One of my good friends recently acclaimed himself as a populist on his blog. This irked me a bit; one because I don’t believe he is really a populist and two I’m not comfortable with the old classifications of social contracts that have been foisted upon us through the rigors of our egalitarian educational system of the past twenty years.
Indeed the proletariat is not equal amongst its own social strata nor with the very existence of a proletariat reflects the egalitarian doctrine spewed forth from educational institutions.
How does this relate to the title of Bourgeois Proletariat? The compound noun I think begins the thought process of breaking down the old social contracts and reconstructs a new one. I think we as a generation have failed to establish our own contribution to the contract and have consistently failed to contribute any enormity to the market place of ideas. Instead we retread the ground of our fathers and only incrementally clear the path forward.
Where are our generations Martin Luther, Dr. King, Noam Chomsky and Karl Marx and so many others? Are we really to be satisfied with our current crop of literati?