[Marxism] Petty bourgeois and bourgeois

[Haines Brown]

Anthony, I'm not unsympathetic to your efforts here, but questions
persist.

> A few words on Marxist terminology. The worst contribution of French
> to Marxist terminology in English is the word "bourgeois". Those of
> us who live in cities belong to many social classes.

Well, yes, but let's be more precise. In Petite Larousse, it says that
the bourgeoisie refers to the class possessing the means of
production. So there's no difficulty here moving from the French to
the English word. However, when it comes to "bourgeois", while one
definition says it refers to town dwellers, it adds the qualifier that
these are town dwellers with special privileges. This qualifier I'm
sure was true from the start of real cities, for there obviously were
servants and peasants who also lived in town and definitely were not
considered bourgeois. In other words, you are using a primitive
definition coming from about the 10-11th century which was was prior
to cities and referred to the burgos (castle)-dweller. When the word
was carried over to the cities that often emerged from those forts in,
say, the 11-12th centuries, the word acquired the implications that a
bourgeois person had special privilege or powers. The other definition
in Petite Larousse says that the "bourgeois" person belongs to the
middle class as opposed to the workers or peasants, and so in French
there is presumed to be a real class difference regardless of where
one lived.

> Capitalist, small capitalist, and independent producer or worker are
> better terms, but not much used.

I gather you have no objection to the Marxist use of the words
capitalist, small capitalist, independent producer, or worker. But
what do you mean they are not much used? I must be missing your point.

> Most people who have been termed to be "petty bourgeois" are small
> capitalists, independent producers, or managerial and professional
> employees.
 
Oops, Please make clear whether you are trying to use Marxist
terminology or not. In Marxist terms, while the successful petite
bourgeois could become a capitalist, the dynamic of small property and
capitalism are dramatically different. Marxism offers a clear
definition of that distinction. I would not object to representing the
petite bourgeoisie as being in part independent producers (I've
discussed this in another message). The term is also conventionally
applied to professionals. But what are these "managerial and
professional employees"? Are they paid for their time or their
product/service? In some cases, it obvious that they are either
workers or petite bourgeois, but in many cases, it may be a grey
area. A litmus test might be whether they can decide on their own to
take the rest of the week off once the project they are working on is
done. If petite bourgeois, they could say, well, I did my work, so why
hang around? If the person is expected to hang around even though
there's no work to do, that sounds like a worker to me. But don't
debate me on this point, for I only throw it out to think about.

> Similarly managerial and technical employees form another
> transitional class. While in some respects they are part of the
> working class, in other respects they are not. They can share in
> surplus value through bonuses, stock options, etc. Plus they have
> other priveleges which set them off from and above other workers.

Yes, you bring up a point I overlooked. However, I doubt a bonus or
stock option really moves the person toward being a objective
capitalist rather than just a better paid worker. What's the
difference between a bonus or stock option and a Christmas bonus that
many workers (used to) get? The employer uses the Christmas bonus to
buy good will from his workers, and like regular pay it comes out of
the value the worker produces. The stock option helps make the
employee identify with the company. That is, a bonus given to a
regular worker and a stock option to a manager still aims to counter
any subjective working class consciousness. Now, if a manager acquired
so much stock that it became a major part of his income, and
especially if it allowed him to quit work and dedicate his existence
to investments, then obviously he has become a capitalist rather than
worker.

The other side of this difficult coin is whether the manager is a
member of the petite bourgeoisie rather than worker. In Marxist terms,
to be a member of the petite bourgeoisie, he would have to be
independent (able to take the rest of the week off without permission,
for example) or be working under a contract that indicates what he
will get paid for delivering specified goods or services. This does
not describe middle management, but I gather it does specify top
management. In other words, if my assessment of the typical situation
is accurate, then I'd see middle management as workers and top
management as petite bourgeoisie. I.e., I pay little attention to the
relative size of income, whatever its source.

One difficulty in my little exposition is that bonuses and stock
options do come out of surplus value, while workers are paid as a cost
of production. Wages are paid after you do the work, while a contract
involves payment, at least in part, before you do the work. As long as
this bonus or stock option is relatively small compared to total
income, perhaps we can marginalize it. When a bonus or stock option
becomes a major part of a person's income, then there seems little
reason to keep thinking of the person as being in the working class.

> Historically almost the entire leadership of every social revolution
> in history has come from one or the other of these two transitional
> classes. Look at Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Villa (that's
> Pancho) Winstanley, Cromwell, Ho Chi Minh, and those French guys
> (Guys, too) except for the aristocrats.

This is to an extent true, but we have to be careful about what
inferences we draw from it, for when the modern working class movement
first began, one of the classic objections to it was that workers'
consciousness was tried down to their jobs, and so they had no
capacity to see more broadly than reformist objectives. Revolution
therefore had to be an idea of the bourgeoisie.

However, I suggested elsewhere that since workers are mobilizing
social forces of production, they naturally acquire a sense of society
as a whole and therefore naturally become aware of its contradictory
character and so possibly acquire a critical consciousness. You don't
need to be a member of the bourgeoisie to tell you that you are
getting back very little of the enormous surplus value you
produce. Everyone sees that right away because they are putting in
motion a very powerful technology that obviously produces enormous
surplus value that swamps the size of one's paycheck. It may be
natural that revolutionaries have enjoyed higher education and more
leisure, but it would be a mistake to infer from this that their
leadership was made necessary because the working class was
incapacitated. And let me add that the development of capitalism now
broadly requires the working class to have both leisure and education,
so the objection now seems rather antiquated.

I believe there is also a danger we look only at the subjective
conditions for revolution when speaking of the bourgeoisie and only at
the objective conditions when speaking of the working class. We
obviously must consider both in both cases. In objective terms, the
working class has good reason to revolt, but not the bourgeoisie (in a
bourgeois regime), but are moved more by subjective considerations,
which may or may not be as reliable. A bourgeois rebel is easily
Co-opted, but there is no way to remove the exploitation taking place
at the point of production.
 
> The use of the term "petty bourgoies" within the Marxist movement,
> especially in outfits like the SWP was sort of like the use of the
> word "papist" in Protestant sects in Northern Ireland.

Have you really proven your point (I don't know anything about the
SWP, so can't address it)?  All you have done is to suggest that there
are grey areas between the classes in empirical terms. However,
Marxism is not empiricism. If you represent yourself as a Marxist, you
need to understand why a Marxist approach today is quite the opposite
of empiricism. By pointing out that there are grey areas that can
muddy conventional class distinctions, what you have really done is to
expose a major weakness of the empiricist approach to social class. It
limited bearing on Marxism.

As a summary statement, I suggest that the Marxist definition of class
is based on relations of production is only constrained by empirical
facts. In contrast, the empiricist definitions of class impose
arbitrary divisions upon empirical continua, and as a result are
fundamentally unscientific and lack explanatory power, although
certainly useful for certain practices.

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM