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I want to love WTYP but Nova makes it increasingly hard when she talks geopolitics
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this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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Rest In Power, Michael Brooks.
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No, that’s small business owners, petit bourgeoisie are owning their own means of production, shopkeepers of 19th century and the like
No, "small business owner" is not a term that is describing things on the proletarian - petite bourgeois - bourgeois spectrum, and is not part of Marx's analysis, even if using it can be useful in various contexts.
Someone who owns a tiny bit of the means of production, has employees, and still needs to work themselves is 100% the most textbook definition of petite bourgeois. The point of the term is that "bourgeois" refers to someone whose income is principally from the excess labor value of others (accomplished via their ownership of the means of production), while proletarians need to sell their own labor, and the petite bourgeois are people who have both qualities.
Exactly lmao, you are confusing them. Small shopkeeper owns a shop in 19th century, employs his kids and owns means of production, namely the shop. Same for artisanal crafts. Owning a chain of restaurants and “working” as a manager is distinct from owning one small restaurant where you cook with your wife. Same as artist who can afford to fly solo - they are definitionally petit bourgeois
Could you chill? I'm trying to be polite here and you're not demonstrating very well that you're even reading what I'm writing.
I know what the MoP is here, that was the thing least in need of clarification, but you also aren't proving anything by your example. The person you describe is petite bourgeois (subsisting on both his own labor value and what he extracts from his employees), just in the bottom stratum of the petite bourgeois. If we stipulate that he has no employees, then he's not bourgeois in any manner but instead purely a member of the working class. The type of labor is immaterial to this distinction, so this rule is the same for artisans, farmers, and whoever else you like.
For the rest of your comment, you seem to be conflating Marxist class with liberal class (income brackets). Marxist analysis is based principally on qualitative aspects of production relations rather than how much money one is making overall. I don't understand how this is a contentious subject, honestly, but perhaps we could make more progress if you could outline your schema of class labels all together?
Podcaster owns their means of production, thus they are petit bourgeoisie. Person hiring labor to produce commodity is bourgeoisie, person having to sell their labor is proletariat. Police and criminals are lumpenproletariat.
Petit bourgeoisie are characterized by owning their means of production, i don’t know how else to explain this. If i have a gold mine where i go to mine gold, im petit bourgeoisie until i hire worker to do so, wherein I transmute myself into bourgeoisie. Just same if i paint art or write books or make podcasts. Worker who isn’t exploited doesn’t sell their labor, they sell commodity, they are two in one (both bourgeoisie and laborer), but because of their historical inclinations they have been cast into bourgeoisie bucket, you can lead a crusade to rename them l’ouvrier emancipe if you like
So in your definition, the shopkeeper in your previous example who labors but also has his children as employees is not petite bourgeois but bourgeois?
No, if they use their own kids they are petty bourgeoisie, I have slightly elaborated in another answer, 19th century family hits different. But anyway, same also kinda works in 21st century, business run by husband and wife, if they don’t have completely separate financial accounts where one person determines price of labor of another, they are still petit bourgeoisie as a family unit. And yes, as soon as they hire someone outside, they transition into bourgeoisie.
If one where to make finer distinctions, think of it more like a star scale with three prongs, there three axis, exploited, owning their own means of production and exploits others (owning others’ means of production). So a worker maintains same scale of being exploited, why their 401k slowly grows their prong of owning others means of production, while petit bourgeois sits firmly on 0 on being exploited, but also until success 0 on exploits others. While haute bourgeois sits firmly on exploits others and doing jack shit
So ... people who owned small businesses?
There is a difference between owning your shop and having family work there, and owning a store where people work for money, for one success of the store means direct results for petit bourgeoisie, while not so much for owned store with strangers. For two, familial relations in 19th century where wife and kids are property of the man, in a sense. Unless you want to go full tilt into unquantifiable reproductive labor being unfairly compensated by a husband because he doesn’t directly pay his wife, and thus all man are bourgeoisie before 20th century, you have to treat family as a unit and avoid those questions and deal with economic transactions.
For petit bourgeoisie their labor being valorized (turned into money) is very direct relationship, they work “better” they get exactly proportional “better” compensation, there is no boss (aside from society/market), which grades them on some incomprehensible metrics. They are a servant of market conditions, their work easily wiped out by haute bourgeoisie (say, walmart) and workers getting paid more than them (say google code monkey) brings burning hatred in them, thus they hate and envy the former, and disregard and hate for the latter. If you pay attention, frequently more precise marxists would say petit bourgeois morality to cast labor aristocracy into them, as the middle class is composed of those two types, but they are not petit bourgeois, they just share same fears and striving, even if they are different in relationships of production
You can make vague case that labor aristocracy possesses some kind of inbuilt labor valorizer in their resume/certificates/skillsets, and that’s what makes them closer to morality of petit bourgeois as owning their own means of production (exotic skills which they own), but eh