DEFINITION OF BOURGEOISIE

What is the Bourgeoisie ?

The bourgeoisie is defined as the middle class of society: the social class of skilled workers, entrepreneurs and professionals, and government officials. The bourgeoisie is the oppressive class, which Karl Marx argued would be destroyed in the workers’ revolution. Specifically, the bourgeoisie was the class that controlled the means of production, as well as almost all the wealth.

The means of production can be identified as natural resources, factories, factories, and anything else needed to create goods and/or services to sell in the marketplace. While the French term bourgeoisie is not often used today, a term intended to represent similar attributes Marx saw in the bourgeoisie has taken its place.

Whatever term one prefers, it can be shown that members of today’s society see the same problems that Marx saw. Karl Marx saw his theory as the next step that economic society would take after capitalism. Marx found problems with capitalism because wealth and power eventually flowed upward to a few instead of downward to the masses, the few being the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie would use the tools of capitalism to protect its wealth and power and to oppress the masses.

It is important to know that the bourgeoisie may not be synonymous with the rich. While the mastery of wealth is an important aspect of the bourgeoisie, it is not enough to call these individuals members of the bourgeoisie. Controlling the means of production was as important, if not more important, than simply possessing wealth. Bourgeois society is the social formation in which the relationship of commodities, the relationship of buying and selling, has spread to all corners of life.

The family and the state still exist, but the family is broken down and atomized successively, more and more as a commercial contract relationship, rather than one that genuinely expresses kinship and care from one generation to the next. The state retains its essential instruments of violence, but increasingly it remains under the dominion of commercial interests, reduced to acting as buyer and seller of services on behalf of the community.

The ruling class in bourgeois society is the bourgeoisie, which owns the means of production as private property, even though the productive forces have become fully socialized and operate on the scale of the world market. The producing class in bourgeois society is the proletariat, a class of people who have nothing to sell except their ability to work. Since all the means of production belong to the bourgeoisie, the workers have no choice but to offer their labor power for sale to the bourgeoisie.

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