Bourgeoisie

The bourgeoisie is a term closely associated with Marxist class analysis of social and economic systems. It refers to people who make a living by exploiting capital to produce commodities for sale in a market system. Under a capitalist system, capital is the private property of its owners, and so the owners of capital have the power to exclude others from access to and enjoyment of the means by which society produces everything it needs to meet its members’ needs.

In Marx’s version of European history, there were people who lived outside of the feudal, aristocratic system. They had no tie to any land, and no relationship to a lord as a landowner. They might own their own equipment for farming, for instance. Or, they might have other kinds of resources they can exploit to produce goods. They were associated with markets in towns; they were burghers, townspeople, which is to say they had no other status in the feudal system. The original bourgeoisie occupied a distinct, and relatively limited role with respect to the overall economic structure. They were an economic class, but not a very powerful one.

What was marginal to one system becomes central when society as a whole shifts to an economic form based on private ownership and commodity production. Under capitalism, people have no rights over how an owner uses their capital, and so in a system in which one group owns a society’s means of production, everyone else must offer something to sell them in order to meet their own needs. The bourgeoisie in this system buy labor power from these people, who have no other resource to sell than their own labor as a commodity in exchange for a wage. In this kind of system, owners of capital and workers—bourgeois and proletarians—each occupy different, interdependent, yet unequal roles in the economy and in society. They need each other, but their interests as members of different classes are fundamentally opposed.

The rise of the bourgeoisie, Marx also argues, is what really drives the political transformation of European societies into liberal democracies. When people fled serfdom and established themselves in towns, they enjoyed a special political status in which they were exempt from taxes and tributes to a landowner. The nascent bourgeoisie acquired what were known as “city rights,” including both freedom to trade and to participate in an autonomous local government. This, Marx argues, plants the seeds of the chief ideological fiction of liberalism. Liberalism promotes the individual’s inherent rights. The bourgeoisie believe that they and everyone else is and should be politically equal because they see each person as an autonomous individual who is and should be responsible for themselves. Liberal political equality does not eliminate material inequality; it reclassifies inequality as the outcome of an individual’s own success. Liberal critics of contemporary capitalism decry the existence of political rights for private corporations, but this was in fact always the basis of the rights liberals assume belong to each individual person.

In the contemporary world, capitalism is too diverse and complex to be explained by simple class analysis. There is no actual class of capitalists or owners the means of production. Yet the idea of a bourgeois ideology is still useful in other kinds of social analysis. The commodity form itself expresses what we might call bourgeois ideology. In the contemporary world economy, nearly everyone meets their needs through commodity consumption. This involves a dual fiction: (1) that commodities themselves possess value which can be owned; and (2) that each individual as a consumer is like Robinson Crusoe on a island, alone, and thus free, to calculate how to use limited personal resources to acquire what is necessary to one’s life. These are classically bourgeois ideas in that they draw us into seeing ourselves and everyone else as individuals, and in doing so, mystify and obscure the way commodities are actually produced through social relationships. In any society or social situation, every person depends on other people in some way and yet in a bourgeois culture we learn to ignore our inherently social existence in favor of an ideological representation of a world of strangers. When we define modernity as a qualitatively distinct form of society or stage of history in which individuals are free from tradition, we are thinking like the bourgeoisie.