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

[Carrol Cox]

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