"Petty Bourbeois"????? was Re: Nader

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Jun 27 16:52:50 PDT 2000


Doug Henwood wrote:


> Alex LoCascio wrote:
>
> >Yup, but a lot of anarchoids seem to cavalierly throw the term around.
> >
> >To be fair, a lot of Trotskyists are also prone to denouncing each other as
> >"petit-bourgeois."
>
> I'm not a Trot, nor do I play one on TV, but I use the term petit
> bourgeois. I think it's very useful. Ralph Nader is p-b. The
> International Forum on Globalization is p-b. Objectively speaking,
> I'm p-b.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. A good synonym for the term, which brings us back to the realm of trying to understand class rather than the vagaries of marxist, academic, journalistic, and popular diction is "petty producer." The connotation (Mills's sense) of that term is anyone who retains possession of his/her own surplus value but does *not* appropriate the surplus value of others. I believe that is what p-b originally meant in most Marxist usage, but it has been so terribly overused, misused, and abused that it has lost all meaning. One could then add to the category of petty producers that of small capitalists (though that's a sort of rubber bag category), and end up with something that one might call the petty bourgeoisie *within in any one text* within which one could define the term and confine its usage. But to use without lengthy definition it is even more useless than "ideology."

Again, within a single text, one could define a particular meaning for "petty-bourgeois consciousness" and stick to that meaning within that text -- but for someone to throw out the term "petty bourgeois consciousness" (say in a post on lbo) without defining it at length would be to merely babble. Possible definition: consciousness based on the assumption that there should and can be a direct relationship between act and motive within capitalist society. But I doubt that without a page or two of explanation the term could carry that meaning. I could write long posts both agreeing and disagreeing with *that* definition.

Carrol



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