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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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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