Thesis on the Petty Bourgeoisie as a Revolutionary Class

New Developments in the Perfection of the State Machine

AI Generated image of the state machinery

A brief upfront summary of this thesis is as follows¹:

• The state, through its extended historical logic of the relative maximization of violence perfects social control by learning from revolutions, revolts and crises

• The petty bourg remains the only class which the state has not yet created effective methods of social control for

• Capitalism ran into its fetters of production 50 years ago and is limited in its ability to invest and grow further, relative to other possible modes of production

• The precarity of the petty bourg will generate new political crises that any future state will be forced to adapt to

• Any state which adapts to this crisis by moving beyond bourgeois social relations has the ability to create a society more meta-stable than capitalism

This thesis is explicated below. 

The Historical Logic of the Realization of Horror

There is a claim among post-structuralists and anarchists, which I’m inclined to believe, that for the ancients and the peoples of pre-history their greatest fears, the nightmares which animated their various social and political pathologies, was the realization of us. That is, the dawn of bourgeois society, capitalism, atomized, commercial reality. Deleuze and Guatarri perhaps describe this idea best in their work Anti-Oedipus², where they describe capitalism as the “nightmare” exorcized and suppressed by these early societies in order for their own social logic to function, analogized to the fear of incest within the Oedipus Rex myth. Our world is the constant, total destruction of the meaning and values of the old worlds, a whole set of names, categories, hopes and ambitions ground into dust. What remains, like a horrible truth laid bare making return to innocence impossible, is what appears as the simplest and most essential categories of the atomized individuals, relating to each other through free exchange, the social realization of what Marx called commodity fetishism. 

To avoid idealism, it is important not to mistake what I’m about to argue as the suggestion that these past dynamics, or future ones, came about because of the inevitability of horror, of the necessity of our nightmares coming true. Nonetheless, the nightmares keep coming true. The reason why is hinted at with Adorno’s famous line in Negative Dialectics, which is worth quoting at length: 

“Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it. Not to be denied for that reason, however, is the unity that cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history—the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity. It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head. If he transfigured the totality of historic suffering into the positivity of the self-realizing absolute, the One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.”³

There is indeed a conceit at the heart of Marxism, and all theories of historical progress, which hide the plan for utopia within the laws of history only to rediscover it like a dog digging up a bone it forgot it buried exactly where it always digs its holes. But when history becomes a science, it admits the possibility of objectivity, of outcomes which no one in particular desires. Here, Adorno is describing one of the few objective tendencies of human history, the tendency for ever increasing social control and organized violence. This tendency, to be sure, is contingent, but it is only contingent on the lack of alternatives to existing human society on the level of geography - we cannot simply get up and leave this arrangement because every other place is already taken by societies with similar arrangements. In other words, once the Earth’s habitable regions reached a certain level of population density, the emergence of the state became more or less inevitable. Once the state forms, you quickly establish an arms race for the relative maximization of violence, that is, the maximization of the potential violence of the specialized armed men at the heart of the state, versus the violence of the population at large and versus other states. 

Societies move towards this maximization through a non-continuous process of adaptation. They respond to crises, or if they don’t, they’re replaced by societies which can deal with these threats to their social reproduction. I’ve previously called this process social evolution: 

“So, too, can we take societies as objects moving through time in the same way as biological lifeforms, being such systems of low entropy maintenance, and therefore expect societies to also become more correlated to their environment through adaptations. The question remains though; what exactly is the environment which they are becoming correlated with and adapting to? …we can count three levels of abstraction in the environment of social reproduction: ideological reproduction, economic reproduction, and biological reproduction, listed here in ascending order of timescales and primacy. Ideological reproduction occurs on the shortest of time scales, something which happens on an every-day, every-hour basis in our ordinary discussions, creation of art, teaching in classrooms, etc., and it is subordinated to the selection pressures of the higher order systems of economic reproduction, which has its selection pressures arising on a monthly, even yearly level with investment, hiring decisions, and economic crises, last of which is biological evolution, which only sees selection pressures in humans when we’re conceived, die, and in the far more rare crises that threaten our whole species. Each level has its own evolutionary pressures, together creating a meta-environment for human social evolution.”⁴

The connection between the rise of the atom bomb and the domination of the mind by the state and its associated social machinations which Adorno identifies is made obvious by this formulation of the maximization of relative violence, which was developed by Althusser: the relative maximization implies not just the creation of astonishing weapons, but new, spectacular, methods of social control and ideological reproduction which can manage the violent threat of the populous mass to the state. 

This is the historical law which has foiled utopians and ideologues again and again. Although Marx ultimately failed to complete his theory of the state which may have explicated this law, he did describe its contours when in his political journalism on France: “...the parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralization of governmental power with repressive measures. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it.”⁵

The bourgeois state as a machine acts to regulate what Deleuze would call the decoding, deterritorializing, function of capitalist social relations, to ensure that all the revolutionizing of production that occurs doesn’t tear the system apart. It creates codes, that is, laws, authority, legible social categories, and does this by taking in and transforming the raw materials of violence and intellectual labor. When Marx describes the outcomes of the various French revolutions as perfecting this machine, he’s describing how the state developed new, more sophisticated tools to deploy official violence to manage revolutionary energies, both by suppressing revolutionaries and suppressing failed regimes, as well as transforming the politics of those operating outside of the state, into the confines lawful politics, transforming the state machine such that it could go beyond its previous limits. At one point, the bourgeoisie represented a threat to the state, but after the second French revolution, this ceased to be the case. At one point, the proletariat represented a threat to the state, but so too, after a few revolutions ending in the 5th Republic, with a last gasp in 1968, this ceased to be the case. The short twentieth century is the history of the state at last finding a solution to the problem of the revolutionary proletariat. 

Even in the communist nations, where the bourgeois state was actually smashed and bourgeois society disappeared, at least for a time, this was only another solution to the same problem. The wrinkle in these solutions, experiments as they were in totally new forms of social reproduction, was that they were unstable on the level of economic reproduction. Their planning methods and set of institutional incentives were in many ways inferior to industrial capitalism, and because of this instability, reduced to methods of encoding categories onto society through legible authority, vulnerable in the same way as the ancient societies to the decoding, meta-stable, seemingly naked bourgeois social relations which make up commodity fetishism. 

See, what makes capitalism meta-stable is its ability to maximize quantities of production through selfish calculation, so long as this is the case (that is, so long it’s actually the maximization), capitalist societies will have greater control over nature, and greater relative capacity for violence, and in general be more attractive to ambitious individuals than non-capitalist societies. What makes commodity fetishism appear natural is not just the various ideological institutions of society, but also the fact that if you want to be a realist in accomplishing your goals, whatever they are, you quickly become a businessman (exactly what the bureaucrats of the USSR did). This is why Marxists discuss the fetters on production implicit in the contradictions of capitalist production: in order for communism to be more meta-stable than capitalism it must be more capable of producing things and using this production to meet human aspirations. If capitalist private property actually inhibits further economic growth then it ceases to be the meta-stable social relation. 

Of course, the unfortunate underside of this meta-stability is that economic growth is actually only an intermediary variable, in order for communism to be the more meta-stable society, better adapted to survive on this earth, it must also be better at maximizing relative violence. Perhaps it is possible to do this without creating a professional body, and thus the dream of an abolition of the state as we know it is still possible, after all, much like how popular conscription revolutionized war in the 18th century, maybe training and organizing the entirety of the population for the maintenance and defense of society at all levels will prove more powerful than the professional and administrative state. While this remains an open question, it should be noted that there is good evidence that states that have greater participation, and a more diverse and varied civil society with many living institutions, are more stable overall, resistant to coups and civil wars. 

Limits: Relative and Absolute

The past 50 years of capitalist development have leveled a fundamental critique at the theorists of capitalism’s limits. Examine the following statements from Marx on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari on the other:

Marx:

“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.”⁶

Deleuze and Guattari:

“...capitalism is indeed the limit of all societies, insofar as it brings about the decoding of the flows that the other social formations coded and overcoded. But it is the relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is even more pitiless than any other. Schizophrenia, on the contrary, is indeed the absolute limit that causes the flows to travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs. Hence one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale. It axiomatizes with one hand what it decodes with the other. Such is the way one must reinterpret the Marxist law of the counteracting tendency.”

“We shall speak of an absolute limit every time the schizo-flows pass through the wall, scramble all the codes, and deterritorialize the socius: the body without organs is the deterritorialized socius, the wilderness where the decoded flows run free, the end of the world, the apocalypse.”

We see that Marx has identified the limit of capitalism with its end, and for D&G, the relative limits of capitalism are its ordinary method of operation, while its absolute limits are the end of the world. Here I would like to offer an alternative to the naive forecast of Marx (naive only due to its early date and the failure to complete the theory of the state), as well as the idealist formulation of D&G (idealist in the sense that it does not present the apocalypse as a historical moment with material causes and is triangulated from an essence of capitalism). 

In truth, capitalism is no stranger to its absolute limit, which is, as per Marx, the destruction of the capitalist class, the expropriation of the expropriators (first by the capitalists themselves through the centralization of production). The bourgeois state, quickly recognizing the danger of the monopoly fetters of production, instituted antitrust and competition laws to prevent the very scenario Marx was describing not long after his death. But Marx expected that monopolies would pop up because the alternative would be even worse for the capitalists, that being faced with the tendency for falling profit rates and therefore profitability crises, would endanger the social reproduction of the capitalist class. This is exactly what happened in the 1970s. The flagging investment and the related stagnation since then are the expression of us having hit the fetters of the capitalist mode of production. 

The mistake of D&G is understanding fetters to mean an absolute limit to growth, rather than a relative limit. Growth, at an ever decreasing rate, is always possible. The application of science to create new commodities and improve or cheapen old ones is also, always possible. The “relative limits” in the framework of D&G that are constantly overcome are not what Marx and communists in general meant by the limits of capitalism, although, on occasion, capitalist crises were opportunistically discussed in such a way. Rather, when capitalism has reached its fetters, this means that it is no longer the bottom of the meta-stable well, it can no longer claim to be the end of history: its at this point that a different mode of production, a different set of social relations, are more capable, and more stable. 

Capitalism and the capitalist class have long made their peace with having hit these fetters, with secular stagnation, lower investment and atomized production. New innovation and R&D continues, but their ability to actually be used to improve society and generate social wealth is extremely limited due to the lack of investment. To the extent new policies knock us out of this trend, we’ll quickly be disciplined by a new profitability crisis. So long as this new mode of production does not make an appearance, it can live up against the wall of its limits indefinitely. 

As the growth of the late USSR waned, it's understandable why people, such as D&G and other poststructuralists, would think Marx’s fetters described an absolute failure of capitalism rather than a relative one, as suddenly it appeared there could be no better relative mode of production. Thus, the relative limit became redefined to the limit of capitalism relative to itself. But meta-stability still exists, as you can’t actually remove the degrees of freedom of history, you can’t eliminate the necessity of contingency. The reason that capitalism only appears to be the nakedest form of social relation, the reason that commodity fetishism is actually a fetish, is because of these other meta-stable possibilities. 

Petty Bourgeois Dreams and Nightmares

Whereas previous societies picture us as their nightmare, the pure essence of capitalism has become our dream. Its values, even if some on the political fringe bemoan the loss of communal life, embody the heroism of the individual entrepreneurial, their monarchical genius, their conspicuous consumption, their atomized estates, ect. We dream of seeing our true value, of all our talents and efforts, expressed in dollar signs. We dream of a world without the proletariat, thus of total bourgeois freedom.

What is our nightmare then? In short, communism, in every connotation that exists. Everyone still reads the cold war anti-communist books as children, and the collective anxiety of our culture is the same as the kulaks under the shadow of Stalin, the scourge of expropriation. At the same time there scarcely exists any actual communists to extoll the necessity of this expropriation, everywhere we see any militant mass politics, it is by the petty bourgeoisie protesting against the government based on the paranoid fears typically centered around communist dystopias. 

It is this last fact that is worth lingering on. If the state solved the problem of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century, and the problem of the proletariat in the 20th, it did so only by creating the problem of the petty bourgeoisie for the 21st century. Up until the mid 20th century, they barely existed as a political class, totally subordinate to proletarian and high bourgeois political struggles. Their first expression as a class was the rise of fascism in Italy⁷ and then in Germany⁸. Then, as is now, they were animated by the terror of expropriation, of the end of their values and the victory of common, lower, man against their vainglorious aristocracy of shopkeepers. The petty bourg question was postponed by the loss of the axis powers in WW2. It became reanimated, however, as it emerged first as a significant economic class in the US in the 1970s due to the intense atomization caused by the profitability crisis. It gained political consciousness in the battle against globalization, and solidified into a militant movement with the rise of right wing populism in 2016, particularly with Trump. 

The political doctrine of this class, wherever and whenever it is expressed, amounts only to 1) its self preservation, and 2) the preservation of bourgeois social relations. At first glance, this would seem to put it in perfect harmony with the bourgeois state, whose primary goal (after the relative maximization of violence) is also 2. But here intercedes the material realities of political economy: the American petty bourgeoisie was born from the 1970s⁹ profitability crisis, an attempt to expel low profit niches from high bourgeois businesses and intensify exploitation. Small businesses in general have lower profit rates, and seek protection from the state in the form of tariffs and antitrust action. The elevation of these protections to official policy on behalf of the petty bourg under Trump, and then continuing under Biden, shows the present political power of this class. But this will not be enough, it will never be enough. 

The entire existence of the petty bourgeoisie is defined by their struggle to keep their chin above water, by existential threats posed by the state on one hand, the workers on the other, and their larger cousins on the other. At any moment, their revenue could slip below their costs and condemn them to the life of the common man they were supposed to be distinguished from. Those few who actually have the ability to create successful organizations leave their ranks to join the high bourgeoisie. Collectively, they are like rabid animals, their brains curdled by the terror. They cannot help but lash out. 

Extensive state-backed loans prevented the economic crisis during the pandemic from ruining the petty bourg; we’ve yet to actually see how the now politically organized and militant sections of the class would react to a crisis that actually does threaten ruin. The state cannot protect the petty bourg from economic ruin permanently without fundamentally undermining bourgeois social relations. In fact, by creating such a large petty bourgeoisie section of society, the state interventions to preserve capitalism have made capitalism more susceptible to profitability crises overall through the prevalence of more precarious producers. Serious attempts to preserve the petty bourg can only result in propping up inefficient, atomized producers and forcing industry to be less efficient overall; hence undermining the state in its role seeking the relative maximization of violence. Even the attempts to mollify them through breaking up big tech companies can only damage R&D and technical innovation. 

The fact that the bourgeois state has yet to create adaptations to regulate the petty bourgeois as a political entity means this is a very dangerous situation. It took many revolutions and civil wars to develop the sort of state ideological apparatuses (political parties, unions, media, and academia) which could contain and regulate both the high bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The last great explosion caused by the petty bourg, WW2, was settled by the external contradictions, that is through war, how to manage them to create a stable society internally has yet to be discovered. Much like these previous epochs of unrest, this has led to the creation of intellectuals operating outside the existing political framework on behalf of this “revolutionary” class¹⁰. I like to refer to these as lumpen intellectuals, to signify their relationship to the state, though not necessarily as a pejorative. Marx, I believe, would also count as a lumpen intellectual on behalf of the proletariat. 

The logic of the state imposes a cruel irony onto history: the battle for freedom by a class is always rewarded with its unfreedom, even in victory. This was just as true of the bourgeoisie as it was the proletariat. When the bourgeois revolutions succeeded, they were rewarded with the innovations of Emperor Napoleon and then his nephew, regarding how the state could concentrate authority away from the bourgeoisie as a class and use it against their immediate interests to preserve bourgeois society. When the proletarian revolutions succeeded, a bureaucratic party dictatorship concentrated authority away from the proletariat to preserve a kind of communist society¹¹, at least for a time. 

Just as it was with the secret of Aristotle as he described the ideal types of government and compares them to their corrupted forms. To him, the ideal government should rule on behalf of all, whereas the corrupted forms are the rule of a faction for a faction. The truth is that only the corrupted forms actually exist. When Aristotle says “...a tyranny is a monarchy where the good of one man only is the object of government, an oligarchy considers only the rich, and a democracy only the poor; but neither of them have a common good in view,” we can take it a step further¹². A state which proclaims itself as the ideal object of one man destroys all else beside him and surrounds him, along with all his riches and titles, with the threat of assassination and civil war. A state which proclaims itself as the ideal of the rich takes power from them to ensure nothing can interfere with the private accumulation of wealth. A state which proclaims itself as the ideal of the poor, of the working class, takes power from them to ensure nothing can possibly lead to the private accumulation of wealth. Everyone gets exactly what they wanted, no? Everyone gets the unfreedom they deserve. 

What is created, in both the failure and success of revolutionary classes, are new mechanisms and institutions for social control through the creation of ideology or the application of violence. People get what they “deserve” in the sense of cruel ironies, not because they deserve it, but for the same reason the squeakiest wheel gets the grease - the state is the reactive part of a feedback loop, attempting to manage any threat of violence and breakdown. Even in the rather unstable case of the one man state, the ambition of the tinpot dictator is channeled towards the purpose of suppressing all other possible factions in society and their potential violence.

The petty bourg too will not escape this fate. At one point it might have been possible to imagine the erasure of this political class through the usual means, of increasing centralization and socialization of production, but that has been politically undermined everywhere in the capitalist world, and in the US petty bourg political power is growing more firm, creating a strong bipartisan consensus against this outcome. At the same time, we should not expect the same scale of revolutionary violence from them compared to the revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie or proletariat, for the simple reason that many of the methods of social control which applied then also apply now to a lesser extent to the general population. So too does the rise of "the megaton bomb" mean that the externalization of all the internal contradictions, in the way of the world wars, is no longer possible - this is the meta-stability earned by the drive for ever greater relative violence. The only way forward is straight through: the petty bourg and their lumpen intellectuals will create a political crisis for the bourgeois state, and either the bourgeois state will adapt, or it will die. 

The intense paranoia and desperation of this class could make the contours of this crisis appear quite different than one may assume from where politics stands today, outside of the crisis. The deep fears of government overreach and communism are quickly turned into pleas for law, order and even economic planning when it advantages them. Present day conspiracies about, for example, central bank/government backed digital currencies and the possibility of them excluding people could just as easily turn into demands to create one as our world gets flooded with AI based scams and suddenly the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate petty bourg becomes hugely important. I've talked about the impact of AI on the working class before, but it's worth noting that the petty bourg as a class is perhaps even more vulnerable: their livelihood is based on nothing more than being a node of exchange to make sales, if these nodes can be made arbitrarily through artificial means then they could quickly be overwhelmed.

This crisis, which will likely play out in several major countries across the globe, including China, of course has no fixed outcome, but there is one obvious solution which must be prevented at all costs: the creation of a new tendency of an increasing rate of exploitation and immiseration of the working class. It is this solution, and this solution alone which opens the gates to the fantasy of maintaining bourgeois social relations indefinitely. So long as improving fortunes for the working class is a boundary to the range of possible solutions, it is possible to imagine alternatives. And, it is these alternatives which are the realization of the petty bourg nightmare and their generalized unfreedom, of the end of its values and way of life. 

There are good reasons to believe that if any state should adapt by abandoning bourgeois society, it would have the ability to be more meta-stable than capitalism. It would certainly be capable of investing much more resources into production than capitalism currently is, the only question is whether, unlike the USSR and other communist bloc countries, there would be institutions and incentives to effectively propagate and utilize investments and new technologies across the economy. The developments in cybernetic planning since the collapse of the USSR is one reason to be optimistic this would be the case. In such a socialist society that emerges from a crisis of petty bourgeois revolt, which can imagine a positive vision of the world, of small workshops and creators proliferating and in cooperation with each other, rather than a society of petty tyrants and rentiers. Truly, this would be the greatest nightmare imaginable to the existing petty bourg, as it always was. Capitalism and capitalists welcomed the approach of their fetters, if nothing lay beyond them, then they would be a comfort; it's only in the emergence of new, more meta-stable alternatives that evokes a sinking feeling. After all, what worried the capitalist world about 1917 and the Soviet Union wasn’t the emergence of a failed mode of production, it was the worry of a communism that worked. 

1. I intend to make this kind of clear-cut summary a consistent feature of future theoretical writing to avoid confusion.

2. Anti-Oedipus (libcom.org) “SAVAGES, BARBARIANS, CIVILIZED MEN”

3. Adorno, Theodor W. Negative dialectics. Translated by E.B Ashton. London: Routledge, 2015. Universal History

4. The Dawn of Social Evolution - Cosmonaut (cosmonautmag.com)

5. 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. VII (marxists.org)

6. Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Thirty Two (marxists.org)

7. L. Trotsky: What Is Fascism (November 1931) (marxists.org)

8. Leon Trotsky: What Is National Socialism? (1933) (marxists.org)

9. Specifically excluding small farmers here who constituted a distinct political force.

10. Speaking here of the type of petty bourg intellectuals such as Curtis Yarvin, various members of the Claremont Institute, various defenders and legitimizers of Donald Trump’s novel plans to keep the presidency in 2020, ect.

11. Certainly not what Marx meant by communism, but actually existing communism is still something meaningfully distinct from bourgeois society.

12.  A Treatise on Government, by Aristotle (gutenberg.org) Chapter VII