handofdave wrote:
IanB wrote:
Of course by Maoist / Stalinist standards virtually every user of this site would be considered a bourgeois decadent.
Most of the planet wouldn't hesitate for a second to be so generously bestowed with 'bourgeois decadence'. Even the Chinese have embraced it, albeit with a certain heightened amount of central control.
Agree totally which is why I find it odd when bourgeois is flung about liberally as an insult. Of course it is often used as a synonym for middle class or for liberal*. Which are obviously not the same thing and not interchangeable either. I guess people use it thinking of the characters in the later Bunuel movies - smug, comfortable people with an over-developed concern with taste and manners and little concern for the body politic as a whole?
*a quick review at the social history of the last 200 years of European history has the damned liberals coming out of it all with a pretty good score card in terms of expanding the frontiers of social justice and there is far less on the collective liberal conscience than those who would set us all free at the point of a sword.
