Up until the revolutions of
1848, which began in France as a political
agitation of the bourgeoisie against the Restoration
monarchy, the political agenda
of the working class had tended to fall in line
with that of the bourgeoisie, to ride on the long
political reform coat tail of bourgeois aspiration
of capitalistic democracy and political equality
as a class. The proletariat had hoped for a better
economic position under a new bourgeois
capitalistic political regime brought about by
revolution against the agricultural economic
social order of the aristocracy. But the
proletariat as a class had not aspired to be ruler
of the new post-revolution socio-economic order.
The 'stake in society' theory In
France as well as in Britain, the revolutionary
agitations of 1830-1832 ushered in the
re-ascendance of the bourgeoisie after the fall of
Napoleon. The reigning liberal political doctrine
at the time was the theory of "stake in society",
which limits political rights and participation,
mainly the right to vote and to hold office, to
only people who have a financial "stake" in
society, those who have something material to
lose, such as monetary wealth, real property and
other financial assets such company shares and
government bonds, because only persons with
something valuable to loose in socio-economic
change could be trusted to keep themselves
informed to participate meaningfully in political
debate and to vote predictably if not
intelligently to preserve the class interest of
stake holders.
Members of the proletariat
did not qualify as stake holders of society
because they were men who did not own valuable
assets beyond their undervalued labor sold at low
wages, and therefore were not qualified to enjoy
political rights and participation in government.
US invitation to China to be a stake
holder Reviving the same stakeholder theory
175 years later to apply to contemporary global
geopolitics, Robert Zoellick, then as US Deputy
State Secretary, proposed in a speech in New York
on September 21, 2005, that the US should step up
efforts to invite China to be a "responsible
stakeholder" in the post-Cold War international
order, notwithstanding that the stakeholder basis
for global geopolitical participation is
fundamentally undemocratic.
Since its
founding in 1949, the foreign policy of the
People's Republic of China has been based on the
principle that in a world order of sovereign
nations, countries big or small should enjoy equal
status in international relations. All nations,
rich or poor, should be equal stake holders in a
world order of sovereign nation states, and if
not, then a new world order should be introduced
to make it so.
The US was apparently
calling for China to abandon its founding
principle to join the US to be a stake holder in a
world order still operating with residual rules of
global imperialism, an obsolete world order that
new China had committed to overthrow from the
beginning of its revolutionary root and one that
the US itself vowed to disengage from at the time
of its declaration of independence from Britain in
1776.
19th century bourgeois democracy
in Europe In France during the July
Monarchy (1830-1848), about one adult in 30 could
qualify to vote, meaning that only the more
wealthy, the financial elite, were allowed full
political rights. In Britain of the time of the
first Reform Bill (1832-1867), about one in eight
enjoyed the right to vote, meaning that Britain
was four times more democratic than France, with
even the petty bourgeoisie also enjoying political
rights.
In England, conservative Tory
landed interests blunted the advancement of
industrial capitalism in politics, resulting in
the passage of legislation protective of
industrial workers rights. In France, the landed
aristocracy had been stripped of political power
in the French Revolution of 1789, some 41 years
before the establishment of the July Monarchy.
France under Louis Philippe in the July
Monarchy was a more bourgeois but less democratic
society than Britain. As France began to
industrialize on the heels of British economic
progress, French industrial labor was deprived of
devious help from the French landed aristocracy,
as the British factory workers had from British
landed gentry, to make life difficult for rising
industrial entrepreneurs by advocating labor
rights in the name of social ethics that in
practice were costly to bourgeois entrepreneurs.
Still, political leaders in both countries
believed that political democracy via universal
suffrage would lead to ruin for any political
order. Democracy was merely a useful slogan for
the bourgeoisie to legitimize the emerging class
struggle against the aristocracy.
Bourgeois industrialism created new wealth
from industrial production that was not
predominantly derived from land ownership as it
had been in the feudal agricultural economy. It
did so by accumulating capital to finance new
factories, but industrial labor was not allowed to
share the new wealth created by workers whose
productivity was increasingly enhanced by
mechanization.
This was because profit was
based on selling to the rich manufactured products
produced with low-wage workers, and profit was
exclusively reserved for maximizing return on
capital. In fact, in business economics, profit is
defined as the margin of revenue over cost, the
prime portion of which is wages. Higher wages can
only come from lower profit.
Marx's
concept of class struggle This is the
essence of Marx's concept of class struggle. In
industrial capitalism, the bourgeoisie as a class
takes control of the process of wealth creation
and wealth distribution through its control of
capital. The bourgeoisie usurps the natural rights
of the proletariat as a class to share the wealth
created by a fusion of capital and labor via a
financial order in which the bourgeoisie imposes
excessive rent for the use of capital needed to
increase worker productivity.
To survive
even on a subsistence level, labor must give up
its rightful share of wealth in the production
process to serve the conspicuous consumption of
owners or controllers of capital to keep
production capacity fully utilized, even when
capital comes from the imposed savings of workers,
known today as pension funds. The working poor
were told that without consumption by the rich,
there would be no jobs for wage workers.
Industrial Revolution not supported by
broad consumer market While production
increased with industrialization, the concept of a
broad consumer market had not yet evolved in the
19th century as sound business principle or valid
economic theory. Profit was reserved exclusively
for high return on capital to support more capital
formation to finance more investment in
industrialization.
The weak domestic
market with low consumer demand due to low wages
naturally pushed the development of international
trade to capture luxury markets overseas to serve
the financial elite in other countries and to
secure supply of needed raw material. Workers are
told they must accept low wages in order to
maintain their country's competitiveness in
international trade, which is necessary for
promoting peace. Yet competition for new markets
and raw material supply has led to recurring
global wars.
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