Doctors, Terrorists, and the Proletariat: What's a Person to Think?

Doctors and medical professionals being mixed up in the recent set of London-Glasgow car bombings seems to be confusing, at least to some in the news media.

I can understand that. White-collar professionals don't fit into the oppressed-poor / unworthy rich mental model that seemed to work so well with previous street-level terrorists.

When someone wearing explosive underwear was somehow related to poor people, the mass-murder-suicide perpetrator looked a lot like a revolutionary in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

When a doctor pops out of a flaming jeep in an air terminal, things get complicated.

Doctors, as professionals, do fit into a Marxist scenario, either as Petit-Bourgeoisie or maybe part of the proletariat, since they do a kind of work.

On the other hand, since professionals, at least in the United Kingdom and the States, get paid for something that they presumably ought to do for free, they're guilty of Commodification ("the transformation of relationships, formerly untainted by commerce, into commercial relationships, relationships of exchange, of buying and selling"). That would seem to make them at least complicit in the oppression of the proletariat.

The suspects in the recent terrorist attacks seem to have Islam as a common thread. Religion has a place in Marxist thought, too, as "the sigh of the oppressed creature," so for people who didn't notice the end of the Cold War, the "struggle will continue between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie."

I'd say that it makes better sense to decide that what we have these days, after generations of the Cold War, is something new. Or, rather, something very old: religious fanatics who are convinced that it is their sacred duty to kill certain kinds of people.