Petite-bourgeois- Bourgeois or privileged proletariat?

[Belleraphone]

Title says most of it. Do you think the petite-bourgeois are downgraded bourgeois or privileged proles? Now obviously the name would imply the former, but I actually think it's the latter. I don't know much about petite-bourgeois so this may already be an established opinion, but I think the petite-bourgeois are oppressed in the same manner the proletarians are, but not to the same degree. For example, an engineer doesn't set anyones wages and he lives under wage slavery, but he does get paid more. What are your thoughts?

[Tim Finnegan]

Neither. The petty bourgeoisie are capitalists who must supply their own labour power in order to generate profit. They may or may not employ the labour power of others; the extent to which this is the case will generally (although not rigidly) determine their own orientation in regards to the conflict of labour and capital. Well-paid workers are just that, well-paid workers, located within the same relationship of capital and labour as other workers, but able to demand a higher wage in return for their labour power, typically because of a collective monopoly on a particular skill. This may lead to subjective compromise, the creation of a contentedly fat "aristocracy of labour", but it creates no objective distinction in class.

[Jose Gracchus]

Marx et al never intended 'petty bourgeois' to be a discrete and well-defined (i.e., sociological) category or grouping to assign individuals to, or even a 'class' in the same sense as the bourgeoisie and proletariat. It is precisely defined by its intermediary, uneven, undeveloped, transitory, and ambiguous position between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Consider that 'petit bourgeois' arguably includes artisans, artists, self-employed professionals, those with substantial inherited personal but not meaningfully capital assets, peasants, freehold family farmers, and small shopkeepers and service-providers. It is precisely the fact they are neither proletariat nor bourgeoisie proper which defines them, and it is no mistake they have no coherent 'all-class' coherent interest or historical trajectory. Members of it are constantly being pauperized and forced into the full-time workforce as proletarians. Others occasionally successfully break through to being full-fledged capitalists, generating profit through the surplus value acquired from others' alienated labor.

[tfb]

marxian class analysis is about a person's relationship to production, not about how much money a person happens to have or make

[Jose Gracchus]

I don't think class is some mechanical application of the 'arbitrary individual X's direct personal relationship to production'. E. P. Thompson and Borgia have a lot of good stuff that struggles against this mechanical view. The fact is the class must be viewed as part of a totality; the proletariat does not exist as such as a discrete 'thing' that can be located as an empirical entity, so much as it is a historical entity which must be understood in terms of its historical movement and simultaneous relation to other classes. Marx was not a reductionist sociologist.

Take movie stars. Do they really fit very well in the class picture? Not really. Thankfully they are basically historically irrelevant as such, and it means nothing that class analysis does not have a basket to neat place them in.

[CAleftist]

Well, what do people think the term "middle class" means?

Like JG said, the petty-bourgeoisie is a non-definitive "class." The working class and the capitalist class-more specifically, the conflict between their material interests-is definitive.

[promethean]

I don't think class is some mechanical application of the 'arbitrary individual X's direct personal relationship to production'. E. P. Thompson and Borgia have a lot of good stuff that struggles against this mechanical view.You mean Bordiga?:D

It is worth quoting (http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1926/lyons-theses.htm) him here:

The fatalist and passivistic error, though it might not necessarily lead to negating the function and the utility of the party, at the very least would certainly involve adapting the party to a proletarian class that is understood merely in a statistical and economic sense. We can sum up the conclusions touched on in the preceding theses as the condemnation of both the workerist conception, and that of an elite of an intellectual and moral character. Both these tendencies are aberrations from marxism which end up converging on the slippery slope to opportunism.
and

From the Marxist point of view, the class is not a concealed statistical data, but an organic active force, and it manifests itself when the simple convergence of economic conditions and interests widens into action and common struggle.From here (http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1946/orientation.htm).

[Jose Gracchus]

Goddamn spell check.

I was thinking of his thing about how you cannot look for the class in 'snapshots' of history, but instead in the historical motion.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Marx et al never intended 'petty bourgeois' to be a discrete and well-defined (i.e., sociological) category or grouping to assign individuals to, or even a 'class' in the same sense as the bourgeoisie and proletariat.

At least you're admitting this, unlike Stammer in the police thread. I just see shortcomings in this intermediary-by-unrelated-avenues approach.


marxian class analysis is about a person's relationship to production, not about how much money a person happens to have or make

Indeed, and it's good to see another poster think in terms of processes and state "relationship to production" and not the less fluid "relationship to the means of production."


I don't think class is some mechanical application of the 'arbitrary individual X's direct personal relationship to production'. E. P. Thompson and Borgia have a lot of good stuff that struggles against this mechanical view. The fact is the class must be viewed as part of a totality; the proletariat does not exist as such as a discrete 'thing' that can be located as an empirical entity, so much as it is a historical entity which must be understood in terms of its historical movement and simultaneous relation to other classes. Marx was not a reductionist sociologist.

Take movie stars. Do they really fit very well in the class picture? Not really. Thankfully they are basically historically irrelevant as such, and it means nothing that class analysis does not have a basket to neat place them in.

The only mechanical stuff I see is "relationship to the means of production."

Oh, and early Marx was a reductionist sociologist for having a binary view of capitalistic class relations.