ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to summarize key characteristics of bourgeois and proletarian characteristics of living. The difficulty of progressive change as a historic process is frustrating and debilitating, especially when war, aggression and acquisitiveness at every level of human existence continue to dominate social life. Under capitalism and neoliberalism, social life is reified to the production and exchange of commodities where money transactions avoid considering what commodities represent in social terms. Social stratification under capitalism is the norm, with differences rather than equity between wealth, position and status being the natural order of things. They are of course, subject to social, economic and political context that can be difficult to resist or mitigate. Social class and other sociological categories do influence us mightily, but they provide for our emancipation hourly, daily as we live and transform, determined to make our experience and existence meaningful and satisfying, knowledge within us reawakened.
