"For Wells is a petit bourgeois, and of all the products of capitalism, none is more unlovely than this class. Whoever does not escape from it is certainly damned. It is necessarily a class whose whole existence is based on a lie. Functionally it is exploited, but because it is allowed to share in some of the crumbs of exploitation that fall from the rich bourgeois table, it identifies itself with the bourgeois system on which, whether as bank manager, small shopkeeper or upper household servant, it seems to depend. It has only one value in life, that of bettering itself, of getting a step nearer the good bourgeois things so far above it. It has only one horror, that of falling from respectability into the proletarian abyss which, because it is so near, seems so much more dangerous. It is rootless, individualist, lonely, and perpetually facing, with its hackles up, an antagonistic world. It can never know the security of the rich bourgeoisie or the companionship of the worker. It can never rest on anything, for it is always struggling to better itself. It is the most deluded class, for it has not the cynicism of the worker with practical proof of bourgeois fictions, or the cynicism of the intelligent bourgeois who even while he maintains them for his own purposes sees through the illusions of religion, royalty, patriotism and capitalist ‘industry’ and ‘foresight’. It has no traditions of its own and it does not adopt those of the workers, which it hates, but those of the bourgeois, which are without virtue for it, since it did not help to create them. This world, described so well in Experiment in Autobiography, is like a terrible stagnant marsh, all mud and bitterness, and without even the saving grace of tragedy.

Everyone seeks to escape from this marsh. It is a world whose whole motive force is simply this, to escape from what it was born to, upwards, to be rich, secure, a boss. And the development of capitalism increases the depth of this world, makes wealth, security, and freedom more and more difficult, and thus adds to its horror. More and more the petty bourgeois expression is that of a face lined with petty, futile, bewildered discontent. Life with its perplexities and muddles seems to baffle and betray them at every turn. They are frustrated, beaten; things are too much for them. Almost all Wells’s characters from Kipps to Clissold are psychologically of this typical petit bourgeois frustrated class. They can never understand why everything is so puzzling, why man is so unreasonable, why life is so difficult, precisely because it is they who are so unreasonable. They are born of the irresponsibility and anachronism of capital expressed in its acutest form. And they do not understand this.

The ways of escape from the petit bourgeois world are many. One way is to shed one’s false bourgeois illusions and relapse into the proletarian hell one has always dreaded. Then one finds a life hard and laborious enough but with clear values, derived from the functional part one plays in society. The peculiarly dreadful flavour of petit bourgeois bitterness is gone, for now the social forces that produce unhappiness – unemployment, poverty and privation – come quite clearly from above, from outside, from an alien world. One encounters them as members of a class, as companions in misfortune, and this generates both the sympathy and the organisation that makes them easier to be sustained. ‘It’s the poor what helps the poor.’ The proletariat are called upon to hate, not each other but impersonal things like wars and slumps and booms, or classes outside themselves – the bosses, the rich.

It is the peculiar suffering of the petit bourgeoisie that they are called upon to hate each other. It is not impersonal things or outside classes that hurt them and inflict on them suffering and poverty, but it appears to be other members of their own class. It is the shopkeeper across the road, the rival small trader, the family next door, with whom they are actively competing. Every success of one petit bourgeois is a sword in another’s heart. Every failure of one’s own is the result of another’s activity. No companionship, or solidarity, is possible. One’s hatred extends from the workers below that abyss always waiting for one, to the successful petit bourgeois just above one whom one envies and hates.

The development of capitalism increases both trends, the solidarity of the workers and the dissension and bitterness of the petit bourgeoisie.

It is also possible to escape upwards. Many are called. All who do not sink into the proletariat strive upwards. Only a few are chosen. Only a few struggle into the ranks of the rich bourgeoisie. Wells was one of those few. The story of this sharp, fierce struggle and its ultimate success in terms of his bank passbook is recorded in Wells’s Autobiography.

Some try to escape into the world of art or pure thought. But this escape becomes increasingly difficult. Take the case of the artist in the young Wells’s position. A dominating interest in art will come to him perhaps as an interest in poetry, in the short story, in new novelist’s technique. Painful and unproductive at first, his study of his craft will also be uneconomic. It will not pay. But how is he to live? Is he to proletarianise himself? Is he to starve in a garret on poor relief? But starvation in a garret as an outcast despised member of the community will necessarily condition his whole outlook as an artist. He will write reacting with or against proletarianisation, or as an unsuccessful petty bourgeois, or as an enforced member of the lumpen-proletariat, and all society will seem compulsive, rotten and inimical to him. Moreover, art itself in that era, being the aggregate of art produced by these and their like antecedent conditions, will be more and more outcast, turned in on itself, non-functional, and subjective, it will be the sincere, decadent, anarchistic art of a Picasso or Joyce.

It was impossible for Wells, imbued with this burning desire, to escape from the petty bourgeois hell, to accept art as an avocation, a social rôle, and be driven in on himself as an outcast from bourgeois values. He could only accept it as a means to success and the best road to cash. His autobiography reveals the early stages of his struggles in the literary market to attain five-figure sales and a five-figure income." - Christopher Caudwell, “H. G. Wells: A Study in Utopianism,” in Studies in a Dying Culture. First published posthumously by Bodley Head in 1938.

There is no lower limit to much i do not care for small business tyrants.

If it were up to me, i would be the peta of dmall businesses: putting at least one down every day.

i usually think it's bullshit when people say 'if you like x character it's because you're like them' but lately in case anyone was wondering i have been listening to videos on marxist history while single-mindedly making a self-sufficient high profit farm on stardew valley without having talked to a single romanceable character. hopefully this says nothing about me nor kevin day

some of us need to learn the difference between subsistence farming and for-profit farm management fr.

i think one of the most insidious parts of capitalist ideology is the idealisation of small businesses

I love you small business, I love you mom&pop shops, I love you little independent ventures that don't make your workers lives hell

why does a lot of critique of postmodernism say that postmodernism thinks all hierarchies and binaries are bad... ive never thought that was what it was about, its not even about the binaries its about the nature behind them, the fact that they can never be objectively defined or be a rule of nature because they are defined by us and can fluctuate and change definitions, but NONE of this disregards their use or why we as humans define things in general. critiquing the proposed infallible nature of a hierarchy is good, actually. and following this line of thought, personally i believe the societal definitions of oppressive hierarchies form in response to oppression being acted out, not the other way around.

to explain this: the various binaries of rich/poor, bourgeois/proletariat, and powerful/powerless are particularly shared to us from first viewing, but if we think about them a little closer we realize that these hierarchies were all formed through histories of oppression and systems put in place by the rich, and that they are maintained by the concept of us believing in the rich over the poor, and thus their power over the powerless. and this makes this binary not a force of nature, but something that can be changed, something that is not so clean cut as we might think. the rich only ARE rich because of the labor of the poor, and the powerless can seize and exercise THEIR power over the powerful in an oppression of the bourgeoisie.

its very funny 2 me that a p a s is on the wrong side of the ai art thing just by virtue of saying ‘ur mad at the wrong thing!!!!! hate the game not the player!!!!!’ essentially but then real idiots in the notes going ‘so true!!!! artists are petite bourgeoisie for this !!!’ like............................. thats absolutely not what it fucking means

maybe here there's ppl talking about how they're not gonna vote because the one 1 proletarian party we managed to cobble together in one 1 month isn't perfect, ppl saying they'll vote for the same people who are ruling right now and that somehow is the progressive thing to do. but at least i'll always know the comrades in the US are witnessing a bigger clown circus. Godspeed.

original comic by stephanie mcmillan

Question for Capitalists

Small Business owners, or those who hope to be small business owners, why would anyone want to work for you? What do you have to offer?

I don't know how many of my followers this question would applied to. But anyone can answer how they want. I am curious at the responses I will get.

nobody in this website has ever heard of the concept of the petite bourgeoisie i think

in the discourse landscape of gay shipping I think a crucial element is the underdog effect. official approval of your ship from showrunners (ie ship going canon) compromises your marginal status as a fandom shipper on tumblr, and in the long run produces a sore winner subjectivity where you must constantly insist that your ship is still good and subversive. destiel is a good edge case as it went canon in the most homophobic way possible, thus maintaining something of an underdog status despite it being explicitly addressed in the text of supernatural, while still ultimately losing its fandom dominance as evidenced by it constantly losing in shipping polls. ofmd shippers in this respect occupy a conflict of class interests in which their gay canonicity confers a level of comfort and stability that gay shippers who have to work in the posting mines doing web weaves will never experience. therefore, we can consider ofmd shippers to be the petit bourgeoisie of the fandom ecosystem, caught between the big bourgeoisie (tv writers) and the proletariat (stuckys), predictably choosing to engage in downwards class conflict to maintain their narrowly privileged status

spoiled children who expect the benefits of public infrastructure without any of the responsibility or knowledge for managing a basic resource. the american pb in a nutshell.

Look, man, I know that Tumblr's grasp of class analysis is not the greatest, but I promise you, having goofy ideas about what "working class" means is not a Tumblr thing. Stupid hair-splitting arguments about who is and is not petite bourgeoisie are literally as old as leftism. Hell, some of the takes I've heard from actual, accredited professors of political science are far dumber than anything I've run into on this site – when I was in college, "are women inherently bourgeois?" was still treated as a question worth taking seriously!

another news article from a nepo baby about the alleged terrifying “antisemitic” atmosphere and perils of supporting israel at the most elite and expensive private schools in the country that cater to the every whim of the children of the bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie lol