this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.

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[โ€“] combat_brandonism@hexbear.net 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

not whether they employ others or not

That's certainly a take. I feel like you're conflating artisans and petty boug here. Could you point me to where I can read more?

[โ€“] Cowbee@hexbear.net 6 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Artisans are a sub-category of the petite bourgeoisie. They sell commodities they fashion, not their labor power for a wage or piece-wage, and those that do are not true artisans in the class sense, but the character of labor, and thus are proletarian artisans rather than traditional artisans.

Prolewiki's articles on the Petite Bourgeoisie and Artisans backs this up:

The petite bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie is the lower strata of the bourgeoisie, consisting of smaller-scale merchants, semi-autonomous peasants, small business owners, self-employed individuals with complete autonomy, and other business owners who own enough means of production to extract surplus value but not wealthy enough to subsist solely off that extraction, in contrast to the haute bourgeoisie. Therefore, they must also perform labour alongside their employees.

This coincides with the class outlook of self-employed people, who seek individual autonomy over collective bargaining (on average), whereas proletarian workers tend to come to the class outlook seeking collectivization. Artisinal reaction was covered by Marx. Independent artists struggle against proletarianization in a similar way to small business owners and other self-employed individuals. They can also be allied with the proletariat, due to their precarious social position.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.