3w ago

Question about petite bourgeoisie (small business owners)

Was thinking about the distinctions of this and wondering...

Would it be accurate to say that the petite bourgeoisie are on the same ladder as the bourgeoisie? Or to put it in more English terms, would it to be accurate to say that small business owners are on the same ladder as Jeff Bezos? Just on a much lower rung?

Versus, in this analogy, the proletariat (or working class), are not on the ladder at all.

The idea being that the small business owner is in a less organized stage of development toward the same thing as the conglomerate (if this is happening under capitalist rule). Whereas the working class cannot organically develop in that direction (I suppose a few could through stocks, but that seems like on the level of winning the lottery).

Want to make sure I have my metaphors straight.

19 comments

They're on the same ladder in the same way a rare proletarian can jump to petite bourgeoisie through frugal saving and luck, and a rare petite bourgeoisie can jump to bourgeoisie through jumping from simple reproduction to reproduction on an expanded scale. Liberals love that these jumps are possible, making "rags to riches" stories, but these are extreme outliers and ultimately the classes themselves remain.
- Liberals love that these jumps are possible
  Meanwhile, the petit bourgeois are losing their grip, with the threat of proletarianization looming, and they’re pissed.
  Trumpism: It’s Coming From the Suburbs
  But scapegoating poor whites keeps the conversation away from fascism’s real base: the petite bourgeoisie. This is a piece of jargon used mostly by Marxists to denote small-property owners, whose nearest equivalents these days may be the “upper middle class” or “small-business owners.” FiveThirtyEight reported last May that “the median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000,” or roughly 130 percent of the national median. Trump’s real base, the actual backbone of fascism, isn’t poor and working-class voters, but middle-class and affluent whites. Often self-employed, possessed of a retirement account and a home as a nest egg, this is the stratum taken in by Horatio Alger stories. They can envision playing the market well enough to become the next Trump. They haven’t won “big-league,” but they’ve won enough to be invested in the hierarchy they aspire to climb. If only America were made great again, they could become the haute  bourgeoisie—the storied “1 percent.” 
  
  Great point, absolutely. It becomes harder and harder for these jumps over time.
  
  Jup Fascism arises when petite bourgeoisie are under economic threat. The Kulaks of East Elbia and Hannover were the first backers of nazism, thanks to the agricultural crisis inside germany post-Versailles.
- So would someone like Jeff Bezos be an example of that "luck" since he started out small? Or would he be more of a cross between "new money" and "old money", since he also got financial help to do it?
  That seems like (I am not entirely sure) the kind of distinction you're talking about, is the difference of capital that comes from "old money" (power passed down) versus "new money" (a breakthrough pf petite bourgeoisie to bourgeoisie), with the first one being the norm and the second one being the oddity because of class antagonisms/interests largely keeping petite bourgeoisie from moving upward in class.
  
  Bit of both, and they are usually in flux.
  
  So would someone like Jeff Bezos be an example of that “luck” since he started out small? Or would he be more of a cross between “new money” and “old money”, since he also got financial help to do it?
  Jeff Bezos (adopted) father Mike Bezos was a gusano who worked for exxon - Jeff Bezos was never small.

Yes and no, they straddle the class division just like the Labour Aristocracy. They are similar to the haute (high) bourgeoisie in their social reproduction, which is derived from extracting surplus value off of the proletariat. So if you apply a moralistic perspective to Marxism, they too are "vampires" who survive by exploiting others.
However, unlike the haute bourgeoisie they still control very little capital. This means their economic power can sustain them, but does little for their political power. Besides, in many cases petite bourgeois families that own small enterprises still have to work themselves in those enterprises. They are also much more like the proletariat in how vulnerable they are to crises and political violence, being too just a stone's throw away from poverty and wage labour, whereas bankruptcy for the haute bourgeoisie means only a temporary embarrassment.
So the petite bourgeoisie for the has their long term strategic interests more aligned with the proletariat, with regards to wealth redistribution, combatting poverty, public services, etc. but they tend to be more tactically aligned in the short term with the maintenance of capitalist relations, as they derive their very immediate survival from it.
This is why Mao saw the petite bourgeoisie (among other classes) as allies of the proletariat in the revolution, because they'd also benefit in the long term and were very useful but were not fit to lead the revolution.
But to answer your analogy question, it's more like a pyramid. Even well paid proles benefit from capitalist relations wrt their lower counterparts, and the petite bourgeoisie is not even necessarily entirely above all of the labour aristocracy. But it's way more likely that a small business owner who owns, for instance, a bakery or a pub could go bankrupt and become a wage worker than that he could become a billionaire. To believe otherwise is to fall for liberal ideology.
- i very much share this view, there can be an abyss of difference between the petit-bourgeoisie and the large propietors while the difference between the average wage worker and the average petit-bourgeoisie can be quite small.
  Reminded me of that quote by that basketball player "White mamba" where he said "i'm closer to lebron than you are to me".

My dad was a baker. He had two shops, family business. His class conciousness was somehow there but he also whined about unemployed people and taxes and stuff. That being said, compared to his lifestyle, unionized blue collar job were a sinecure. He was always somehow of a rebel. Now he's in the public train company he goes harder than the reformist union people lmao

if the ladder is "ownership of means of production" then it sort of works.
- Yeah, I think it's more clear when you put it that way. I may not have a clear enough understanding of the layers of class dynamics. But I keep coming back to a point about small businesses and how they play into things, and trying to crystallize it more so. I notice there's this narrative (not so much in our kind of circles, but more in people who are dissatisfied with capitalism to some degree and may not have much political clarity beyond that) of "supporting small businesses" and such as that, but it doesn't seem to take into account what the interests of a small business are and how they can develop; instead, it often seems to treat them as a static form that will remain small and unmarred by the machinations of conglomerate level capital.
  
  to me it becomes more clear if you think of in terms of ownership of means of production and class interests that arise from that. because petite bourgeois own their businesses, they will always be on the side of private property rights and against workers (small businesses also notoriously have atrocious working conditions). so it doesn't even matter to me if they have the potential to become big businesses / conglomerates.
  with that said, sometimes petite / national bourgeoisie can have a progressive character in certain contexts, but I would say definitely not in the US.

As a rule of thumb I consider that petite-bourgoisie are defined as those who are at risk of proletarianisation themsleves if they lose that relationship with capital ie the ability to extact surplus value from the proleteriat.
I would be careful of essentialising classes though. (Individuals of the) Proleteriat could become the petite-bourgoisie and even bourgoisie, and petite-bourgoisie may never become the bourgoisie. The proleteriat may never become bourgoisie but engage in class collaboration against other proleteriat through nationalism. The petite-bourgoisie could collaborate with the proleteriat against the bourgoisie in a national liberation struggle.
(The beauty of dialectics)
Having said there is still an objective reality from which we build praxis from.
(The beauty of materialism)

i don't know if it's a good way of viewing it since the petit-bourgeoisie could also find themselves on their way to turning in to working class.

Thanks for the replies. Don't have followup to add for all of them, but I am reading it all and digesting. My general takeaway so far (welcome to further correction/commentary) is:
"Keep class interests in mind, but be careful of oversimplifying where people land in it and what that means for them, especially if they are a group that is closer to proletariat than to capitalist."

Almost all small business owners benefit far more, and are far more closely related to, the proletariat. Which is why the capitalists try so hard to skew the lines to make them side with them against the workers. Workers fighting against massive monopolistic conglomerates? "Look. LOOK. These greedy workers want to steal your mom and pop business."
And damned if it doesn't work
Every
Single
Time

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