Petite bourgeoisie

Petite bourgeoisie (French pronunciation: ​[pətit buʁʒwazi]), also petty bourgeoisie (literally small bourgeoisie), is a French term (sometimes derogatory) referring to a social class comprising semi-autonomous peasantry and small-scale merchants whose politico-economic ideological stance in times of socioeconomic stability is determined by reflecting that of a haute (high) bourgeoisie, with which the petite bourgeoisie seeks to identify itself, and whose bourgeois morality it strives to imitate.

The term is politico-economic, and references historical materialism. It originally denoted a sub-stratum of the middle classes in the 18th and early-19th centuries. In the mid-19th century, the pre-eminient theorist of socio-politico-economy, Karl Marx, and other Marxist theorists used the term petite bourgeoisie to identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that comprised small-scale capitalists such as shop-keepers and workers who manage the production, distribution, and/or exchange of commodities and/or services owned by their bourgeois employers.

The petite bourgeoisie is economically distinct from the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat social-class strata who rely entirely on the sale of their labor-power for survival; and also are distinct from the capitalist class haute bourgeoisie (high bourgeoisie) who own the means of production, and thus can buy the labor-power of the proletariat and lumpenproletariat to work the means of production. Though the petite bourgeoisie can buy the labor of others, they typically work alongside their employees, unlike the haute bourgeoisie.

Historically, Karl Marx predicted that the petite bourgeoisie were to lose in the course of economic development. In the event, R. J. B. Bosworth suggested that they were to become the political mainstay of Fascism, which political reaction was their terroristic response to the inevitable loss of power (economic, political, social) to the haute bourgeoisie.Wilhelm Reich also highlighted the principal support of the rise of fascism in Germany given by the petite bourgeoisie and middle-class in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. He claimed that the middle classes were a hotbed for political reaction due to their reliance on the patriarchal family (small businesses, according to Reich, are often self-exploiting enterprises of families headed by the father, whose morality binds the family together in their somewhat precarious economic position), and the sexual repression that underlies it.

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