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Recently on Tumblr, I happened to see a slice of discourse; namely, a disagreement between leftists about communism. Certain parties referred to artists as petite bourgeoisie, and another party posted indicating that they believed this invalidated their argument. "They think artists are petite-bourgeois," they said, in a bullet-pointed list of offenses, as if it was on its face ridiculous. I think that this stems from a fundamental lack of understanding of the conversation being had! This person had, I think, read "petite-bourgeois" as simply an insult; "petite bourgeoisie" with a definition of "yucky rich people" rather than the actual definition the communists were using.

I think that "class" means a lot of different things in different contexts; in the context of general conversation, "class" means more or less "how much money you have." In that context, "working class" is used as a synonym for "somewhat poor." In the context of Marxism, though, "class" refers to your position in relation to production. This is something that has (I think) gotten lost in the weeds as anti-capitalist sentiment gains traction in the USA and more people who are not Marxists or especially interested in Marxism specifically are engaging in conversations about work, money, and capitalism with people who are Marxists. The same words mean different things!

The bourgeoisie are the people who own the means of production; a factory owner, for example. They make money primarily by owning things, not by working. An owner of a factory doesn't make the machines or operate the machines or fix the machines; he just gets money because he owns the machines, while people under him do the work of using the machines. In colloquial terms they would generally be considered "upper class." They are people who are rich because they profit from other people working.

The petite bourgeoisie are the "small" bourgeoisie; small business owners and self-employed artisans. They aren't usually rich, and they do typically actually do actual work of some kind besides "owning things," but they still profit from the work being done by those producing goods. As a class they aspire to being more profitable, and their interests typically align more with the owner class than with the laborers. Consider how small business owners in the USA are not held to the same standards with regards to the treatment of their employees and take full advantage of this; they are not required to provide health insurance, and so they do not. Because they are interested in profit; profit that they are extracting from their resources, which include other human beings.

Consider, for example, a potato chip factory. There are workers in the factory operating the machines: they are the ones actually making the potato chips. They're the proletariat. The owner of the potato chip factory is the bourgeoisie. The owner of a potato chip store that wholesale purchases potato chips to sell is the petite-bourgeoisie.

If you sell prints and acrylic keychains in an online shop, you are petite-bourgeoisie; someone else is laboring to make things for you to profit from. You are not rich, certainly, but you are in a class separate from the workers who are actually producing your goods. You make money because their work is cheap, and you have a financial interest in keeping their labor cheap. It is against your class interests for the workers in that factory to be paid more, because that cuts into the money you make.

But let's say you have a specialized skill; you are a self-employed artisan. Not only are you an artist who sells prints, but you do not outsource their production. You make your own paper and ink and printing materials. First of all: you are probably aware that it is extremely difficult to make a living doing this as your sole occupation. You are in competition with mass-produced work, which is made fast & cheap & high-quality. And - again, unlike factory workers - you own the things you use to produce your prints. Owning a printing press and using it is very different from being paid to work on a printing press that someone else owns. In order to make a living with your work, the things you produce are very expensive; your ability to make a living relies on you having connections with rich people who can actually afford your stuff.

Due to the way capitalism structurally works, you will almost certainly not remain a completely self-sufficient self-employed artisan; either you will become a business owner and delegate some of the work required for you to make a living to employees, or you will have to get another job to actually pay the bills. And, to be frank, you are probably already wealthy; again, because the role of the "artisan with specialized skill" has been pretty much demolished by industrialization.

This is the factual description of what the petite-bourgeoisie is; so, yes, if you are an artist then you are petite-bourgeoisie. That's how Marxist definitions of classes work! It is a description of your relationship to production, because that's what Marxists are interested in talking about.

I think people feel very fired up about the assertion that they are exploiting the labor of other people largely because they resent the implication that they are rich when they are in fact probably hovering around the poverty line or just above it. But that is not actually what the term petite-bourgeoisie implies at all! Marx and Marxists are fully aware that the petite-bourgeoisie are not rich.

Marx wrote: The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.¹

Further Marxist writers elaborated on the petite-bourgeoisie, theorizing that their insecure economic position and fear of "sinking" into the proletariat leads to support of fascism. You've certainly heard variations on this - the rise of the far right in the USA being attributed to "economic insecurity," variations on the quote, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

The point is that the petite-bourgeoisie use the tactics of the bourgeoisie to try to ascend to higher "ranks" in capitalist society; they aspire to being part of the bourgeoisie, and part of that aspiration is evident in their exploitation of workers. They must exploit workers in order to be a petite-bourgeoisie. If you can't buy acrylic charms in bulk for cheap, then you can't sell them! Rather than being in solidarity with workers, the petite-bourgeoisie have to step on workers to lift themselves up. It is a fundamental function of the class. If they weren't exploiting workers, then they would be workers themselves. Because petite-bourgeoisie are not wealthy, they are particularly motivated to perpetuate the oppression of workers, which is what makes them so useful to the petite-bourgeois. If wages were to go up for factory workers in China, self-employed artists would be priced out and no longer able to run their businesses. The class interests of the petite-bourgeoisie are aligned with the bourgeoisie & not with the workers, despite the fact that they have more in common with workers than with the bourgeoisie in terms of how much money they really have.

For someone with a vague awareness of Marxism, "bourgeois" just means "rich" and thus "petite-bourgeois" means "kinda rich." With that understanding, Marxists who say that impoverished artists are petite-bourgeois come across as out of touch assholes with no understanding of how reality works (which seems like proof that people who read theory are ivory tower elitists whose ideas aren't worth engaging with seriously). Reading theory is for assholes; Marx is just some dead white guy; who cares what these guys have to say when they think artists are rich??

To Marxists, on the other hand, a bunch of people just butted into their conversation with no understanding of anything being talked about and started getting mad. They're not just intruding, they're intruding and then getting mad that they lack context to understand what's going on. Context they could've looked up instead of interrupting the conversation to loudly proclaim everybody else wrong based on vibes.

The USA has a particularly anti-intellectual culture which frequently gets put on display in these types of online conversations, where an undereducated person from the USA accuses a self-educated person from the Global South of being an ivory tower elitist trying to intentionally exclude poor people by being too hard to understand. In the USA, self-directed education is pretty rare, and higher education at college is typically a series of hoops people jump through in order to get a job after graduating rather than an enjoyable opportunity to learn and study broadly. Pursuing particular interests that are not considered "useful for getting a job" - or, god forbid, are only useful for a career in academia - is seen as a mark of privilege as well as somewhat embarrassing and foolish. Outside of academic institutions, educating yourself is the purview of Ultra Dweebs and the foppish privileged upper crust. If you have time to educate yourself, you have too much time on your hands and need to get a real hobby/life.

We also have a powerful cultural attachment to "folk knowledge" and positioning "common sense" against "book learning" as mutually exclusive. Things that seem right are always more true than something a high-falutin' big-city book nerd thinks. ("I don't care what science says; my grandma always said XYZ, and it's worked for her! Just goes to show!") Someone who is "too educated" is offputting, uncharismatic, arrogant, out of touch with "reality."

So when a USAmerican encounters someone saying words they don't understand, or people engaging in an intellectual conversation that has some contextual barrier to entry, they feel not only offended but righteously offended, because they are positioning the "intellectuals" as "privileged elites" and themselves as an "oppressed underclass" who is being looked down upon by those privileged elites. Even when they are demonstrably richer than the person they are talking to, with easier access to educational resources, they are the folksy everyman who is too poor to be educated, and these strangers talkin' fancy are out-of-touch academics.

It isn't uniquely USAmerican, of course. All kinds of people react with anger and defensiveness when faced with something they find confusing or don't understand. It's one of the classic hallmarks of internet culture! You see something you don't understand, assume you're under attack, and get pissed off. Any implication that you don't know something is an insult, which includes simply talking about things you don't know anything about.

Trigger warnings are stupid. There's only two genders. Not ALL men. White privilege doesn't exist. You're exagerrating. You're overreacting. You're lying. You made that up. You're being mean to me. I'm under attack. You're just trying to sound smart. Who cares about this stuff? Be normal. None of those words are in the bible.

The logic being, "if I haven't heard of it before, it can't really be all that important or real. Otherwise I (the center of the universe) would have heard about it already! If I don't understand it, no one understands it, which means that people saying they understand it are liars and thus I don't need to listen to them."

Something that's really important to me is trying to cultivate/nurture curiosity. I try to redirect frustration and confusion into interest/curiosity, even if it's a frustrated kind of interest/curiosity; I read linked sources, I try to factcheck, I try to find people explaining themselves. When someone says something that seems wrong to me, that I disagree with, that provokes an emotional feeling of "no way!!", I try to figure out what they meant, how much & why I disagree, why I might be feeling bad about what it is they said. Do I disagree or am I feeling guilty? What information and context are they working from that's different from mine? What are they basing this hot take on? Who is this person, anyway? On social media (DUN DUN DUNNN) with reblog/retweet type functions, it's really common to see people saying something without knowing the context in which they're saying it. Is this a parody account? An ad? A neo-Nazi? A congressman? A thirteen-year-old KPop stan? A communist organizer? A journalist? A fish biologist?

When someone asserts a fact that I am pretty sure is not true, I try to remain open to the possibility that I just am missing information. I don't know that much about most things, so it's always possible!

I'm not very good at this, I think - better than average, but that's not saying much! It is nonetheless something important to me to do anyway. I do find it very frustrating when I don't understand what the fuck someone is talking about, often to the point of intolerable resentment. I'm also extremely prone to doomscrolling, reading stuff that makes me miserable, and getting lost in weird internet rabbitholes and subcultures. It's hard to balance letting go and thinking "I just disagree," with making sure I feel like I have enough of an understanding of something to disagree about it. The world is overwhelmingly complicated. It's full of stuff, and people, and experiences. It's not possible to know or understand everything.

Anyway. This has been bothering me since I saw the post. It helps to get stuff out of my head when it's been going around in circles for a really long time.

In other news, I'm considering turning my blog into a rotating cube.