The petty bourgeoisie is the Marxist term for small-scale merchants, artisans, and self-employed workers. They own some means of production, the land and tools used to produce goods, but employ little labor. Sitting between the bourgeoisie and the working class, they have shifted political sides historically.
Examples
Following are some examples of those who could be described as the petty bourgeoisie:
-
Traders
-
Merchants
-
Some land-owning farmers
-
Independent artisans
-
Small-scale shopkeepers
The Petty Bourgeoisie in Marxism
Marx’s Class Position
In Marx’s categorization of social classes, the petty bourgeoisie are self-employed, or those who employ a few laborers in their economic activity. These are associated with the shop-keeping or independent-artisan class, forming a buffer between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Because of their intermediary position, they were seen as being pulled in both directions, sometimes revolutionary and sometimes conservative. They were economically fixed, but politically fluid.
The petty bourgeoisie has been historically viewed as partakers of the systems of private property which undergird capitalist societies (Poulantzas, 1979). However, they lack the capital for large-scale industrialization.
On the other hand, the petty bourgeoisie does not have to rely on selling its labor, and may even employ other people. Unlike capitalists, however, it still has to work, often alongside family members as well as employees.
The 1848 French Revolution
Karl Marx claimed that during France’s failed revolution in 1848, the petty bourgeoisie had shifted their loyalty to the bourgeoisie from the proletariat (Poulantzas, 1979).
Marx treated this episode as the clearest illustration of the class’s characteristic instability, torn between the pull of labor and the pull of property.
The mid-1840s had seen the petty bourgeoisie, amidst widespread discontent and famine, fighting alongside students and the urban proletariat. They demanded liberal reforms and the recognition of workers’ rights.
However, the conflict evolved into anarchic upheaval. The petty bourgeoisie ended up transferring its allegiance to the counter-revolutionary movement, comprising the conservative peasantry, the bourgeoisie, and powerful feudal remnants.
The upshot was the establishment of the Second Republic of France, with Napoleon III as its president. He would go on to become the Emperor of France.
Engels’s Transitional View and the Classical Prediction of Decline
Friedrich Engels, on the other hand, was more inclined to see the petty bourgeoisie as a transitional middle class rather than a stationary one (Poulantzas, 1979).
He identified it as a section sandwiched between the nobility it had already surpassed and the working class it would eventually be displaced by.
Engels’s view reflected a wider prediction. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels named the small manufacturer, shopkeeper, artisan, and peasant as the “lower strata of the middle class.”
This group, they said, was doomed. It would “sink gradually into the proletariat,” out-competed by concentrated industrial capital (Marx & Engels, 1967).
Only the largest owners could afford to deploy capital on that scale. The class was not permanent.
It was, instead, a leftover of pre-capitalist relations, squeezed from above by the bourgeoisie’s growing scale and from below by its own inability to compete.
The Petty Bourgeoisie Over Time
A Shifting Term, A Persistent Puzzle
The late 20th century saw a decrease in the term’s usage, accompanied by more frequent references to the middle class (Poulantzas, 1979).
Somewhat disassociated from the bourgeoisie, the term middle class has come to mean a subsection of society whose growth could increase upward mobility, spur economic growth, and advance democratization.
Different theorists have attempted to distinguish the petty bourgeoisie from both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The claim is narrow. Its characteristic mental labor, they argued, was hostile to the interests of the working class (Poulantzas, 1975).
On this view, the petty bourgeoisie represents capitalist interests without owning capital in a form it can alienate. The plenitude of joint-stock companies is one example that defies easy theorization and complicates radical political organization (Wright, 1978).
The Small-Business Ideal, Tested
In the meantime, images of small business owners, freed from the demands of working for others, continue to occupy the popular imagination.
Norms of individual freedom, personal autonomy, and entrepreneurship exert a powerful influence on many people. This latest petty bourgeoisie shapes society’s economic trajectory.
Did this shift in language reflect genuine decline, as Marx and Engels predicted? Or was the petty bourgeoisie being reconstituted in new form? The question became directly testable once long-run labor-force data on self-employment became available.
- Aim: Steinmetz and Wright (1989) tested why US self-employment rose between 1976 and 1983. Was it a response to unemployment, service-sector growth, or a genuine rise within industry itself?
- Method: They decomposed official self-employment statistics across roughly thirty industrial categories, tracking how much of the change each explanation could account for.
- Results: The unemployment explanation had only weak, diminishing power. The rise instead reflected growth in postindustrial services and a genuine, previously undocumented increase in self-employment within industrial sectors themselves.
- Conclusion: Steinmetz and Wright read this as a structural reversal in the long decline of the American petty bourgeoisie. It partly vindicated the view that the class was being reconstituted by advanced capitalism itself.
This reading did not go unchallenged. A rebuttal argued that much of the measured rise sat in low-paid personal-service jobs, such as maids and hairdressers. Their “self-employed” status, it argued, often disguised economic dependence rather than genuine ownership (Linder & Houghton, 1990).
Critical Evaluation of the Petty Bourgeoisie
Unresolved Theoretical Debates
Two theoretical disputes remain unresolved.
Poulantzas grouped salaried technical and clerical staff with the petty bourgeoisie based on a specific reading of “productive labor” in Marx’s sense. Critics within Marxism argue this reading is contestable, leaving much of the modern service workforce less clearly classified than Poulantzas’s label suggests (Skotnes, 1979).
Wright’s alternative fares somewhat better.
It is more formally precise, built on measurable dimensions of control rather than a single disputed criterion. But one critique argues that his “contradictory class location” risks becoming almost as broad a catch-all as the category it replaced. That charge has not been fully answered (Weil, 1995).
Both schools agree that something changed about the middle of the class structure over the twentieth century. They disagree sharply, though, on how best to capture it: a second, ideologically defined petty-bourgeois category, or a set of formally specified contradictory locations along several separately measurable dimensions.
Formal Status vs Real Class Position
A deeper problem runs through this literature: a formal “self-employed” label does not reliably track real class position.
The Steinmetz-and-Wright/Linder-and-Houghton dispute above turns on exactly this gap. Official statistics use “self-employed” as an administrative category. It does not show whether a worker actually owns productive assets, bears real entrepreneurial risk, or is instead economically dependent on a single employer in all but name.
Many are not truly independent. The same dispute shows a meaningful share of those formally recorded as self-employed are, in substance, working under another party’s direction.
Neither classical Marxist theory nor modern labor statistics have fully solved this measurement problem. It sits at the heart of what distinguishes a genuine petty bourgeoisie from a merely nominally self-employed workforce.
Contemporary Research
The strongest recent evidence on the petty bourgeoisie’s political alignment comes from a large, cross-national survey.
- Aim: Jansen (2019) tested whether solo self-employed workers hold political views closer to the classic, welfare-sceptical petty bourgeoisie, or closer to insecure temporary employees.
- Method: The study drew on a household survey across eight West European countries, covering 852 self-employed respondents’ political views and job insecurity.
- Results: Solo self-employed workers leaned toward supporting welfare cuts overall, matching the classic petty-bourgeois pattern. But those facing high job insecurity looked far more like insecure temporary employees.
- Conclusion: Solo self-employment is not politically uniform: its alignment depends on the worker’s actual job security, not just formal self-employed status (Jansen, 2019).
This sample is large and genuinely cross-national. It lets the finding generalize further than Lipset’s older, impressionistic account (Jansen, 2019).
A separate health survey found that petty-bourgeois men reported markedly worse self-rated health than managers, close to that of unskilled manual workers. Workplace conditions explained part, though not all, of this gap (Kong et al., 2017).
Further Information
Key Takeaways
- Origin: Petty bourgeoisie is a French-derived, often pejorative term for small-scale merchants and semi-autonomous peasants whose politics tend to mirror the high bourgeoisie during stable times.
- Marxist Usage: Marxist theorists, including Marx himself, used the term for those sandwiched between the wealthy owners of the means of production and the oppressed proletariat.
- Not Extinct: Marx predicted the class would disappear into the proletariat, but self-employment has persisted and even grown in some periods, complicating that prediction.
- Modern Evidence: Recent research finds the self-employed are not politically uniform: their alignment depends more on job security than on petty-bourgeois status itself (Jansen, 2019).
References
Bernstein, H. (1988). Capitalism and petty‐bourgeois production: Class relations and divisions of labour. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 15(2), 258-271.
Jansen, G. (2019). Self-employment as atypical or autonomous work: Diverging effects on political orientations. Socio-Economic Review, 17(2), 381–407. https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mww017
Kong, K. A., Khang, Y.-H., Cho, H.-J., Jang, S.-M., & Jung-Choi, K. (2017). Neo-Marxian social class inequalities in self-rated health among the employed in South Korea: The role of material, behavioral, psychosocial, and workplace environmental factors. BMC Public Health, 17, 345. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4269-9
Linder, M., & Houghton, J. (1990). Self-employment and the petty bourgeoisie: Comment on Steinmetz and Wright. American Journal of Sociology, 96(3), 727–735. https://doi.org/10.1086/229577
Marx, K. (1968). The Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850. Wellred Books.
Marx, K. (1926). The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. International Publishers.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1967). The Communist Manifesto. Penguin. (Original work published 1848).
Poulantzas, N. (1975). Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. New Left Books.
Poulantzas, N. (1979). The new petty bourgeoisie. Insurgent Sociologist, 9(1), 56-60.
Skotnes, A. (1979). Structural determination of the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie: A critique of Nicos Poulantzas. Insurgent Sociologist, 9(1), 34–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/089692057900900104
Steinmetz, G., & Wright, E. O. (1989). The fall and rise of the petty bourgeoisie: Changing patterns of self-employment in the postwar United States. American Journal of Sociology, 94(5), 973–1018. https://doi.org/10.1086/229110
Weil, R. (1995). Contradictory class definitions: Petty bourgeoisie and the “classes” of Erik Olin Wright. Critical Sociology, 21(3), 3–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/089692059502100301
Wright, E. O. (1978). Class, Crisis and the State. New Left Books.
