On 2013-11-08, at 9:52 AM, andie_nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Great story. I have to confess I don't like fishing either, but I never pretended to be anything but a petit bourgeois intellectual. Even if I spend the rest of my working life stacking boxes at Target, that's what I'd be.
Andie may be playfully self-deprecating, and the phrase may still have some polemical utility as an epithet, but does the characterisation of today's intellectuals as "petty bourgeois" retain any explanatory power?
Most are university graduates who come from white and blue collar families. They're no longer predominantly self-employed or living on family allowances or landed and business profits as was common in the 19th century. For the most part, they're salaried professional and technical employees, the newest and fastest growing layer of the working class.
Their class location may have shifted, but some would still argue that the political consciousness of intellectuals (broadly understood) is petty bourgeois. Like farmers, artisans, and other small property holders before them, they're generally accepting of capitalism with a bias towards redistributive reforms and against the rule of Big Capital and the wealthy. Andie goes so far as to suggest that this would still be the case even were he to succumb to the temptation to leave lawyering in favour of stacking boxes at Target.
But isn't this true of of the working class as a whole? It's political consciousness can no longer be described as "proletarian", when large numbers of workers saw themselves as having distinct interests and socialist objectives fundamentally opposed to the ruling class. This anti-capitalist constituency is now pretty much confined to a small minority of leftish academics and other dissenting intellectuals and students, which brings us back to the question of how to describe the class location and political character of the particular social layer to which most of us belong.