I'm glad you said this. I found the larger context for that paragraph and it became clear that what he was saying was more like "we are all petty bourgeois now". Petty bourg as hegemonic, not as statistically dominant. Furthermore, when you read the entire passage, he's in speculative mode: if we had. If we were to take this position. He's stipulating a condition, agreeing not to argue with it at the moment. That's a whole other kettle of fish that making some absolute claim. As another example: right now I'm stipulating that we can take this claim seriously without evidence: "It's a lot easier to write theory when you don't actually have to marshall any empirical evidence." No evidence has been provided for it -- and I sincerely doubt the claim. More, I doubt that you could operationalize anything in that statement in order to conduct experimental research - the gold standard -- let alone survey research, ethnographic research, qualitative research, or even -peeeuuuw - focus group studies.
Meanwhile, in speculative mode, this was the lengthier quote I found. It doesn't seem to me that it is a claim about the statistical majority of the peebee. clearly, he is writing about a peebee that is hegemonic as opposed to some growing class. the "disappearance" of other classes is not about the statistical existence either. Hence, the facts that have been marshaled here are based on misrecognition:
"If we had once again to conceive of the fortunes of humanity in terms of class, then today we would have to say that there are no longer social classes, but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, in which all the old social classes are dissolved: The petty bourgeoisie has inherited the world and is the form in which humanity has survived nihilism.
But this is also exactly what fascism and Nazism understood, and to have clearly seen the irrevocable decline of the old social subjects constitutes their insuperable cachet of modernity. (From a strictly political point of view fascism and Nazism have not been overcome, and we still live under their sign.) They represented, however, a national petty bourgeoisie still attached to a false popular identity in which dreams of bourgeois grandeur were an active force. The planetary petty bourgeois has instead freed itself from these dreams and has taken over the aptitude of the proletariat to refuse any recognizable social identity. The petty bourgeois nullify all that exists with the same gesture in which they seem obstinately to adhere to it: They know only the improper and the inauthentic and even refuse the idea of a discourse that could be proper to them. That which constituted the truth and falsity of the peoples and generations that have followed one another on the earth -- differences of language, of dialect, of character, of custom, and even the physical particularities of each person -- has lost any meaning for them and any capacity for expression and communication. In the petty bourgeoisie, the diversities that have marked the tragicomedy of universal history are brought together and exposed in a phantasmagorical vacuousness.
But the absurdity of individual existence, inherited from the subbase of nihilism, has become in the meantime so senseless that it has lost all pathos and been transformed, brought out into the open, into an everyday exhibition: Nothing resembles the life of this new humanity more than advertizing footage from which every trace of the advertized product has been wiped out. The contradiction of the petty bourgeois, however, is that they still search in the footage for the product they were cheated of, obstinately trying, against all odds, to make their own an identity that has become in reality absolutely improper and insignificant to them. Shame and arrogance, conformity and marginality remain thus the poles of all emotional registers.
The fact is that the senselessness of their existence runs up against a final absurdity, against which all advertising runs aground: death itself. In death the petty bourgeois confront the ultimate expropriation, the ultimate frustration of individuality: life in all its nakedness, the pure incommunicable, where their shame can finally rest in peace. Thus they use death to cover the secret that they must resign themselves to acknowledging: that even life in its nakedness is, in truth, improper and purely exterior to them, that for them there is no shelter on earth.
This means that the planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which humanity is moving towards its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeois represents an opportunity unheard of in history of humanity that it must at all cost not let slip away. Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of humanity, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity -- if human could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable.
Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself -- this is the political task of our generation. "
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)