im finally understanding this better. the petite bourgeoisie have finally tasted the good life but its not fully under control. a small business can fail. but for the time being they can finally pay their bills without checking the bank account life is pretty good. but this is why they are so volatile. they have most likely been poor and reuse to go back. this is in contrast to the poorest who are stable in their hopelessness and the real deal bourgeoisie who have absolute stability.
but the petite bourgeoisie have tasted the champagne. this is what makes them volatile.
yea why wouldn't they fight to never go back to that desperate state
It’s less about going BACK, most of them come from generational wealth and it’s more a case of falling INTO the proletariat for the first time. The rise of the nazi party was literally borne out of the same anxiety in the German petit-boug after WWI.
It’s not exactly a new observation, the proletarianisation of the petit-bourgeoisie is literally written about in the Manifesto:
The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
If those two paragraphs don’t perfectly sum up what happened at the Capitol, I don’t know what does.
