Here again, without identifying it by name, she gives us a clear and understandable description of the process of Proletarianization. The process which kicks the petite bourgeoisie off the ladder and down into the dregs of the working masses. She aptly describes their tendency for nostalgia, a call back to a "better time", but that time can not be recreated as she points out. Even if it were, it would simply be replaced with the world we have now. Nostalgia is a lasso that can be used to capture the minds of the middle class, it was used previously in history, and we see that happening again today.

The chapter closes with her case for Marxism, and Scientific Socialism, and it is compelling. She poses two questions, which I think, as Marxists, we've all had to attempt to answer before: "who owns the world?" and "who will bring about this change of ownership?". For the first, she makes it clear that when it comes to "owning the world" it is not a matter of "shar[ing] the wealth", which is something we hear from Democratic Socialists of our time. Sharing the wealth implies that the wealth remains in the hands of the owners, and she contrasts this view with "jointly owned wealth", which again is another great reframing, this time on the issue of ownership. For the second, she identifies the working class as the revolutionary class that brings about this change in ownership. In our current time, this can feel muddy, since the question of who is the "working class" and who isn't is often debated, especially in the west. However, there is something she identifies here, which is that between the two largest classes under capitalism, part of class warfare centers around the battle for the "middle classes": "Nor can the disintegrating middle classes achieve it, except insofar as they come to understand that their future lies with the workers" Regardless of how we slice these middle classes, whether we split them into categories like "petite bourgeoisie" and "professional managerial class" or not, the tasks remain the same.

The task of every Marxist is to help them understand, to make them “class-conscious,” aware of their power and function as creators of social progress. [...] The less the workers are organized, the less conscious they are of their power and function, the more will the coming changes in human society be protracted, painful and blind. The more conscious the workers are of their great task in history, the better they are organized, the more they are able to rally around them the middle classes, the swifter will be the change and the less will be the human suffering."

She answers the question of why we can't return to the old ways of production, of small property ownership, and it's because "tools and wealth have grown too complexly social to be owned individually and must therefore be socially owned;" When we think of things like "Made in America" and how that concept has morphed over time into "Assembled in America" you can understand how the "tools and wealth have grown to complexly social". Through monopoly capitalism, the world has become far to interdependent for anything to be made in any one place all together.

Honestly, this whole chapter could be cut right out of this book and transformed into a pamphlet to be distributed, one that could be very effective at communicating the perspective and methods of Marxism. I wasn't expecting to get such a great summation of what Marxism is from this chapter, but I'm very happy to have received one!