what/who exactly is the bourgeoisie?
In: 3097
People who get a majority of their income through things they own. Like people who own a lot of stocks, people who own a company or landlords. Famous actors or sports stars wouldn’t be bourgeois, for example unless they invest all their money in capital assets.
Proletariats are wage earners… they are paid to produce a work product. Bourgeois make profits off of the proletariat’s labor and do not earn wages themselves
The people owning the means of production (factories, offices, etc.). They’re the ruling class because everybody else is forced to sell their working power to them in order to survive in capitalist systems (which are almost all states)
People who make money by virtue of owning *capital* which is to say the non-human part of production. Factories or land. Without being aristocracy (the existence of nobility is why some seemingly clever people will try to say that the bourgeoisie are the middle class, which was true when the class structure was peasants – merchants – aristocrats). After the invention of industrialization, the class divide dropped the aristocracy and instead became a division between those who own the factories and those who work in the factories. You can substitute factory for any sort of business. The people who work retail are not those who own the business, etc.
The bourgeoisie are the owner class. They make money simply because the legal system says they own the machines and land and buildings and so forth. They pay workers, or the proletarian class, to do the actual labor. This payment is less than the full value of the produced good or service (e.g. if a product requires $1 of material to make, and you pay the worker $2 for each of these items produced, but then sell the item for $10, the profit ($7) goes to the owner of the factory who pays the workers).
Huh. All this time I thought it referred to upper middle class people with cushy white collar jobs
So the slang word “boogie” did not come from bourgeoisie?
The simplest explanation, at risk of oversimplification, is this: the bourgeoisie are the people who support their lifestyles by *owning* things, and the proletariat are the people who support their lifestyles by *doing* things.
Even a wealthy CEO can be a member of the proletariat so long as his income is dependent on actual labor rather than stock options and such. Conversely, a small and poor landlord who passively lives off of the income of a few tenants he rents on property he owns is a member of the bourgeoisie, even if he isn’t living well.
In the old days, there were wealthy nobility and dirt-poor peasants. There was no social mobility. You did whatever your family did. Hard work, risk taking, and ambition got you no where.
Then with the industrial revolution, things started changing. Rich people weren’t just old money; now they were the proprietor/owner class who controlled the means of production. More and more people were able to buy their way into noble circles. The vast majority of folks were still dirt poor, but it seemed possible with luck and circumstance to improve your lot in life and maybe leave your family better than your ancestors left you.
These upwardly mobile city dwellers were called bourgeoisie. They are kind of like a middle class, but the meaning of words changes with time and context. Depending on the frame of reference, bourgeoisie can mean boring people obsessed with wealth and status, yuppies, “basic”. These are people who lack the credibility of truly coming from nothing as they are born privileged, yet lack the legitimacy of nobility because they are not descendants of Charlemagne or whoever.
One of the great achievements of the postwar west was the establishment of a thriving middle class. We have guaranteed rights and a social safety net that prevents most of us from slipping into the destitute masses of most human history. We also have only minimal respect for the wealthy, and it’s blurred with envy and disdain more than any kind of submission. It’s difficult for us to think of bourgeoisie in the way folks did 200 years ago, because we see it in the lens of the modern world.
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Bourgeoisie in a pre-modern context was basically “The Middle Class”. Not rich noblemen, or priests, but not part of the working class either.
Think successful business owners. People with well paying jobs who weren’t part of the government or upperclass.
Marxists adopted the term to refer to “the hedonistic materialists who overthrew the aristocracy to rebuild it in a capitalist’s image”. Basically, rich materialistic people who wanted capitalism
In the modern day, it’s used to refer to “The Rich” in a broad sense. Kinda whitewashed from the original meaning tbh, but that happens in language all the time.
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