my signature line by political scientist Barrington Moore. Sustainable democracies require a large middle class.

It is a term that applied to the 19th century -- and not even to the U.S. then. This is the 21st. It is a dead word.

oops replied one too low =) sry

Meaning people who make their living through commerce or management/representation of some sort and who do not have inherited wealth and get their income through salary.
Laborers, artists, and skilled labor salaried professionals like teachers or doctors are not bourgeoisie. Financiers, lawyers, business owners who have assistants or others doing most of the work are bourgeoisie. Petty Bourgeoisie are clerks, book-keepers, and the "department head/floor lead/supervisors, and they are called "petty" because while they aren't at the banker/lawyer/Capitan of industry level, that is the top of the hierarchical structure that they are working towards.

The term Bourgeoisie is not based on economic status; it is used to refer more to a social middle class where, while people need to be trained to a career as any skilled laborer does, they work during the day, do not have to be constantly re-training themselves or expanding knowledge, and can leave work to socialize. Their wages and jobs are not dependent on a skill or a talent and under their personal control, rather, they are dependent on competency, reliability, and sociability and needs of the employer.

I am Petty Bourgeoisie. I am not a business owner, nor a specialist in management or finance, but I support management and have some knowledge in business practices. As a former Field Service Engineer/jack of all trades, I was once a Prole, but am now pretty much a desk jockey.
My co-worker, a contract Engineering Specialist who is actually working on networks and network equipment, is not Bourgeoisie. He is skilled labor, in effect, a Prole, even though he likes to think of himself as more than just a skilled worker.
My boss is also Petty Bourgeoisie, even though she is in charge of me and several other groups of workers under contract.

My boss's boss's boss, who is responsible for an entire operation in the company and is pulling down middle six figures and hob-knobs with the business elite in the area, is Bourgeoisie.

That's how the hierarchy goes.

Haele

who is an employee of that practice is a worker. a highly educated worker, but still just a worker.

bourg isn't about education or job titles. it's about a relationship to capital.

bourgeoisie/ some people loosely use it to mean middle class/consumer class, or its values, but....they're dumb.

Doctor, lawyer, etc.

(v. owning hospital chains) are definitely small potatoes in the greater scheme of things. 'small, local' bourgies.

The upper-middle to ruling class.

Petit bourgeois grammar stasi checking in.

The bourgeoisie were wealthy middle class.

That meant they lived in town; they weren't nobility; they weren't peasants. They had invested in the 1700s or 1800s in the means of production, which they controlled; that was their "capital", which in Liberal tradition just meant "money." Here it's more "money invested in production. They often had excess income for their own kind of fine-arts culture, their own social norms; they were typically conservative and monarchist.

But the idea of capital = "money invested in the means of production and the control of those means" failed to capture the class envy of the time, because there were small proprietors who met those conditions and didn't arouse the same kind of response. Petty bourgeois.

Got it? Money, means and control of the means of production; cultural, political, social and artistic. That's the bourgeoisie.

Nowadays a lot of people simplify this, as they are wont to do, in various ways. They all fail in some crucial way.

I have capital in the sense of "money", but it's in a cash account. No investment in the means of production. I'm not a peasant, although my ancestors were. My parents were workers, what the peasants became. I was a translator--free lance, but my investment was dictionaries and a computer and I had no workers. Petty bourgeois, at best, but now I'm a teacher. Middle class. But bourgeois? Nopity.

Now my son, he's bourgeoisie. Yeah, he likes Minecraft and Clone Wars, but he has money in a college fund that's invested in stocks. Capital invested in the means of production. Whoa. But he'll sell all of that when he goes to school to become a worker.

Still think "bourgeois" has much of a meaning?

My worker mother is bourgeois. She has had investments in stocks since she was punching a time clock. One of her stocks was the company she was punching the timeclock for. She was a bourgeois worker, apparently. Now that she's retired her status is clear.

Well, not really. Control of the means of production mattered. You had to control the workers, not just have a piece of paper saying you owned a bit of a lathe or tanning vat. My son and mother aren't really part of the bourgeoisie, they're just investors. Argh!

However, when my mother owned part of the means of production where she punched a timeclock, she answered to the person who controlled the workers and had practical control over the means of production. Thing is, he was like her--he had some stock and drew a salary. His job, as a worker, was manager. So he was no more bourgeois than she was. In fact, from time to time she was sort of the de facto shop foreman.

The ideology that requires the term "bourgeoisie" carries on. The social and economic milieu that it applied to is gone. Any attempt to apply it has to distort the ideology. Sovkompart (sorry: Soviet Communist Party) thought redefined it one way. Most American views redefine it another way. They dispense with niceties and use it to mean people who are wealthy and somehow powerful--perhaps high-ranking bosses, perhaps wealthy investors, perhaps the actual owners. It's mostly a word that means "people we don't like and suspect take advantage of us." Sometimes it'll reach down to doctors in private practice, sometimes investors. Depends how deep the rage goes.

Similarly "middle class"--which meant a certain set of values, a range of income, and a social class between peasants/workers and nobility has altered. Some use it for values; some for income; some just leave it in between the "poor" and the "wealthy". It's a weasel term. I think most DUers use it strictly to mean income, reducing everything to what matters for them, money. The workers I grew up with thought of it as mostly cultural norms and values. Times change.

The cleanest application of "bourgeoisie" is to a group that don't form a coherent class, but it's a group that most DUers actually like. The small business owner or partnership that has perhaps 5-50 people. Start-ups, often. They're the innovators now (and were then, too, for the most part). Usually once they get much past 50 or so they start thinking of becoming corporations, but some get bigger and stay privately owned by "capitalists."

with a savings account or a pension isn't bourg.

"The ideology that requires the term "bourgeoisie" carries on. The social and economic milieu that it applied to is gone."

Wrong. The bourgeoisie control every aspect of our lives. Private interests control the commanding heights of the economy & the FIRE sector, and are attempting with great success to gain ownership of all aspects of resources built with social capital.

The wealth of the 1% is more greatly contracted to a few than in any other point in history. Start-ups here in Silicon Valley now all "start" with a business plan that plans on getting bought up by one of the big companies. Monopolize or die is the name of the game.

One of the last polls about income showed DU to be a very proletarian group. NOT bourgeois at all. And very few own the means of production.

that mentioned the membership ran white and affluent. Most are in their fifties or sixties. Most are highly educated, that means more income.

Because some authors will use the term to describe lower upper class, and some will say flat out anyone who is not a farmer or peasant. Some say everyone in America is Bourgeoisie because we make more than a dollar a day. I myself have a college degree (which has been a mark of bourgeoisie) but live opff of one of the lower SSI amounts.

In short, I ask because that term means a lot, but it almost seems to be the sociological equivalent of "smurf", as in, you can scream it loud and use it to imply anything "Smurfin bourgeoisie!"

The closer to control of the means of production the grander the bourgeoisie.

A hipster at Starbucks may be petite bourgeoisie but financiers like Bloomberg are the real deal.

I haven't read Marx in 20 years. I told the OP it is the middle class, and I think that is still fine for common usage, but yeah, you have the real Marxist economic definition. Funny I was actually trying to remember the Marxist term for the upper class, remembering the bourgeoisie as middle class. I forgot the whole petite vs. grande. Again, took that class 20 years ago.

by different authors. Literally it's people not enfeoffed in their profession because they live in a town.

The bourgeoisie were distinguished from the aristocracy. Rather than being born into a title or land, they made their money through manufacturing and commerce. The petty bourgeoisie were small shop keepers without much wealth but who had a consciousness that differed from workers, or the proletariat, according to Marx.

Marx determined a worker by his relationship to the means of production--whether or not someone owned what he produced. Workers in the age of industrialization did not own the product of their labor. They sold their labor to industrialists, or the bourgeoisie.

The term doesn't have the same meaning now as it did in the 19th century. In the US, there is no distinction between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and the old European nobility isn't what they once were.

and life experience.

To college freshman, many of which are in fact sons and daughters of the bourgeoise class, nearly everyone but they are bourg.

In actuality, the bourgeoise are generally those who own the means of production and have control over the meager capital that is "gifted" or cast off to the proletariat. As mentioned above, there are different classes of bourgeoise. The lap dogs of the true bourgeoise are considered "petite" bourgeoise.

In this sense, bourgeoise is not merely a socio-economic status but also a mentality. In aspiring to be part of the upper echelons of society, even if you are not yourself truly well off, one becomes an accessory to the ruling class.

Since they're the capitalist class and their retirement fund holds capital.

But since that would include a lot of union folks it's not very politically correct to point this out.

So basically it's been generalized to mean anyone who isn't a business owner.

Of course there are a lot of small businesses out there.

So it's evolved to mean anyone who doesn't own a big business.

Of course some small businesses are owned by rich people who own lots of property or have other methods of income.

So it's evolved to mean anyone who has money and liquid assets except for those who are workers who have investments and property.

Basically it's become so convoluted that people use it to mean anything that they want it to mean given the context and given their desire to bash a given group.

Often by people who represent the original definition of bourgeoisie to begin with. The owner class.

You'll note that other concepts had to be invented to make sure to keep the poor majority under the umbrella of Marxism, such as the proletariat (wage earners), lumpenproletariat (wage earners that uphold the system, such as finance, real estate workers, etc) and petit bourgeoisie (small business owners).

It's important to remember that, when Marx was writing, he was describing an emerging capitalist and industrial society. Such a society was essentially still feudal in organization, with owners and workers supplanting nobles and serfs in a still-retained structure of exploiter and exploited. The bourgeoisie in Marx was the owner class (those who owned but did not have many or any workers to exploit -- shopkeepers, basically -- were the petite-bourgeoisie).

Marx, however, never envisioned a post-industrial society where, to be sure, there are owners and workers, but there are also legions of managers and professionals who do not fit neatly into either description. He never envisioned a society with a large middle class -- a society in which an enormous number of people who were not even close to being wealthy (by their own societies standards) would nevertheless live in relative comfort -- owning homes and cars, having a reasonable amount of leisure time, and seeing their children have better lives than they had, not through revolution but through fluid class mobility. So its not surprising, I suppose, that "bourgeois" has not retained its original meaning.

As early as the 1920s, if not earlier, artists and intellectuals begin using "bourgeois" to describe not the owner class per se, but the (to their mind) pedestrian thought and artistic taste of that class. This use of bourgeois as a descriptor of taste rather than economic circumstance gets taken up, in turn, in the 1960s -- the high watermark of the American middle class -- when boomers, in rebellion against their parents, appropriate (and, to my mind, pervert) "bourgeois" and twist it to mean any embrace or defense of the status quo. Ironically, the upper class -- a/k/a the owner class, a/k/a the folks Marx originally labeled the bourgeoisie -- also start to use "bourgeois" as an insult aimed at the middle class, disparaging them for their lack of taste, class, and breeding.

So, since English is a living language, that's what "bourgeois" means now, but it's a far cry from Marx's use of the term.