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Proletariat
According to Marxist theory, the bourgeoisie is the minority ruling class of industrialists, investors, and executives who own the vast majority of a society’s wealth, capital, land, resources, and government power. Seeking to maximize their own profits, they continually try to reduce costs—including, of course, the cost of labor, which is done by the proletariat. This means the proletariat’s loss is the bourgeoisie’s gain, and over history, according to Marxists, the bourgeoisie will continually drive the proletariat as close to starvation and slavery as possible. In the context of Anderson’s reconstruction of the history and roots of nationalism, the rise of capitalism and colonial conquest leads the bourgeoisie—a class unified only because of its economic position—to gradually replace the traditional aristocracy—which is not only economically powerful but also comprises distinct hereditary and social groups. In other words, the bourgeoisie is an imagined class, whereas the aristocracy is a concrete one. Moreover, the bourgeoisie is wealthy because of capitalism, which transmits money and power through deeds, records, and financial entities like stocks—in other words, through paper and writing, making literacy paramount for the bourgeoisie. So whereas “an illiterate nobility could still act as a nobility,” Anderson argues, “an illiterate bourgeoisie is scarcely imaginable.” This further strengthens the role of print media, which is the bourgeoisie’s means of recognizing their unity and interests as a class, and in turn contributes to the spread of nationalism in the 19th century.
Bourgeoisie Quotes in Imagined Communities
The Imagined Communities quotes below are all either spoken by Bourgeoisie or refer to Bourgeoisie. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 5
Quotes
An illiterate nobility could still act as a nobility. But the bourgeoisie? Here was a class which, figuratively speaking, came into being as a class only in so many replications. Factory-owner in Lille was connected to factory-owner in Lyon only by reverberation. They had no necessary reason to know of one another’s existence; they did not typically marry each other’s daughters or inherit each other’s property. But they did come to visualize in a general way the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through print-language. For an illiterate bourgeoisie is scarcely imaginable. Thus in world-historical terms bourgeoisies were the first classes to achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis.
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Bourgeoisie Term Timeline in Imagined Communities
The timeline below shows where the term Bourgeoisie appears in Imagined Communities. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Introduction
...Marx wrote that “the proletariat of each country must first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”
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Chapter 5: Old Languages, New Models
...read in order to work as colonial administrators. Second was the creation of a capitalist bourgeoisie, which, unlike the old aristocracy, did not define itself by personal or blood relations, but...
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Chapter 8: Patriotism and Racism
...when the upper classes tried to replace popular nationalism with official nationalism, and because the bourgeoisie could pretend to be nobility in colonies, performing “capitalism in feudal-aristocratic drag” (which is neatly...
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