. Skilled proletarians, to be sure, but proletarians nevertheless.
I have almost always found more class solidarity within the pediatrics ward of any hospital than most union shops. Not that this means anything for revolution in the U.S., as the structures that bind us are still far too powerful.
I think I agree in the sense that your analysis is becoming the reality. It’s growing out of the dying subclass of doctors as professional-managerial (which I still hold as distinct from other proletarian interests due to colonial and imperial flows). The same deskilling/proletarianization is happening in most professional industries, really.
Fully proletarianized doctors, especially younger ones, are likely to increasingly have revolutionary potential comparable to other workers. That’s at tension with the older aspects of the subclass that still retain petty bourgeois and professionalist interests or ideology.
Hostile interactions with actual capitalists (hospital boards, insurance companies) do seem to be accelerating the potential of a lot of doctors, the ones that have the capacity for it at least.
Notes on your other comment (from memory since in my app I can’t easily reread it while replying here, so I apologize in advance): I imagine the class character of Cuban doctors is gonna be quite different from that of US doctors. Is the education system in Cuba used as a class signifier? I don’t actually know but I suspect not.
And we examine different subsets of classes not to determine purity or morality, but to identify revolutionary potential. A strict two-class model is used for education and explanation, it isn’t meant to reduce analysis. If people are trying to gatekeep “proletariat” for moralist purposes I agree it’s not useful, but especially in the context of multilayered colonial and imperial systems, it’s essential to be able to examine the internal tensions and trajectories contained within any class/subclass.
I am not trying to limit the class structure, I am saying that the proletarianisation of doctors is happening. If it will complete within my lifetime, I don’t know, I doubt it, but the long-term trend is there. Marx was correct, and since he didn’t put a time scale on this stuff (he discussed feudalism in terms of centuries, over a millenia if history), he is correct, and that means that we, as communists, should recognize that solidarity can be obtained from the class of medical practitioners, and we should seek to build that relationship, in spite of their current reactionary disposition.
There are several different classes that exist, but the primary driver of history can only be the proletariat if modernisation is to exist and continue. If you don’t want modernity you will value a different class, but the proletariat comes out of modernity, which means that they are the only class that truely values it’s preservation.
Expert artisans were not usually given the tools of their trade. They were given money, and then their apprentices would source their materials, much like a head chef sources food for a fancy restaurant. And yes, often the agreement would stipulate that the the materials bought were the property of the patron, not the artist. However, they owned the tools of their trade. They usually (not always) had their own pencils, brushes, scrapers, chisels, and hammers.
A modern car mechanic with a personal Snap-on tool chest has more in common with an artisan than a modern doctor does, which is why you can still find a mechanic in a town of less than a thousand people, but not a doctor.
Certification boards made up of doctors have created the cartel, but most doctors, especially young doctors, are fleeced of their time and money in the pursuit of attaining the medical practitioner status, and have absolutely no control over those larger processes.
And doctors and nurses will be the first to tell you that more often than not it is the universities, hospitals, and insurance companies that are the major obstacles getting in the way of cheap medical care, with the doctors themselves being an outcome of those systems. If the greed of medical doctors were the root the problem, then Cuba wouldn’t create so damn many of them.
If you keep excluding people from the proletariat based on rental agreements and not who actually owns the tools and means of production, you will have an extremely confused set of definitions on your hands.
thinking about when the NYT editor explicitly said it is part of the paper’s mission to defend capitalism
EDIT: Top NYT Editor: ‘We Are Pro-Capitalism, the Times Is in Favor of Capitalism’ | FAIR / Adam Johnson
I think we are pro-capitalism. The New York Times is in favor of capitalism because it has been the greatest engine of, it’s been the greatest anti-poverty program and engine of progress that we’ve seen.
—James Bennet, Editorial Page Editor
greatest anti-poverty
The system that drops people in ditches is the greatest anti-ditch placing program we’ve ever seen
Tell that to China, which has lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty.
Turns out swatting away porky’s trotters and telling him to fuck off is nothing but good.
piggies: capitalism has been the number one engine of growth and poverty reduction
me: but all of that happened in communist china
piggies: no you don’t understand, that’s because china is doing capitalism
me: so can we do China style capitalism here?
piggies: NO
in fact, if you take China out, the “global poverty reduction” statistics actually show poverty increased or at best stagnated (depending on exact metric) in the last 50 years or so.
Again, I hop into another thread about a stupid fucking piece of shit getting paid to be a dumb motherfucker
I’d be a dumb motherfucker for half the price if they’d let me. Free market my ass! No more legacy jobs for rich fail sons. After the revolution we will all take turns being the dumb mother fucker and equally distribute the prestige that apparently merits according to capitalism.
Hi Lussy :kirby-wave: see you in the next one
people just make shit up about marx and people believe because they also have never read him. just hundreds of people arguing with each over about what marx said with not a single one of them having read his works directly.
Right wing grifters like Jordan Peterson, Penis Prager and Charlie ‘oddly silent’ Kirk have it so easy. I recommend searching communism and other related terms in Youtube shorts if you want to see what I mean.
They can say communism equals no personal property, socialism equals no pay off for hard work and get millions of dipshits clapping and nodding in agreeance.
Lol, Marx was so dumb. I bet he also failed to consider that a spectre might have been haunting Europe.
He also didn’t understand that metal chains are really hard to break
There are real criticisms of Marx you can make — that have been made by people that agree and disagree with him.
He was one man, in a time where certain things weren’t known.
You don’t have to just make shit up lol.
you do if you’re the FAILING new york times
that sounds like work when i have a cushy nepo gig
Feckless criticism of all that is imagined
Mandatory brain implant but all it does is prevent people from talking about books they havent read.
Bruh
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