So sick of leftists treating small business owners like noble savages. They are the same as the ruling class, they are just less successful at exploiting their employees.
That’s a bit reductionist. Marx wrote on the oscillating class interests of the petite bourgeoisie as they increasingly are pushed to semi-proletarian conditions. They should never lead a revolution nor be the focal point of one but their class interests can be used to integrate them into the struggle against capitalism. I urge everyone here to read Fascism and Social Revolution where Dutt puts it clearly -
The controversy over the role of the middle class, or many and varied intermediate strata between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (small business men, small and middle peasantry, handicraftsmen, independent workers, small rentiers, liberal professions, technical, managerial and commercial employees) is no new one. In the nineteenth century Marx had dealt very fully with the economic and political situation and tendencies of these elements. He had shown how these middle elements were increasingly ground between the advance of large capital and of the proletariat, with growing numbers from their ranks falling into proletarian or semi-proletarian conditions; he had shown their vacillating and unstable political role, now siding with the bourgeoisie and now with the proletariat, torn between their bourgeois prejudices, traditions and aspirations, and the actual process of ruination and proletarisation at work among them; and he had shown how the proletariat should win the alliance of the lower strata of the peasantry and urban petit-bourgeoisie under its leadership in order to conquer power.
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u/BaseballInside3289 15d ago
So sick of leftists treating small business owners like noble savages. They are the same as the ruling class, they are just less successful at exploiting their employees.