I provide a service for direct use (forgot the real term).
as an independent worker with my own business I am not an organized worker and have no solidarity with ppl who do the same job. true lumpen.
but then learned about the whole concept of unproductive labour. there is no capitalist who steals my surplus value. true unproductive worker?
what am I?
Petit bourgeois. If you think that means you’re “bad,” don’t worry: I’ve been one off-and-on myself.
In Western imperialist countries, the upper sectors of the petite-bourgeoisie are called “small business owners” whereas the lower ones are called “freelancers”, such as the self-employed, artists or tutors who are both employer and employee under the Capitalist mode of production.
I really don’t see how freelancers are petit bourgeois. They do exactly the same thing as an employee, they only get paid to produce value for an owner, and they do not make any revenue from the labor of others.
Seconded. I believe categorizing freelancers as petty bourgeois is going for the letter instead of the meaning of the term. A youtuber with no editor may own the means of production (his camera and computer) but ultimately depends on Google in order to be able to work. Similarly, freelancers may own their respective means of production, but they may be dependent on platforms like fiverr or corporations hiring them as contractors.
That’s fair: it depends on the specifics of the freelancing. A lot of US 1099 workers, practically speaking, are proletarians with even fewer rights than W-2 employees. I’ve been in that situation, but I’ve also been “lower” petit bourgeois self-employed, and I’ve been “upper” petit bourgeois employing workers myself.
huh didnt saw that one comming 😅
Do you have employees? Then yeah, small bourgeois. If it’s just you? Owner-operator.
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I always thought of unproductive labor as work that served a detrimental function in society – the billing department of a hospital, for example.
i underatood it as not producing value for a capitalist, but might be wrong about that too.
Petty booj,
I’m going off memory, but IIRC lumpenproletariat refers to the disorganised and marginalised class of people who still don’t survive off of Capital. Small-time criminals, “errand boys”, drug dealers, sex workers, people who aren’t directly employed by Capital, and are segregated to the fringes of society, but still live off of their labour. It doesn’t apply to your case.
The situation you describe seems to fit better into petit bourgeois if you actually own some sort of business. But if you’re one of those “be your own boss” doordash deliverypeople, then that’s just enticing propaganda to mask away being part of the disorganised and alienated section of the proletariat.
Either you survive from your labour, from owning property, or a mixture of the two. That’s the principal distinction between proletarian and bourgeois. The material interests of the petit bourgeoisie often align with that of the proletariat, but it’s also a source for reactionary elements and footsoldiers of capital.
Here’s the definition of lumpen on the MIA glossary:
Was looking more at the definition of lumpenproletariat the other day:
An oft-cited description of the lumpenproletariat comes from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Parisian lumpenproletariat that Louis Bonaparte recruited during the French class struggles of 1848–1851 in order to defeat the proletariat and ultimately to seize state power consisted of the following:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème (1963: 75).
As self-interested hustlers whose services are for sale to the highest bidder, the lumpenproletariat – a term Marx and Engels created – is typically co-opted, as Bonaparte demonstrates, by reactionary movements. However, Marx’s taxonomy indicates the difficulty of locating a synthesized and explanatory definition for a term presented here as an ‘indefinite’ alterity with no clear framework of composition.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-021-00487-9
I think of that categorization as characterized by an inconsistent or absent relationship to work and production that leads to a lack of class consciousness (lumpen) despite being closer to the working class than to any other class (proletariat). The “self-interested hustler” phrase stood out to me as a good summation.
Someone who owns their own business could certainly fit this, but I suppose it comes down to how dependent you are on someone else’s means of production (the point made elsewhere in this thread about YouTubers depending on Google is a good one).
