I think there's something fundamentally wrong with an article that attempts to analyze fascism and the social strata that makes up it's base without once mentioning the word petit-bourgeois
I worked as a copyeditor at a local paper as a joke to see what it was like there and how long I would last. I made it three months. It's the only job I was fired from and I've been working for two decades. Here are the reporters I encountered there:
white male boomer who called himself a democratic socialist, who once openly stated his desire to marry Mazie Hirono, whose articles consistently quoted only one establishment source, with no one ever complaining. He was the only guy who seemed to be happy there, and I believe it was because he already had Medicare/Social Security;
white female Gen Xer who revealed that she was an anti-vaxxer pre-pandemic because of bad experiences with doctors (fuck anti-vaxxers but the unbelievably shitty healthcare situation in the USA is one of many reasons for their proliferation);
white female Gen Xer who published a book about a local anarchist but seemed terrified of losing her job. She barely ever said anything and would just shut herself down if anything even remotely political came up in office discussion. She also had the hardest job out of everyone, having to attend town meetings with dozens of local petite bourgeois scum arguing about taxes for five hours, well into the night, at least once per week, and almost certainly not being paid for it. She and the last lady both had elementary-aged kids.
white female Gen Xer, the editor, who left her shitty dog in her car all day because on the rare occasions when she brought it to the office, it would bite people, including me. Two other workers, the coolest people there (they were involved in advertising and secretarial work) yelled at her for this. She fired me because I refused to approve a transphobic article the white boomer had written. (I've mentioned this on hexbear only about eighty times.) A few months later, she herself was demoted and then fired. The newspaper now has a new white lady editor who is bending over backwards to make the paper as inoffensive as possible.
me, a white-passing millennial communist dude finishing the day's work within an hour or two, with several hours to go until I was allowed to leave, being bored out of my mind in a stale depressing office, working on my own books whenever the boss's back was turned, kind of thinking it was funny that they were paying me to do that even though the pay fucking sucked ($13/hr). Toward the end I was kind of trying to get fired and slipped shit into articles about the USA being built on theft, rape, and murder. Nobody ever caught it or complained.
I suspect all corporate papers are more or less like this, even our beloved New York Times. Whatever the reporters' personal beliefs, if they don't toe the bourgeois line, they're out.
Could be, but idk journalism's been thoroughly proletarianized anyway so I don't think either subclass descriptor is useful here.
Editorial (management) is what serves the interest of capital (newspaper owners) anyway, which is probably the sentiment @DivineChaos100 was getting at.
Petit bourgeois are small business owners, family-owned small farms, landlords with only one or two properties, etc. People who are technically members of the capitalist class but don't have much actual capital and don't exploit much labor to turn a profit.
Labor aristicrat is really just an antagonistic term, referring to members of the working class who are materially privileged enough that when the proletariat comes into conflict with the bourgeois, they often side with the bougies. I've heard it used to describe everything from programmers to the entirety of the working class in the US and Europe.
I think the PMC is real as a distinct subset of the working class that emerged post-WWII. But the problem is that a lot of people here think the PMC is static, when really it's collapsing back into the larger working class milleau. Hence the gnashing of teeth at knowledge economy workers when they're stable and the spiteful laughter when they're not.
The only thing to add to @TheFreshestHell's explanation is to be boug you have to own capital. Petit just means they don't own much (think small business owners and smalltime landlords here).
Journalists rarely own capital. Hell at this point they're barely labor aristocracy.
The rare individual cases where a journalist is bourgeoisie, it's almost certainly gentleman farmer-type situation (they don't need the wage) and there's nothing petit about them.
I mean, every podcaster this site stans, even Adam Johnson, is petite boug. The irony of a thoroughly-privatized media industry owned by neoliberals is that you need to have your own operation to create content that advocates socialism.
I think there's something fundamentally wrong with an article that attempts to analyze fascism and the social strata that makes up it's base without once mentioning the word petit-bourgeois
Journalists won't tell on themselves
Journalists are rarely petty boug tho. Usually highly precarious labor aristocrats.
I worked as a copyeditor at a local paper as a joke to see what it was like there and how long I would last. I made it three months. It's the only job I was fired from and I've been working for two decades. Here are the reporters I encountered there:
I suspect all corporate papers are more or less like this, even our beloved New York Times. Whatever the reporters' personal beliefs, if they don't toe the bourgeois line, they're out.
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Is intellectuals not its own subclass?
Could be, but idk journalism's been thoroughly proletarianized anyway so I don't think either subclass descriptor is useful here.
Editorial (management) is what serves the interest of capital (newspaper owners) anyway, which is probably the sentiment @DivineChaos100 was getting at.
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What's the difference between petit bougies and labor aristocrats?
Petit bourgeois are small business owners, family-owned small farms, landlords with only one or two properties, etc. People who are technically members of the capitalist class but don't have much actual capital and don't exploit much labor to turn a profit.
Labor aristicrat is really just an antagonistic term, referring to members of the working class who are materially privileged enough that when the proletariat comes into conflict with the bourgeois, they often side with the bougies. I've heard it used to describe everything from programmers to the entirety of the working class in the US and Europe.
Labor aristocrat is how I would explain many working musicians, a disgusting number of them are just the most ignorant libs.
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lol that's how I feel about PMC
at least labor aristocracy highlights the material interest involved vs. immaterial nature of the work being done
last thing to note, describing journalists as labor aristocrats was a mistake. I think I used it as a gentler correction to calling them petty boug
That sounds like PMC then lol
Pmc is a liberal term imo
I think the PMC is real as a distinct subset of the working class that emerged post-WWII. But the problem is that a lot of people here think the PMC is static, when really it's collapsing back into the larger working class milleau. Hence the gnashing of teeth at knowledge economy workers when they're stable and the spiteful laughter when they're not.
The only thing to add to @TheFreshestHell's explanation is to be boug you have to own capital. Petit just means they don't own much (think small business owners and smalltime landlords here).
Journalists rarely own capital. Hell at this point they're barely labor aristocracy.
The rare individual cases where a journalist is bourgeoisie, it's almost certainly gentleman farmer-type situation (they don't need the wage) and there's nothing petit about them.
I mean, every podcaster this site stans, even Adam Johnson, is petite boug. The irony of a thoroughly-privatized media industry owned by neoliberals is that you need to have your own operation to create content that advocates socialism.