Proletariat and Bourgeoisie= Who?

[Sky Hedgehogian Maestro]

I seem to have been confused with who the "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie" are. For sake of convenience, most use the terms in the sense of 'poor' and 'rich', but from studying, I've learned that not ever poor person is a proletarian, and not every rich person is bourgeois. In fact, bourgeoisie refers to the middle class.
But screw that, I prefer the basic definition.
Still, there should be some clarification noted. What is the proletariat, and what is the bourgeoisie? All working men and economy owners? All poor and all rich? Just the workers who don't own their production and only the rich who do?

[Red Banana]

A Proletarian is someone who has nothing to sell but their labor, i.e. a wage worker, a member of the working class.

The Bourgeoisie is the class of people who own the means of production (things like factories, large farms, etc.), business owners. Not this "middle class" I've been hearing so much about.

Class is a relationship to the means of production, not a measure of income, though it is true that members of the Bourgeoisie tend to be rich due to their exploiting of Proletarians and Proletarians tend to be poor due to their exploitation by the Bourgeoisie.

[tuwix]

In fact, bourgeoisie refers to the middle class.


It is not. So-called middle class is just a middle income. But now it is just bourgeois propaganda myth. When you have degree and have a job, you are considered as middle-class, but in fact you're just usual prol. But middle-class life-style is no to belong to labor unions, not to be socialist and so on. And this is why this middle-class idiocy is promoted so much.

[TheEmancipator]

The reason why the middle class is viewed negatively is because its class character is aspiring bourgeoisie who are ultimately left dissapointed. Then, and only then, do they finally realise they as exploited as the proletariat they claim to be above. Ultimately they are working class, and I for one think one of our greatest challenges if we are to succeed is rallying them to our cause.

[Sotionov]

It should be first noted that proletariat and bourgeoisie are primarily marxist terms. For them, those are classes of capitalism- bourgeoisie are the ones that own means of production; and proletariat are the ones that don't own the means of production, and thus have to sell their labor to survive. That's why they call peasants and artisans "petit-bourgeois".

Non-marxist socialists, e.g. like a lot of anarchists, mostly don't use those terms, but talk about the rulling and the working class. If we do use these terms, we use them as such: bourgeoisie- the ones that exploit (bosses, rentiers), proletariat- people who don't oppress or exploit but live of their own labor. That's why we don't accept such a thing as "petit-bourgeois", and that's why Bakunin talked about proletariat entering the International "en masse, form factory, artisan, and agrarian sections, and unite into local federations for the sake of its own liberation."

[Jimmie Higgins]

I seem to have been confused with who the "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie" are. For sake of convenience, most use the terms in the sense of 'poor' and 'rich', but from studying, I've learned that not ever poor person is a proletarian, and not every rich person is bourgeois. In fact, bourgeoisie refers to the middle class.
But screw that, I prefer the basic definition.
Still, there should be some clarification noted. What is the proletariat, and what is the bourgeoisie? All working men and economy owners? All poor and all rich? Just the workers who don't own their production and only the rich who do?

The Bourgoisie are sometimes called "the middle class" but this is in the context of a still largely feudal world. It's different than how middle class is used today. When politicians, in the US at least, say "middle class" as others have said, they basically lump in a bunch of different groups, but roughly it would include better-paid workers, professionals, and some beurocrats, and small owners of shops and companies. People are lumped into this group by an arbitrary wage-division in the mainstream - and there are expectations or commonalities associated with being middle class like "home ownership". It's used in the US politically to create a sort of popular base for capitalist politics. For some in the "middle class" they are helped by low wages for workers (like shop-owners) whereas others need wages and benifits in order to achieve or maintain their "middle class status". So in the keynsian era, the middle class populism was about a fair deal between "the people" governemnt and business, but in the neoliberal era this populism revolves around low property tax and things like that. This helps build a base of support for these politics, and it also helps divide the working class between homeowners and non-homeowning workers, better paid workers and downwardly mobile workers.

[Red Flag Waver]

This thread brings to mind something I've been wondering about. What is meant when a certain movement is labeled "petit bourgeois"? Like, how are the specific interests of the petty bourgeoisie, not necessarily shared with the proletariat or the big bourgeoisie, reflected in past and extant political movements? I've seen the term applied to a wide range of movements that don't necessarily focus on things like low property taxes.

[tuwix]

"Petit bourgeoisie" needs are refelcted in right-wing so-called "libertarian" movement. Why? Because to maintain their prostion in society, they must advocate a private property, but they hate corporations. Then so-called "free-market" and even so-called "anarchocapitalism" is imagine by them as the best solution. Although both so-called "free-market" and even so-called "anarchocapitalism" are just imposible.

[Jimmie Higgins]

This thread brings to mind something I've been wondering about. What is meant when a certain movement is labeled "petit bourgeois"? Like, how are the specific interests of the petty bourgeoisie, not necessarily shared with the proletariat or the big bourgeoisie, reflected in past and extant political movements? I've seen the term applied to a wide range of movements that don't necessarily focus on things like low property taxes.It's kind of a fluid and "catch-all" term in some ways when describing actual people and social forces... but it basically means "not-workers" and "not-owners". So skilled professionals who have some leverage or may even manage other workers might be in this category; small farmers, small businesspeople, etc. Larger economic pressures might push people in this group upwards or downwards and often the ideas that these groups hold might show a tendancy to reflect who they identify more with: workers or the owners.

In general, petit bourgoise ideas are pretty amorphus, also fluid, and fairly widespread in society. Think about how almost every mainstream movie or book is about and from the perspective of some kind of professional. Often their concerns are represented too: their struggle with identity which is attached to their skilled profession (doctors who become obsessed with their work, detectives who become obsessed or cynical through their work. Writers are in this category - we assume that novelist and film-makers want to do that more often than not and so they fill their works with analogus professionals: Stephen King books are 90% about authors or some other kind of paid artist or journalist, for example - Crieton books are all about scientists and government professionals. So induvidual professions are seen in culture as representing an induvidual's power. Workers tend to be comic relief, scary, or their jobs are totally incidental to the story.

At any rate, I think the general thread which runs through most of what's described as p. bourgoise ideology is both a desire to reign in capital and "the masses". For right-wing libertarians, they want to purify capitalism from the "corpratists" and "big government" which exist (in their view) outside the "natural laws" of the market and so are therefore uncontrollable and destructive. But they also want to keep workers and the masses "in their place". For liberal reformists, it's esentially similar concerns but in a different (keynsian) framework: they want to use "democratic power" through the parlementary system to keep big business "playing fair" and they want to "educate" the masses so that we can have "social peace" and in their view so that everyone can have the same chance at capitalist mobility. So, from a class perspective, I think as much as liberals and right-libertarians hate eachother, they are really two different approaches to the same question of how to manage the excesses of capital and keep the working class in line so that capitalist society can work "as it's supposed to".

[rebelsdarklaughter]

So, Engels, as a factory owner, would be considered part of the bourgeoisie?

[Jimmie Higgins]

So, Engels, as a factory owner, would be considered part of the bourgeoisie?yup, and Marx, professional journalist and writer would be p. bourgeois.