Hey, teens! Your class identity is determined by your relationship with the means of production, not how much money you’ve got.
Do you own any means? Like a business, a factory, a mine, a distribution network? Oh, you don’t? Welcome to the working class, sibling! I love you.
“But Natalie,” you say, “what if I’m a homemaker, or disabled, or otherwise unemployed?” Don’t matter. First off, not all productive labor is paid labor, and second off wasn’t you listening? It’s all about relationships to capital. Can’t be a capitalist if you don’t got no capital.
“But I’m an artist, or a contractor, or I own a small business!” Well, that’s where shit gets more complicated; where you fall then depends on whether or not you’re benefiting from anyone else’s labor. If you got no employees, you’re still a worker; that tiny piece of means you got don’t count for much. If you do got employees, then you’re one of them petit bourgeoisie–someone who owns capital but also works it.
If you own capital but don’t work it, making profit off of other people’s work what like that Jeff Bezos, then you’re a bourgeoisie.
So there’s your three classes. You got proletarians (that’s us!), and you got the petit bourgeoisie (your small business types–some are cool, some are bastards), and the bourgeoisie (all bastards).
Thanks for coming to my talk.
and what of the lumpen proletariat?
my ged-havin’ ass watching this discourse and loving this plain spoken level of explanation
interesting take. but it seems to me that petit-bourgeoisie is a concept applied to a group by people outside it who don’t understand how it works. a roofing contractor who owns their truck and tools and has two assistants is every bit as much a laborer as the assistants. any economic theory that classifies farmers as bourgeois needs more work.
keep at it, though, i do think you’ve found an important distinction wrt whether you work your own capital or just handle the money.
they’re defining proletariat as the people who lack control over their workplace. so an unemployed person is of the proletariat even though they’re not a laborer, and a small business owner with employees is bourgeoisie even if they do labor for the business.
a small business owner has control over their employees, is the point. the owner decides how much wages and benefits they get, as well as working conditions! these definitions are about power, not effort.
Well I mean I haven’t “found” anything, this is how these words have been used by Marxists since the mid-1800s, I just felt like explaining them with everyday modern language.
Our hypothetical contractor with assistants does still qualify as petit bourgeoisie, as would, say, a farmer who employs laborers or collects rents, because they (1) own means of production and rely on extracting surplus value from the people under them, disqualifying them from being proletarians (that is, the alienated workers who have no control over their workplaces), but (2) have to do labor for the business and have only limited control over distribution, so they aren’t really comparable to the Musks and Bezoses of the world either. That’s where the qualifier petit comes in; small business owners are petit bourgeoisie, small capitalists.
Like I tried to say up top, a lot of petit bourgeoisie are chill bros who do hard work and are aware of this stuff and do try to do right by their workers; class-collaborators, we call ‘em, and God bless ‘em. But they are still bosses.
valar apologist 