No they are not. The petite bourgeois doesn’t refer to “Workers who are shitty”, it refers to people who own the means of production but also have to participate in labour like shopkeepers, artisans or small business owners.
In reality there’s a multidimensional gradient of class characters, we just focus on one dimension between proletarian and bourgeoisie and divvy it up into discrete categories. On this dimension, individuals fall somewhere between the two extremes. When there is a single owner that just makes money by owning stuff, well yeah that is bourgeois. Though most owners do try to meddle more than that, we don’t always call them workers or petty bourgeois because they are primarily owners. Similarly, a worker may monitor a team and it’s performance and report this up the chain. This person is not solely prole in their relations, they are also fulfilling a part of the bourgeois role, but they may not have any ownership stake or control. We call them a worker because their relations are primarily as a worker.
But in between there is a lot to investigate. Management tends to be paid in wages and not a substantial portion of ownership, but we do practically separate them from the proles in general because their allegiance is to the owners and they act accordingly. A given manager’s role might be 50% organizing production (a prole role) and 50% monitoring workers and driving down variable capital costs (an owner’s role). Even though they don’t make money directly from ownership, their own position and wages are predicated on ensuring that gravy trains jeeps moving to the owners.
It is not invalid to say these people have a petty bourgeois character, which is a mixture of owner relations and worker relations. This is the same sense in which many professionals and academics are described as such. Their own relations to production create an alignment with the owner class rather than the working class.
To be super clear, both definitions of petty bourgeois have been defined and used by Marx and those in his orbit. The owner-workers (like a small shop owner) and those akin to management.
It is not in any work of Marx I have read and as far as I can remember. I can remember him talking about small capitalists which are shopkeeps and artisans.
You appear to be describing a combination of the professional-managerial class and the labour aristocracy.
Marx and Engels talk of the labor aristocracy as a bourgeois-ified working class of dual character. Sometimes they call this the middle class. Not long after Lenin and those similarly critical of the British and German revolutionary potentials described these relations as petty bourgeois, and this continued throughout the Bolsheviks to include basic all subsequent Marxist Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, etc., and even modern folks that just call themselves Marxist.
The PMC is a much later term. It’s from the 70s. But they are definitely described in their own way by Marx et al in their early form.
HR people are petty bourgeois, they are bureaucrats controlling other people’s labour and they identify with the ideology of the bourgeoisie.
No they are not. The petite bourgeois doesn’t refer to “Workers who are shitty”, it refers to people who own the means of production but also have to participate in labour like shopkeepers, artisans or small business owners.
In reality there’s a multidimensional gradient of class characters, we just focus on one dimension between proletarian and bourgeoisie and divvy it up into discrete categories. On this dimension, individuals fall somewhere between the two extremes. When there is a single owner that just makes money by owning stuff, well yeah that is bourgeois. Though most owners do try to meddle more than that, we don’t always call them workers or petty bourgeois because they are primarily owners. Similarly, a worker may monitor a team and it’s performance and report this up the chain. This person is not solely prole in their relations, they are also fulfilling a part of the bourgeois role, but they may not have any ownership stake or control. We call them a worker because their relations are primarily as a worker.
But in between there is a lot to investigate. Management tends to be paid in wages and not a substantial portion of ownership, but we do practically separate them from the proles in general because their allegiance is to the owners and they act accordingly. A given manager’s role might be 50% organizing production (a prole role) and 50% monitoring workers and driving down variable capital costs (an owner’s role). Even though they don’t make money directly from ownership, their own position and wages are predicated on ensuring that gravy trains jeeps moving to the owners.
It is not invalid to say these people have a petty bourgeois character, which is a mixture of owner relations and worker relations. This is the same sense in which many professionals and academics are described as such. Their own relations to production create an alignment with the owner class rather than the working class.
To be super clear, both definitions of petty bourgeois have been defined and used by Marx and those in his orbit. The owner-workers (like a small shop owner) and those akin to management.
HR are most analogous to cops
It is not in any work of Marx I have read and as far as I can remember. I can remember him talking about small capitalists which are shopkeeps and artisans. You appear to be describing a combination of the professional-managerial class and the labour aristocracy.
Marx and Engels talk of the labor aristocracy as a bourgeois-ified working class of dual character. Sometimes they call this the middle class. Not long after Lenin and those similarly critical of the British and German revolutionary potentials described these relations as petty bourgeois, and this continued throughout the Bolsheviks to include basic all subsequent Marxist Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, etc., and even modern folks that just call themselves Marxist.
The PMC is a much later term. It’s from the 70s. But they are definitely described in their own way by Marx et al in their early form.