The petty bourgeoisie. Included in this category are the owner-peasants, 7 the master handicraftsmen, the lower levels of the intellectuals--students, primary and secondary school teachers, lower government functionaries, office clerks, small lawyers--and the small traders. Both because of its size and class character, this class deserves very close attention. The owner-peasants and the master handicraftsmen are both engaged in small-scale production. Although all strata of this class have the same petty-bourgeois economic status, they fall into three different sections. The first section consists of those who have some surplus money or grain, that is, those who, by manual or mental labour, earn more each year than they consume for their own support. Such people very much want to get rich and are devout worshipers of Marshal Chao; 8 while they have no illusions about amassing great fortunes, they invariably desire to climb up into the middle bourgeoisie. Their mouths water copiously when they see the respect in which those small moneybags are held. People of this sort are timid, afraid of government officials, and also a little afraid of the revolution. Since they are quite close to the middle bourgeoisie in economic status, they have a lot of faith in its propaganda and are suspicious of the revolution. This section is a minority among the petty bourgeoisie and constitutes its right-wing. The second section consists of those who in the main are economically self-supporting. They are quite different from the people in the first section; they also want to get rich, but Marshal Chao never lets them. In recent years, moreover, suffering from the oppression and exploitation of the imperialists, the warlords, the feudal landlords and the big comprador-bourgeoisie, they have become aware that the world is no longer what it was. They feel they cannot earn enough to live on by just putting in as much work as before. To make both ends meet they have to work longer hours, get up earlier, leave off later, and be doubly careful at their work. They become rather abusive, denouncing the foreigners as "foreign devils", the warlords as "robber generals" and the local tyrants and evil gentry as "the heartless rich". As for the movement against the imperialists and the warlords, they merely doubt whether it can succeed (on the ground that the foreigners and the warlords seem so powerful), hesitate to join it and prefer to be neutral, but they never oppose the revolution. This section is very numerous, making up about one-half of the petty bourgeoisie.
The third section consists of those whose standard of living is falling. Many in this section, who originally belonged to better-off families, are undergoing a gradual change from a position of being barely able to manage to one of living in more and more reduced circumstances. When they come to settle their accounts at the end of each year, they are shocked, exclaiming, "What? Another deficit!" As such people have seen better days and are now going downhill with every passing year, their debts mounting and their life becoming more and more miserable, they "shudder at the thought of the future". They are in great mental distress because there is such a contrast between their past and their present. Such people are quite important for the revolutionary movement; they form a mass of no small proportions and are the left-wing of the petty bourgeoisie. In normal times these three sections of the petty bourgeoisie differ in their attitude to the revolution. But in times of war, that is, when the tide of the revolution runs high and the dawn of victory is in sight, not only will the left-wing of the petty bourgeoisie join the revolution, but the middle section too may join, and even tight-wingers, swept forward by the great revolutionary tide of the proletariat and of the left-wing of the petty bourgeoisie, will have to go along with the "evolution." We can see from the experience of the May 30th Movement 9 of 1925 and the peasant movement in various places that this conclusion is correct.

Mao

not too sure i often struggle with myself on this question as well the wages they get make it comfortable for them to live well off but their relation to production also don’t reflect a petty bourgeoisie one

Thread is way faster and more active than on KTT1 and not filled with Bernie bros We did the math once and it was twice as fast as the ktt1 thread

Lawyers and doctors can be petit-bourgeois if they run their own firm/practice, which many do. They can also be proletarian if they work for another lawyer or doctor, for example those doctors at hospitals. Professors are usually government employees in many countries, so it depends on how you see those, Mao puts them in the petit bourgeois category, I'd personally put many of them in the proletarian category

yeah someone said that in the past this was a bit more populated and told me what happened

i had no idea

Been in this thread/its predecessor since 2015 or so and I'd say it's pretty healthy rn

oh im not complaining. just a stark difference from how boisterous things were in the past compared to here in this thread. was curious what happened.

like you, most ppl seem like OGs for this topic.

There are new users here and fellow travellers lurking

trrruuuu. il make sure to keep that in mind when i post again

300 pages in 8 months

Equating 7500 posts itt not counting tangential conversations on socialism

Fifty950 requested a perma. We lost one of our boys. Salute to him

That's not bad right?

Fastest I’ve seen a thread

I used to argue with him so much lmfao he turned socialist later though

One of my ktt1 accounts got a perma for insulting him if I recall correctly

is profiting from the privatization of "doctor" specialization not a form of capital they have access to ?

rip i hope hes doing good

I don't see professional accreditation as capital. Medical school is just compound labor that increases labor power, as are all forms of training

The Marx & Engels Reader goated

i would understand in the case of for instance cuba, but a massive part of the privatization of healthcare is the monopolization of access to medical knowledge and practice as well as the accreditations.

i mean i made the comparison of trucker owner operators as petty bourgeois, but i also am not entirely certain that is a correct classification

@spacecadet how did you take those old film flicks on ur OG was stalking and loved the colors

I don’t think your skillset is what determines your class. It is how your skillset is employed in a wider system where power is determined by ownership and subjugation to ownership

Peasants can be bourgeois, just as much as those who handle financial capital (handle, not own). Finance workers can (very rarely) be proletariat just as much as the poorest serf. Brokers working long hours and handling multiple phones a la Wolf of Wall Street

It’s about what you own and what owns you, not what you do to get into one of those positions

(This is an textually unprincipled position, just off my head)