Petite bourgeoisie

And simultaneously, you can have someone who is a homeowner, again, regional accent, very affluent.

The people in my book, I would call the old petty bourgeoisie, tradesman, superstar tradesman, whatever.

And then they are also working class because they work and they do physical hard work.

And then someone...

But they, a lot of people have done very well out of trades and now have like a lot of money.

So I do think that there, you know, as I say in the book, those are really important.

I'd say the main driver of modern politics is these two fractions of the low middle class, the old petty bourgeoisie that's more self-employed on the one hand, and then the new petty bourgeoisie, which is my... name for the downwardly mobile graduates, these people with high cultural capital, great education, discerning taste, but very low economic capital.

It's a new thing, I think.

In fact, the essay really was compelling.

It's titled The Crisis of the Petit Bourgeois or the crisis of petty bourgeois intellectualism, which he goes into talking about the class and strategic reasons for why although the uprising could be a myth so I'm going to just open up the ground for him to introduce himself much more fully and then we'll go into his point of view so thank you Tosin for coming on to the podcast with us it's a pleasure to have you

yeah it's a pleasure to be here

Yeah.

Like in the Nigerian Afro beats and hip-hop scene, he's popular, actually.

He was from a relatively privileged middle-class background.

So the spirit of the Petit Bourgeois class was always there.

kind of.

So that's petty bourgeois socialism, and I think it's worth taking a bit of a closer look.

Understanding the term petty bourgeoisie is an incredibly important term to understand when you are applying communist ideas to the real world.

Because when someone says that the owner of a business is not a worker, sometimes that can read really weird for people who know owners of businesses that work incredibly hard.

Most of us probably know someone personally who owns a business like a restaurant or a small shop with handmade goods.

They are their own goals that they have always wanted to achieve, and so they are willing to give much more of themselves to that business than the average worker is willing to give to the business that they work at.

And yet, if the business they own relies on wage labor of other people, they are still bourgeoisie.

But they are a small bourgeoisie, a petty bourgeoisie.

They are incapable of impacting society to the same degree as a much larger bourgeois actor is able to.