The bourgeoisie embodies a law of progressive dehumanization once it becomes dominant.

Evidence

Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d’Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress. The moralists can do nothing about it. There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is - there can be - nothing but violence, corruption, and barbarism. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 202

Categorization

• XREF: This law of progressive dehumanization parallels Gramsci’s hegemony and how the once-progressive class turns reactionary on attaining dominance — connects to the Scaffolding Module 2 toolkit on colonialism’s origins in European class structure. — connects to: Bourgeois ethics inherits Enlightenment’s truth-postulate as the demand to be oneself.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a class historically defined by its progressive critique becomes morally incapable of anything but barbarism once dominant is a dense, counterintuitive structural-psychology thesis that bears on how colonial cruelty is systematically produced.