[lbo-talk] Petty Bourgeois (was "Big Business Takes Distance... ")

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue Jan 31 13:02:49 PST 2017



> On Jan 31, 2017, at 3:49 PM, James Creegan <turbulo at aol.com> wrote:
>
> The above groups conform to the classical definition, i.e. small property owners. I would also include doctors and lawyers in private practice. Perhaps more controversially, I would include people like professors, journalists and skilled workers at the high end of IT. True, such people do have to sell their labor power, but have sufficient income, social status and control over their conditions of employment to make them more individualist than collectivist in their habits and lifestyles, i.e. more like petty bourgeois than proletarians. Of course, the "new petty bourgeois" groups I have named tend to be urban-cosmopolitan, and thus more likely to have voted for Clinton than, say, Midwestern used car dealers and grocery store owners, who probably leaned toward Trump. There are petty bourgeois and petty bourgeois, in other words.

Professional-managerial class seems like an upscale cousin of the petty bourgeoisie these days - though doctors are increasingly treated like wage labor.

Doug



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