“All that is solid melts into air” - How the bourgeoise maintains power.
“All that is solid melts into air”.
The liquidity of postmodernism protects the bourgeoise and their material interests – in essence, postmodernism underpins the new, neoliberal bourgeoisie. The demise of classical European Marxism, denoting the class struggle and the pursuit of human progress, has sidelined the traditions of the importance of humanity and progress. Classical Marxism, based upon the traditions of Enlightened progress, ideas which “underlay”  socialism, is formed through a pursuit of clarity and historical materialism. There is a progress with socialism, there are answers to the societal issues which are inherited from the bourgeoisie, and there are finite truths.
Socialism does not reject or eschew the realities and structures of society. There are truths and structure, driven by a desire for improvement of citizens lives – society and life are solid. The bourgeoisie, those in society who own and process the means of production, reject the solidity of societal truths, the construct of working-class community, the solidarity of collective truths. Marxism, through the Communist Manifesto a guide for working classes and, in the era of neoliberalism and artificial intelligence, a guide for workers to sustain and fulfil their identity and integrity through the act of work and utility.
Marx highlights the Socratic dialectic in the form of materialism - the historical interpretation through economic exploitation. From ancient Greece, via Feudalism, there are those who are oppressed and those who oppress – and there is no change in 2026 Britain. The bourgeoisie are simply designed in a different construct, a new set of clothes.
I argue that these clothes are now worn, surreptitiously, by a progressive class who feign a mantra of being a part of a left - a left which has assiduously redesigned itself via cult of postmodernism. The word “postmodernism” will be examined later in this piece and in future articles, but in essence it is the theorisation of the impossible, the destruction of the credible and the rejection of the clear “definition” of politics, political theory and economics; neoliberalism and progressive agendas fits this criterion well.
To challenge the menage of postmodern neoliberal progression, we return to Marx and the historical place the bourgeoisie place on production. Artificial intelligence, neoliberalism and progressive postmodernism, are the paymasters of the 21st century, hand in hand with Marxist historical analogy of slave and slave master dynamic. The historical narrative is interpreted by Marx as materialist in its essence, where power is held by those who own the means of production. This resulted by 1848 the factory system acting as a means of production, controlled by a bourgeoisie, who manipulate and coerce working classes to produce surplus value. The proletariat act as a vital mechanism of production, one to produce – they are required to produce surplus value for the benefit of others.
So how does the bourgeoisie construct the environment for their continued success? The title of this piece reflects the means of economic and subsequent societal power and continued class hierarchy – the loss of institutional certainty for working class community. The bourgeoisie understand innately the collective power of solidity and structure. Whether it be agricultural, industrial mining or trades union backed community, the act of solidity acts to block the wild vagaries of bourgeoisie manipulation of market control and offer purposeful and above tangible resistance to material consumption.
The enduring and conservative structures of society, via work, family, education, politics, citizenship, economics and identity, offer a sense of permanency and consistency, offering a playing field for which working people can command a degree of stability and voice. The trades union movement, though ultimately not revolutionary, places a stop on capitalism, a hand break against work-based oppression and symbolically, a counter to the advance of materialism and the liquidity of our lives. Trade unions, socialism and collective action offer a counter to what Marx and Engels describe as the,
“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind”. 1
Marxism offers and engages with a scientific reality – there are truths and there is a concrete existence. This is the world that working people and communities live in, work in, and structure their lives; a tangibility, a series of consistent truths, which offer hope and a spiritual meaning to our lives. The bourgeoisie and post modernism thrives and breathes on the destruction of what is seen as “holy institutions which since the Enlightenment offer progress within our uncertain world, are driven by scientific endeavour and historical precedence. Science and progress have offered a means to reject the idolatry of religious dogma and the servitude of feudalism – structure and solidity offer an effective means of challenging a bourgeoise which consistently recreate historic servitude. Therefore, as Hanah Arendt argues, “No permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.”2
Solidity, existence, and the political reality offer tangible tools of resistance and existence for working class community. And the political certainties, of Arendt’s political animal have been negated the triumphant of neoliberalism, progressive political agenda, and post modernism. A contemporary bourgeoisie, reject solidarity and embrace the confused, nihilistic embrace of post modernism. Cultural trends, spreading to all parts of political theory, academia and media design, is the bourgeoise at its beguiling best – it is magical realism, a charlatan dressed as a snake oil salesman, which has undermined the traditions of economic and cultural collective truths and expression of evolutionary truths. The bourgeoisie cannot, has not, and will not accept these structures of resistance, and offer the liquidity of postmodern production to redesign the gate posts of economic and cultural uncertainty. The bourgeoisie “Cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production.” 3
This is a key point in the rise of the contemporary progressive neoliberal. Institutionally, classical Marxism has been usurped, class conscientiousness and the solidity of the trade union movement replaced and melted - melting into the liquidity of both progressive political agendas driven by identity and postmodernism. Marxism is a child of the Enlightenment. Its core principles eschew a pursuit of rationality which rejects a controlling doctrine of religion and a belief in the factual nature of our existence with a natural world – there is solidity and there are truths. This is rejected by neoliberalism, postmodernism, and a progressive agenda which have dovetailed, via Foucault, the contemporary hegemonic economic and cultural status quo. Economic and cultural liquidity has, the bourgeoise has ensured, melted working class solidarity and identity into air.