The relative autonomy of the petty bourgeoisie

Nicos Poulantzas

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning came to people's attention in early 2018 with their book, "The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars". Seeking to account for an SJW phenomenon increasingly dominant in the western world, they distinguished between three kinds of culture: Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood.

Campbell and Manning over-abstracted these cultural categories, representing them almost as menu choices, or contingent way-points on the arc of history. This was mostly corrected in Tanner Greer's commentary at "The Scholar's Stage" (which features on the sidebar in the web version of this blog).

Rather than having me summarise his impressive analysis, please review it for yourself: "Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: A Tour Through Three Centuries of American Political Culture"

Greer's analysis was not perfect.

"The transition from honor to dignity reflected a deeper shift in the basic building blocks of society. Had Western Europeans not shifted away from clan based to citizen based communities, there would not have been any Culture of Dignity. The shift from dignity to victimhood reflects a similar change in the societal distribution of power. ...

The federal government assumes powers traditionally reserved to local and state governments. Local businesses have been pushed out of existence by international conglomerates. The businesses, associations, congregations, and clubs that once made up American society are gone. America has been atomized; her citizens live alone, connected but weakly one to another. Arrayed against each is a set of vast, impersonal bureaucracies that cannot be controlled, only appealed to.

A "Culture of Victimhood" is a perfectly natural response to this shift in the distribution of power. Remember that the central purpose of moral cultures is to help resolve or deter disputes. Dignity cultures provide a moral code to regulate disputes among equals from the same community. They also help individuals in a community--citizens--organize to protect their joint interests.

21st century America has lost this ability to organize and solve problems at the local level. The most effective way to resolve disputes is appeal to the powerful third parties: corporations, the federal government, or the great mass of people weakly connected by social media. The easiest way to earn the sympathy of these powers is to be the unambiguous victim in the dispute.

Victim culture is here to stay."

In fact this 'atomisation' has to be interpreted more dynamically, in class terms. After all, not everyone identifies as a 'victim'.

Peter Turchin has correctly linked neoliberal atomisation with the 'overproduction of elites', the mass production of (social science and humanities) graduates with inflated expectations and entitlements, but for whom no place exists within the real elite, the top 1% or 0.1%. They are angry and febrile and in the mass a cause of political instability. It's not a new phenomenon: some of us remember the late sixties and early seventies.

This (now vastly enlarged) intermediate layer between the traditional working class and the high bourgeoisie is termed by Marxists the petty bourgeoisie. This brought to mind the seminal work of theorist Nicos Poulantzas and I reviewed with interest his chapter 13, "The New Petty Bourgeoisie" in "The Poulantzas Reader" (PDF) .

Poulantzas was an interesting guy and I also reviewed his bio, nodding along, until I came to this:

"He killed himself in 1979 by jumping from the window of a friend's flat in Paris."

He was 43.

There was something about the mental stability of continental Marxists in the late twentieth century. His more famous contemporary, Louis Althusser,  killed his wife Hélène Rytmann the following year and was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years.

Why are the new petty bourgeoisie so restless again? Because a decade of economic stagnation with the increasing gap between their circumstances and those of the top 1% has left them feeling abandoned. They experience a dislocating lack of prospects and purpose.

The old-time (pre-1980s) working class had a historic cultural identity forged through tenement communities, monolithic employers, trade unionism and social-democratic activism. The modern petty bourgeoisie by contrast is a collection of isolates, expressing their angst through faddish identity-issues.

None of these campaigns ever address the real causes of their dissatisfaction. Nevertheless, their heartfelt herd-activism is always destabilising .. and from the bourgeoisie's point of view, always with a risk of triggering wider unrest. Consequently, the elites attempt to manipulate and co-opt them (eg the moralising campaign against plastic pollution which carefully fails to discuss the true sources of said pollution).

The classic Marxist texts (Lenin, Trotsky) recognised the febrile and changeable nature of the radicalised petty bourgeoisie. Their works discuss methods of creating an alliance with the proletariat in the struggle for socialism.

How times have changed now that the tail wags the dog: the era of Momentum and the death of the dream .. .