Wherein I Stake My Claim as an Individual of the Bourgeoisie

As enamored as I am with the word "proletariat," I must admit that ideologically speaking, I favor the establishment of the bourgeoisie--despite the plethora of "class antagonisms" that the latter supposedly creates. I find my identification with the bourgeois community to be humorous; I'm not attached to the "modern bourgeois" notion of private property, nor do I believe that the abolition of nations/nationality is an evil suggestion. No, what so irks me about the communist definition of the proletariat is that it denies the value of the individual to the greater community. "To be precise, it is...the negation of the individual as existent within the universal," Hegel argues. Therefore, according to Hegel, not only is the reality of the individual negligible when faced with the whole of collective human experience, but to acknowledge some value in this negligible entity is useless: "The sole work and deed of universal freedom is thus death...which has no inner amplitude and no inner fulfillment, since what is negated is the unfulfilled empty 'point' of the absolutely free self." Of course, no one wants a cold, empty death borne of individualism, so Marx and Engels wrote the manifesto for a society that could guarantee warm, full deaths for everyone.

One of the fundamental problems with Hegelian philosophy is that, like Kant, Hegel refuses to consider the effect of human instinct on human sensibility. Intellectually, he lays out a scintillating argument; in a way, our bourgeois, sociopolitical definition of "freedom" can be construed to mean the absence of guidance or human impact. However, freedom is not widely recognized as a canceling force in our lives because human instinct causes us to gravitate towards it, just as instinct allows for self-preservation, a hallmark of individual interest--the type of interest that Hegel would gladly negate. Predictably, individual interest is generated by none other than the self, to be precise, the intuitive, unconscious self which is not considered in the "highest actuality." Why not? Could it be that the self-consciousness which supposedly deconstructs universality informs the self-unconsciousness which composes it and vice versa, therefore leading even the least individualistic of people to a purely chemical individualism? Even by organic means, one can be lead back to the self; even in the work of Marx and Engels, there is room for the establishment of a new, possibly more organic self that both defies and supports the proletariat community.

At least bourgeois society recognizes the inevitable presence of the individual. "Class antagonisms" aside, the bourgeoisie allows an individualist to remain an individual, therefore creating a much more realistic society in which the self rationally contributes to the larger community.