For a long time now I’ve been very critical of the category ‘petit-bourgeois’. My argument has been that it has become entirely a category of political abuse rather than having any intellectual analytical value.
In Australian Marxist circles petit-bourgeois always came with ‘shit’ added to it. A person you don’t like is always a petit-bourgeois shit. I have to admit that I am particularly sensitive to this because I was a recipient of the abuse at one stage. I can't say I have fond memories of that moment where some ‘comrades’ I had some ongoing disagreements with, engaged in a supposed 'thorough investigation' of my personal background, and decided that I have lied about my bourgeois Lebanese background and that in fact I was a ‘petit bourgeois', a 'petit bourgeois shit’ in fact... a sublime moment in the history of 'class analysis'.
It seemed to me that the category was pregnant with all the class phobias of Marxist intellectuals themselves rather than those of the working class. While working class communists thought the bourgeoisie was their greatest enemy, communist intellectuals by far hated the ‘petit-bourgeoisie’ most. It helped that in Marxist analysis, while the bourgeoisie is to blame for capitalism, the petit-bourgeoisie was to blame for the more heinous crime of fascism (even if in that case the petit bourgeoisie is analyzed to be a tool of the bourgeoisie in the final analysis).
But the relation between the petit-bourgeoisie and fascism is surely true, and perhaps there is a good reason today to hang onto the category and salvage it. The thought came to me when thinking as I did in my book Is Racism an Environmental Threat? about the way so many white people who are climate change denialists are also anti-refugee racists. In what way are the two experienced as similar by White people?
I define White, as I always have, not as a skin colour but a particular way of experiencing and having an investment in one's whiteness. White people are those whites who think their whiteness ought to yield something extra for them. And indeed whiteness does, but in the case of some white people it is not yielding enough. I think the ultimate fantasy of Whiteness is still colonialist: it is imagined to entitle White people access to some kind of free lunch, easy wealth, like a good colonial land grab. These White people, like the zionists of today on the new settlements, they are good at mobilising all kind of wonderful nationalists poetic myths, but what they want is indeed what those zionists themselves ultimately want: enjoy a free land grab.
I know that many disaffected White people are hard working people, but nonetheless, they can't shake the belief that unlike hard working black or brown people they are entitled to that free extra thing that never comes. That is their nostalgic fantasy of entitlement and at least one of the sources of the heavily resentful nature of their economic disaffection. I think refugees and climate change, and white people who think we should share our wealth with refugees, and change our desire for economic accumulation because of climate change are all wreckers of this White fantasy of the 'more wealth that we are entitled to that we have not received but that is yet to come'. To put it simply, they think it unfair that they 'only' have what they have, and they want more. They still hope they can become bourgeois before the fantasy of becoming-bourgeois comes to an end. In that regard they are like those people from third world countries who refuse to accept the ramification of climate change because they still think they ought to be given the chance to 'develop' before the fantasy of capitalist development is brought to an end.
Now if I am to think of one category that captures all of these people mentioned above what category is better than petit-bourgeois? I can’t think of any. Except ‘petit-bourgeois shits’ maybe...
