Re: [Marxism] Clarifying the term "petty bourgeoisie"?

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chou  en lai was a member of the Chinese landlord class, as was Chu Teh.

At the time of a revolution a general in the Czarist army (from the
nobility: definitely ruling class) went over to the Bolsheviks. When
captured by the Whites he was given the choice of renouncing Bolshevism
or being hanged. He replied, I die a Bolshevik.

Class simply is not a very reliable basis for judging specific
individuals. And scabs of course are working class, as are cops. It
can't be emphasized too strongly that class is a _relationship_, not a
box of individuals characterized by the box. Hence class helps us
understand the dynamics which rule a whole society but simply isn't
useful for describing individuals.

Lou Paulsen wrote:
> (If we lived in a society where everyone had a vitamin
> deficiency disease, wouldn't we want the vocabulary
> to say so?)

If you tell me X is a rabbit, I know a lot about X without even looking
at it.

If you tell me X is a petty producer (English for petit bourgeois) I
know something about his/her relationships to the society as a whole but
I know nothing whatever about X as a person.

If everyone suffers from a vitamin deficiency, that is a useful
descriptive category because it tells us something concrete about every
individual in it. Everyone  in our society suffers from a water
deficiency: i.e. we need a constant intake of water. Hence we can know
that if X is human, X needs water. Pretty banal. But when marxists use
(or misuse) "petty bourgeois" they are trying to draw a contrast between
the individual(s) so described and _other_ individuals; and they are apt
to fool themselves into thinking that the fact tells them about a
specific person without investigating further. Not true.

In the _Grundrisse_ Marx points out (as a sharp distinction between the
capitalist mode of production and every other mode) the dot-like
isolation of the worker in bourgeois society. It is that isolation (that
illusion of the abstract individual existing prior to and independently
of social relations) that is at the essence of what we call petty
bourgeois consciousness. Even most big capitalists are not free from
this consciousness, the consciousness of having to make relationships
rather than of realizing that wherever and whenever we find ourselves we
are always already caught up in an ensemble of social relations. We
don't _have_ a history; we ARE our history.

The petty producer (pure case) sits by the side of the road and makes a
pair of shoes. The universe is unfair if a customer does not come along
and purchase those shoes. He/she _deserves_ recompense for his/her
labor. That sense of unfairness, of believing that one's solitary labor
should be recompensed, is the core social fact informing/generating what
we call petty-bourgeois consciousness. Put another way, the petty
producer just "naturally" believes Say's Law, that there is a purchaser
for every commodity. (Not a precise way of putting it.) If no purchaser
shows up, then someone must be cheating -- and in actual history that
someone has all too often been identified as a Jewish usurer. Hence the
intertwining of anti-semitism and petty-bourgeois socialism. In the
great Fascist epic:

A factory
has also another aspect, which we call the financial aspect
It gives people the power to buy (wages, dividends
which are the power to buy) but it is also the cause of prices
or values, financial, I mean financial values
It pays workers, and pays _for_ material.
What it pays in wages and dividends
stays fluid, as power to buy, and this power is less,
per forza, damn blast your intellex, is less
than the total payments made by the factory
(as wages, dividends AND payments for raw material
bank charges etcetera
and all, that is the whole, that is the total
of these is added into the total of prices
caused by that factory, any damn factory
and there is and must be therefore a clog
and the power to purchase can never
(under the present system) catch up with
prices at large,

        and the light became so bright and so blindin'
in this layer of paradise
        that the mind of man was bewildered.
                (Ezra Pound, Canto XXXVIII)

There is so much wrong with what Pound says here that it would take a
book of hundreds of pages to even begin to unravel the errors and
identify the perceptions behind those errors. The root of the error is
that Pound is seeing that factory through the eyes of the classical
petty producer (and hence he completely confuses the dividends paid out
by corporations with the profit of the family farmer or the independent
shoe maker). For our purposes we need only see that in the framework
Pound provides the evil from which all other evils cascade is a _clog_
on purchasing power. Someone somewhere is cheating, and that someone is
The Jew, The Usurer.

Now, under _ordinary_ conditions workers (even the most exploited and
oppressed workers) experience themselves in such dot-like isolation. It
is a commonplace that in an economic downturn (such as the severe
recesssion of 1974) workers are individualized, as each scrambles to
save him/herself, and working-class militancy declines (the surge of
give-backs begins in the mid-70s during that recession and in the
following stagflation). When (leaving aside for now the origin of such
periods) a surge in working-class militancy occurs, individualism
(petty-producer consciousness) among workers is replaced with
solidarity.

Yes, being determines consciousness, but in extraordinarily complex
ways. That is just one of the reasons why class analysis as
classification of people into pigeonholes is useless to marxists.

We still need to talk (constantly) of class, because the social
relations of capitalism (that is, the class structure of capitalism) is
the grounds for seeing the necessity of revolution. But don't fall into
the traps of academic sociology and its yen to classify.

[This post remains rather fragmentary, but I don't have the time or
energy to do more with it now.]

Carrol


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