Really fucking long post, I apologize.
The USA is an extremely petite bourgeois country. Only about 12% of the population owns a home without a mortgage, but 65.8% of the country owns a home with a mortgage. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is a pretty basic definition for being petite bourgeois.* Owning a house or apartment, even if you have to pay a bank, makes a massive difference in how you view the world. And at least according to this definition, the proletariat in the USA is in the minority. (And yes, I know, many homeowners can easily lose their homes if the market contracts.)
65.8% of the country owns a home. About half the population voted in 2020. For the most part, I think these are the normies. These are the people who might shake their heads when a cop kills someone, but who will fly into a rage if rioters burn down a single abandoned building. A lot of these people don’t even get their news from places like Facebook or Fox News. They get it from the radio or local TV channels, which is almost nothing but stories like: “a criminal did something bad, but thankfully the cops stopped him.”
I can remember, early in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich says something like: imagine if you could excite ordinary people about leftwing politics the way they are excited by sports. And then in Age of Awakening, the Chinese TV show about the founding of the communist party, one of the main characters talks about the urgent need to raise the consciousness of the Chinese people. For a lot of Chinese Marxists in the 1920s, my guess is that it would have looked completely hopeless to talk with illiterate peasants about communism, just as it honestly seems pretty hopeless to discuss the subject with the American petite bourgeoisie today. (The American petite bourgeoisie is literate, but in some ways they might as well be illiterate because most of them don’t read much of anything, and if you show them revolutionary literature, it might as well be written in a completely different language.)
We’ve talked a lot on hexbear about radicalizing normies. We know that American fascists are also extremely interested in this subject. But until now, I think we’ve completely failed to make much of a dent in the consciousness of the petite bourgeoisie—which I know empathizes much more with people like Jeff Bezos than with workers in the Global South. I don’t know that we can just wait for the system to collapse or for the collapsing system to radicalize large numbers of people on its own. Any hope we might have in the generational divide, for instance, is probably misplaced. Once the boomers really fucking start to die off, the millennials who inherit their property are going to become just as shitty as they are, for the most part. Back in the '60s, the boomers were “pretty radical,” although few of them seemed to give much of a fuck about the Global South or allying themselves to China or the USSR. (Most of the cool ones died or went into exile a long time ago.) Their beef with the Vietnam War was largely with getting drafted, not with millions of dead Vietnamese people.
I honestly don’t know how to radicalize normies. 99% of what I have tried has failed. I only stopped being a normie myself because I started running in elections as a Bernie Democrat and I kept encountering Democrats (especially those in power) who were really hostile to the idea of Medicare for All. But almost nobody in this country has that experience. And lots of Bernie Democrats run in these elections and run into the same problems that I did, but they almost never radicalize, so maybe whatever makes me a communist is actually a lot deeper than just running into shithead Democratic bigwigs.
I was glancing through the wikipedia page on Edward Bernays, and I saw that the CIA hired him to spread doomerism in Guatemala, making the defeat of the revolution there look like a foregone conclusion. If people want to vent here, I’m fine with that, even if some of them may actually be cops. But I think we are running out of time. The planet is going to literally run out of oxygen, and the workers of the world are not uniting. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising comes to mind. Fighting the Nazis on the inside was basically suicide. (Just as it was basically suicide for John Brown to fight the American government almost completely on his own.) If the Nazis had been a little smarter and hadn’t declared war on basically everyone at the same time, the Third Reich might still be around today (instead of surviving inside the CIA and the West German government).
In short, the American proletariat probably isn’t ever going to unite to overthrow the government. There are just too many barriers. The CIA and the FBI are just too powerful and too good at destroying proletarian movements. Our only hope seems to be in the Global South uniting, strangling the economy of the USA from the outside, and then finding a way to stop the bourgeoisie from launching nuclear missiles. But that process is going to take at least twenty or thirty more years.
I don’t know. Before the 2020 Uprising happened, I would have laughed if you had told me something like that could happen. But because there was no revolutionary leadership (because the police will kill or imprison any organizers who present a serious threat), the uprising petered out. It still seems to be continuing now, but in more of a hidden way with American workers refusing to put up with the same old shit from their bosses and landlords.
This is just a bunch of disjointed thoughts born out of my general frustration with things and the fact that for weeks or months I’ve been thinking to myself that we need a Maoism for the petite bourgeoisie even though I don’t know what that actually is or if such a thing is even possible.
- Although I know that in Vietnam and Cuba, the home ownership rate is 90%! I guess it makes a pretty big difference if the proletariat is running your country. I’m not sure about Vietnam, but it also looks like Cubans are not allowed to own more than two homes.
Actually I’ve had experience with mortgages being a somewhat major point of radicalization during the Greek debt crisis for many people, so it’s not even that. The left disrupting auctions was one of the best and most popular ideas we’ve had. Like, who’d have thunk that being slave to a capitalist institution that threatens to take your home away would make people dislike capitalism lol
Yeah, my understanding is:
- Bourgeois = makes the vast majority of their money off of owning things; does not need to exchange their labor for money. A large landlord, the owner of a large company, a trust fund kid.
- Proletariat = makes the vast majority of their money off of exchanging their labor for money. A wage worker who at most has some small retirement account.
Petite bourgeois would be someone who still has to work for a living, but who also makes significant money off of owning things and aspires to make that their major source of income. High-wage workers (doctors, lawyers) who have put their excess wages into significant investments, small business owners who may still work full time at their business.
I’m not sure owning a home even gets you there (you don’t make enough money to live off that), and paying a mortgage definitely wouldn’t qualify.
High-wage workers (doctors, lawyers) who have put their excess wages into significant investments, small business owners who may still work full time at their business.
Another aspect of this is decision making. High wage workers usually don’t own the means of production as partners or shareholder, but they do get to make a lot of the decisions about how the business is run and what happens. That’s why the term “professional managerial class” gets thrown around. These people are technically workers who labor for a wage, but they’re paid either directly for their services (a lot of doctors/lawyers/engineers who freelance or own a consultanting biz) or primarily to make the rate of exploitation of other workers higher for the owner.
That’s not even bringing up the fact that they almost always make enough money to have significant capital investments. If you have half a million or a million dollars, realistically you probably don’t need to work for wages even if you’d have to cut expenses to survive. Homeownership makes this even more possible because you can just pay off the debt and lower your bills significantly.
yeah, I figure that with mortgages people are really just now beholden to the damn bank vs a landlord. You still feel the sting of someone else eating most of your paycheck
Sure, but lots of people with mortgages don’t ever think about it on any level more heavily than “part of my paycheck goes to this thing, but really, I own the house, the house is mine.” So they’ll freak out the same as any landlord or corporate ghoul that owns hundreds of buildings outright would over the concept of someone throwing a brick at a window.
I mean the difference is those mortgage payments go towards you actually owning the house. If the bank wants the house back they have to buy you out of what you already paid, you can sell the home if and when you don’t want to live there anymore. The bank is still making, well, bank, but unlike a landlord that money isn’t just going into their pockets, it’s actually helping you gain ownership over something of value.
I don’t really buy the whole “owning your home makes you petit bourgeois”
It doesn’t. Whether it makes you a “labor aristocrat” really depends on the home. There’s corners of this country where a UPS driver can buy a rancher with barely any debt. You’ll either be living in a place that’s ugly as fuck or has an OxyContin problem, but you’ll own it.
Anyone who owns a home an hour drive from the coast in CA is a fucking Kulak tho.
Oh my god not the weirdo anti-house posts again…
BTW the US if anything has a LOW home ownership rate. I guess the only western country that is not petite bourgeois is Switzerland of all places lmao. Pls make these weird ultra analyses go away, they’re not useful in the slightest other than convincing people to become more insular, eclectic and counterproductive…
I think this is a pretty hostile response for someone making a good-faith effort post,
Tbh I confused them with someone else who used to make somewhat annoying posts about home ownership.
I’m not sure that organizing around labor is feasible for a cross-section of the US; many of us are gig workers or independent contractors or unemployed, and many others work at places with high turnover rates and/or small numbers of coworkers. So discussing organization tactics along other axes of economic status, such as tenant rights, has a lot of utility.
Tenant unions are extremely limited in scope. The jobs you are describing are just harder, not unfeasible to organize around, and more importantly they are not the only jobs. Creating a baseline level of organization in these other jobs and also probably campuses ensures you will have enough people willing to go to the street and strike about the jobs you are describing too, as well as aid organization there. The main reason it ended up like that in the first place was because there weren’t enough unions pressuring to block legislation allowing these shit forms of employment. Now a lot of the more stable jobs are of the kind that people like to describe as le evil PMCs/whire collars which as we all know are evil and impossible to organize around (false). That’s why I’m kind of sick of people drawing these lines, twitter and democrat party adjacent politics have conditioned everyone to constantly means test for the 0.0001% most oppressed minority which you can do anything about instead of trying to build broad social alliances and it flies into the face of any target you may have.
But how else can we define what the petite bourgeois is? Is it wrong to look for a specific definition?
It does have a specific definition and it is not that. Petite bourgeois generally means small time capitalist who typically works alongside their employees. It doesn’t have anything to do with houses, it has to do with whether they are employed by someone else or if they have their own independent job (self employed/small business owner). Home ownership rates are not and have never been a particularly important factor, if anything the US is evidence of that. Or Switzerland. Or Hong Kong. Or South Korea.
BUT if you own a home you can rent out a room or you can use it as collateral to get business loans or even buy other homes to rent out.
However your points are pretty persuasive.
The majority of Americans own significant Capital through homeownership or a 401(k) or IRA plan. How do you convince those people to work against Capital?
Matt Christman would say it doesn’t fucking matter what these definitions are because “normies” aren’t invested in the terms so they are meaningless as agitprop and for leftists it’s all bullshit posturing because nothing is getting done irl while you are arguing about it online.
I thought petty bourgeoise was where you own your own means of production on a small scale potentially hiring a couple of workers.
For example a small business or a farmer who owns their own land
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I agree with others here that home ownership doesn’t equate with petit bourgeois, but it does mean those people have skin in the game for the existing system - that even if they hate it they have to go to work, they have to pay their bills, etc, all of which puts a tamper on anything revolutionary/insurrectionist that could come up.
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John Brown could have escaped Harper’s Ferry and had the slave uprising he wanted if he would have left earlier and gone into the Blue Ridge mountains and formed a guerrilla fighting force as he had originally planned. Attacking the US is not an automatic death sentence. Someone has to be the first to rise up and fight.
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Uprisings probably have to happen in the US, even if they also happen outside of the imperial core. Waiting on them to rise up as a unified front is foolish to put it kindly. You might as well wait for the US working class to spontaneously rise up. You can’t wait for either one, you have to take action now.
The US was still a relative backwater in John Brown’s time, as opposed to the world’s main superpower. Attacking the US in the 1850s was a lot different than doing it today.
I do think that this question about how apathetic/brought off the people here are can only be answered once we have a mass party with democratic discipline and we can observe its experience.
I am also a bit pessimistic but I honestly can’t imagine what it would mean for people’s politics if the squad say started voting against every military budget as a bloc and demanded a rewriting of the constitution. (Speaking of have you heard of the cosmonaut mag?, I have found their argument for party building and democratic centralism very very convincing)
I’m a big fan of Cosmonaut. I think a real Workers’ Party operating in the USA would hopefully act like Sinn Féin: its elected representatives would just refuse to participate in government entirely. I think that approach is so unbelievably fucking based.
Based indeed. Well I suppose the question we have to ask then is how to go forward with building said party. I have been a bit reluctant to join the DSA but now I think I should see for myself if there is anyhope for creating programatic unity in that org.
I would join them if I could, but there’s no DSA where I live—a very rural area. I’ve also tried starting an org here, but it went nowhere. I did make a few cool new friends, but we live at least forty minutes away from each other. People have suggested that I start a DSA chapter here, but I can’t ask people to pay dues to an organization so focused on electoralism and legalism.