Late Escapism and Contemporary Neoliberalism by Greg Sharzer

Author:Greg Sharzer [Sharzer, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781315278728
Google: Q385EAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 56990565
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Petty bourgeois escapism

Bourdieu spends quite a bit of time on people between capital and labour, whom he calls the petty bourgeois. This is a contested category, and for good reason: traditionally made up of small farmers or shop-owners, even Marx expected them to be trampled underfoot by the looming giants of big capital and labour. And indeed, as Hipple and Hammond (2016) show, the number of self-employed in the US dropped from 80% in the 19th century to nine percent by the 1960s. This number has remained more or less constant ever since, rising to 12.1% in 1994 and falling to 10.1% in 2015. “Being your own boss” is a workforce anomaly due to the structural dominance of big capital. Marx understood that the petty bourgeois compete with the large bourgeois, workers and among themselves because they have to: big capitals grow by carving out markets and lowering their production costs. Small capitalists grow by their own labour, and by selling in high-risk markets, assuming the liabilities that large capital would rather not take on. The smallest of the small are often forced to the margins of the labour market as independent contractors freed from a steady wage or benefits. But considered as those whose capital comes from self-exploitation, or exploiting the labour of a few others, then the term retains social weight and, most importantly for a study of escapism, an ideological weight as well.

Bourdieu emphasizes the petty bourgeois’ isolation. They have the “ambition of escaping from the common present,” and pursue private home life rather than social conviviality, defined (in Bourdieu's day) by going to the café. Just like the wealthy demonstrate their escape from class relations by a love for pure aesthetics, the petty bourgeois longing to escape community suggests a hope for upward mobility, fulfilling the promise of individual, atomistic bourgeois self-hood. Their ideas reflect the in-between status of a class whose members rely on themselves, individually, for uplift. Lacking sufficient economic capital to control markets, the petty bourgeois must demonstrate the values of saving and prudence to the employer institutions, investors and customers who can make or deny their fortune, “since they represent his only hope of deriving profits from fundamentally negative assets.” Bourdieu means that the petty bourgeois individual has no capital to speak of, and therefore nothing substantive to offer the system's gatekeepers. A profligate small capitalist just shows that she does not take her capital investment seriously; thus the “petty bourgeois is a proletarian who makes himself small to become bourgeois.”

This position remains contradictory, just like the petty bourgeois themselves. Consider, for example, the habitus of progressive businesses, so beloved as a bulwark of community and solidarity against faceless corporate monotony. The healthy co-operative grocery will have ethical food and healthcare products, which Rao et al. (2013) demonstrate cost significantly more than their unhealthy, corporate equivalents. Infante (2018) tells of average wages for craft brewery employees falling between 2006 and 2016, right when the craft beer boom exploded. Yet petty bourgeois habitus insists on framing itself as choosing quality over quantity, and health (for consumers) over speed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.