[Marxism] DISILLUSIONED WITH MARXMAILers!

[Haines Brown]

> Louis Proyect wrote:
> > 
> > Haines Brown wrote:
> > > It just occurred to me: do you see the term "petite bourgeois"
> > > as an insult for some reason?
> > 
> > Of course it is an insult. The "Marxist-Leninist" parties have
> > used this term as a cudgel against opposition tendencies since the
> > early 20th century at least.
> 
> The neutral term would be petty producer.

Carrol, I see the advantage of having a neutral term that avoids all
the ambiguities, but I'm not sure that what you suggest is adequate. A
teacher, doctor, and lawyer is traditionally a member of the (petite)
bourgeoisie, but they are not "producers" in the conventional
sense. My dictionary suggests that while one meaning of the word is
equivalent to any creative activity, all the other meanings speak of
agriculture or manufacturing. The former is too vague to be of use;
the others too specific.

If you were to include services in "producer" as one who creates
services, then what of service wage earners? That is, to represent a
doctor as petty producer simply because he creates a service leaves
something important out.

With the advent of capitalism, the capitalist bourgeoisie and the
traditional bourgeoisie played quite different roles, and so the term
"petite bourgeoisie" seems to be quite useful.

It seems to me that while the accuation of having "petit-bourgeois"
tendencies might have been unjustifiably thrown about by a _few_
people in some _very_ obscure parties about which most people are
entirely unaware, the accusation could in principle also have been
justified. We can't judge in the present context whether such
accuations were in general valid or not. In any case, some obscure
perversions hardly seem to warrant tossing out a perfectly useful
word. The problem with it is rather that the average person hearing it
finds it stilted or foreign-sounding. And yet, I can think of no
alternative.

> Most users of "petite bourgeois," however, are operating out of a
> vulgar conception of class as identity, and for that reason want a
> term that points to individuals rather than to social
> relations. Once one uses the term "petty producer," it becomes
> clearer that many of those labelled "petty bourgeois" are, in fact,
> members of the proletariat.

As you say, the focus should be on relations of production, but to
reduce the relation in question to the size of productive property
seems a reductionism. And besides, to say the working class is such
because it possesses no productive property, seems a definition by
negation. Perhaps more important in the case of the petite bourgeoisie
is individual independence, which can come not only from petty
property, but also from a professional license, both of which depend
on the social milieu. This is an important point, which draws me into
a philosophical aside.

I suggest that to see social class as the social effect of various
categories of means of production involves a crippling reductionism
that we inherit from empiricism. I believe it is no longer
scientifically valid to define a social system as consisting of
hypostatized causally related parts. Rather than try to define Social
classes as the social effects of forms of property, instead it is
obvious they should be defined as _processes_ in which property
constrains historical social potencies. Well, no one will understand
what I'm talking about, and so enough of this.

I suspect this issue could give rise to a very interesting and useful
discussion of the meaning, significance and function of "relations of
production", but I'm not optimistic.

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM