Yeah, I know the dictionary definitions: “Middle Class”, a landowner or one who’s concerned with “middle class values”(? th’ hell’s a “middle class value”? “Green lawns are good”?)
But take your stereotypical, bomb-throwing revolutionary, the type who speaks (spoke) of individual human beings that were allied with his/her movement as “The Masses”. The type that rails against “The Landlords” and “The Bankers”. The type who preceeds every noun with “The People’s” (“Once we overthrow the landlords, this will be The People’s Port-a-Potty!”). The type that will very likely, if s/he wins, start a reign of terror that makes the old, oppressive system look good, if only by comparison.
You know the stereotype.
When they say “Bourgeois” they’re implying far more than just “middle class”. “Hopelessly banal” perhaps? “Oppressor, but unconcerned?”.I don’t know. Is it like the way liberals in the '60’s used the term “fascist” (“Someone I don’t like”)?
I’m reading a book that used the term and it occured to me that I didn’t know the connotation, so I’m appealing to the Teeming Millions for some help.
Besides, if the People’s Revolution comes, I’m worried that I might be considered Bourgeois and be one of the first with my head under the blade.
Entrenched in the system.
Committed to perpetuating a way of life that enforces the wage-slavery of the proles.
Middle-class and clueless about it (but willing to fight to maintain stats quo)
O’ course, if you take Marx & Engels’ word for it, the most useful kind of person to be is a educated student with an affinity for the lumpenproletariat, so as to educate tham and use your position in the system to kick over the traces. Kind of ironic as Engels was the dilettante son of a wealthy mill-owner who financed Karl’s studies and writings.
Don’t worry about it. If the worst someone calls you is bourgeois, then you can be assured that
a) by some standards, you’re doing all right for yourself
b) the person who calls you it is most likely a pretentious dabbler in social science. I don’t know of anyone who still uses it as a serious insult.
While studying Marx, I always took it to mean fairly specifically “those who own the means of production”, by which I mean factory owners, land owners etc. The word is given a perjorative slant simply because of who is using it. Those who control the means of production are implicitly bad or at least misguided from a Marxist point of view. The bourgeousie are the oppressors and alienators of the workers and therefore their collective name becomes synonymous with these ideas and practices.
Of course, anyone who uses the phrase nowadays is, just as False_god said, most likely either kidding with you or has been reading too much social science
I recall some writers of political economy and history distinguishing between the bourgeousie and capitalists, though others lump them into one group. While everyone identified the capitalist as the owner of the means of production, some saw the bourgeousie not as one of the middle class masses, per se, but rather as a small privileged group who owned shops and such, but were not the big boys. The distinction seems rather unclear to me.
Today, of course, members of the bourgeousie are seen as pompous aristocratics. It’s a way of life, a mindset. In today’s society, it would most closely describe persons who are at least upper middle class.
Anyone who reads comic books, Fenris, can’t be too much of an oppressor. (insert stupid smiley face with the buck teeth.)
That would be, according to Marx, the “petit bourgeois”, small property owners who operated their own businesses. According to Marx, they would disappear into the proletariat , because they would be unable to compete with the bourgeois.
This makes me wonder about a word(?) I’ve seen occasionally, “booshwah” (sp?). Is it a jocular deformation of bourgeois, or a separate word?
In an issue of American Splendor Comix (speaking of comic books), there was a flashback to the 1960s when a young Trotskyite wearing a button-down shirt and tie dismissed the hairy bearded freak revolutionaries as “booshwah”. Is that really what it means? Or does it just mean ‘nonsense’?
I would be very much inclined to say that booshwah is a version of bourgeoise - it looks, smells snd tastes like it. Infact, a quick google search on the term brings up a poem about the “Petty Boushwah” - an African (I’m assuming) creole/pattois/pidgin version of Petit Bourgeois. Interesting what you can find on your searching travels.
If someone calls you it in the black community today it will most likely be an older person. Pronounced “Booshie” (with that “zsh” sound in the middle. It is meant as an insult and means “so you got a little money now and you think you’re better than me.”
I also have always assumed that “booshwah” was a corruption of bourgeoise. However, there could be some connection to the French (Canadian) term bois de vache (“cow-wood”) for dried cow or buffalo dung used as a fuel for camp-fires, especially by fur-trappers. (sometimes given as bodewash in English. The potential extension to the sense of “bullshit” is obvious.
No doubt samclem will be along any minute with his edition of Lighter to shoot this theory down.
According to http://www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm
1 : of, relating to, or characteristic of the townsman or of the social middle class
2 : marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity
3 : dominated by commercial and industrial interests : CAPITALISTIC
Liberal (and I do mean liberal) Arts intellectuals often use it contemptuously in the second sense.
When ya wants quality, ya goes to the source. Two definitions have the most relevance here:
This is the root of the classic Marxist term - a member of a class that emerged from certain social and economic developments. Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, a steadily increasing number of master craftsmen and other artisan types started breaking out of the constraints of the guilds and companies, hiring more apprentices and journeymen than was legal, for instance, and crowding out the competition in other ways. They didn’t come from the aristocratic background but they were beginning to form their own class, based on the fact that they controlled greater amounts of the means of production and greater amounts of wealth. This is what became yer classical bourgeois, whose struggle against the old orders manifested itself in the English, French, and American revolutions. Back then, of course, they were a radical class, with new ideas on rights to property and liberty and the pursuit of equality/happiness, but as time went on and they settled into power they started backpedaling, becoming more conservative as they got a firmer grip on the levers of social and economic power. This conservative manifested itself in all aspects of life, including art and culture; anything that seemed to represent a challenge to their order or a new way of thinking got 'em upset. Hence the second definition:
“I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Anything progressive or radically new is shunned and derided until it starts commanding some serious prices at the galleries cough Picasso cough.
Of course, it got picked up by the “more-Maoist-than-thou” crowd as ultralefty-hipspeak for “square”, but given some of the views they held I’d wager they were just as bourgeois as the people they mocked.
I’ve also heard the term “booshwaw” used to mean in essence “spoiled rich kids who play at ‘radical chic’, while enjoying the wealth and privilige their parents afford them.”
