Against the Hammer and Sickle

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels give 5 examples of proletarians: doctors, lawyers, poets, priests, and scientists - in that order.  Of course, he doesn't claim that these are the only kinds of proletarians - they're just the only ones that he names.  

It's interesting that, today, people tend to think that, in Marx's class analysis, such people are often thought of as "petit-bourgeois".  This is quite wrong.  (Perhaps a doctor who owns his own practice would be petit-bourgeois, but a doctor, who, let's say, works in a hospital - even if she is head of surgery - would be proletarian.)

"In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a
new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between
proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary
part of bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however,
are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of
competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the
moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an
independent section of modern society...."  

The petite bourgeoisie, or petty bourgeois, as it is sometimes translated, are what we would now call small business owners - people who have a privately held, sole proprietorship, with a small number of employees.  The owner of your corner store is petit-bourgeois - unless, as is likely, it is part of a chain.  (Franchisees are a more complicated story.)  Many plumbers, electricians, and other kinds of contractors are petit-bourgeois.

That's right: your college professor is proletarian, but Joe the Plumber is petit-bourgeois. 

Also in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write about what they call "petit-bourgeois socialism."  This passage is often misunderstood, so it's important to go over it carefully.  

First of all, there's a difference between class composition and class character.  For instance, it's quite possible to have a political movement that consists mostly of proletarians, yet which is petit-bourgeois in character, and vice versa.

Also, Marx and Engels were not saying that the petite bourgeoisie were evil, and that they hated them, nor were they saying that they were their enemies, nor that they were delusional or stupid (though this is closer to the truth).  Yes, perhaps Marx made fun of them a bit - not uncommon in his writings.  (Once one gets used to his literary style, Marx is actually very funny.)  But actually, Marx and Engels describe the petit-bourgeois socialists quite respectfully, paying tribute to their analytical prowess:

"This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions
in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical
apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous
effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital
and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the
inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the
proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the
distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between
nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of
the old nationalities." 

"Acuteness," "incontrovertibly," "laid bare."  These are words of great praise, and Marx was not one given to making idle compliments. 

The point is, for Marx and Engels, the petit-bourgeois socialists are not the bad guys.  Marx and Engels do not frame their argument in terms of good guys and bad guys at all.  The critique of the petit-bourgeois socialists that Marx and Engels make in the Manifesto is much more subtle and nuanced than that.  To be specific, Marx and Engels thought that the petit-bourgeois socialists were making a tactical mistake, an error of strategy - namely, a political alliance that would not prove fruitful:

"In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half
of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the
proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the
bourgeois régime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and
from the standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the
cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. [...]

In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to
restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them
the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the
modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of
the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be,
exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and
Utopian.

Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations
in agriculture."

Sometimes people refer to the petite bourgeoisie as "middle class."  In a way, that's correct, but notice that Marx and Engels speak of "intermediate classes" - plural - and the other intermediate class, besides the petite bourgeoisie, is the peasants.   Sometimes people misunderstand Marxian class analysis, and think that peasants are below the proletariat.  No - crucially, for Marx, the peasantry was an intermediate class, above the proletariat, but below the bourgeoisie.  The proletariat, including the rural proletariat, is distinguished from the peasantry in that they had been dispossessed - they had "nothing to lose but their chains", whereas the peasantry owned a little land.  

According to Marx, the tactical mistake of petit-bourgeois socialism was to ally itself with the peasantry.  That is what petit-bourgeois socialism is: the foolish alliance with the peasantry, "in countries like France, where peasants constitute more than half the population." The result is a movement that is both utopian and reactionary, resulting in patriarchal politics.  

It's not hard to see that Marx and Engels were substantially correct about this.  All over the world, and throughout the history of the last two hundred years, one can witness a political alliance between small proprietors - plumbers, electricians, contractors, and so on - and the peasantry, who, while perhaps claiming to represent the "working class," or "the people," end up with a right wing, reactionary, romantic, authoritarian, patriarchal, nationalist ideology - a form of reactionary populism that has, through its energy, propped up countless dictators, autocrats, and ultimately, the interests of the ruling class.

Indeed, Marx's warning proved prophetic just a few years later, during the rise of one of these autocrats - namely, Charles-Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of the famous Napoleon Bonaparte.  In 1844, Charles-Louis, in prison, wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Extinction of Pauperism," which promised several (quasi-)socialist reforms.  This pamphlet was passed around France and became enormously popular.  During the 1848 revolution, he presented himself as a candidate for President, defeated socialist candidates such as Raspail and Ledru-Rollin, and won in a landslide.  Then, in 1851, he performed an auto-coup, establishing himself as Emperor rather than mere president, and renamed himself Napoleon III.  Undoubtedly, many passages in the Communist Manifesto and other writings of that period, Marx was referring, indirectly, to this man.  But in "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Marx finally stated it directly:

"Bonaparte represented a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasants."  

Just as Marx predicted, the tendency of petit-bourgeois socialism was to foolishly ally itself with the small-holding peasantry, resulting in a reactionary utopianism, an authoritarian, patriarchal politics that ultimately served the (haute) bourgeoisie.  Marx goes on:

"Just as the Bourbons were the dynasty of the big landed property and the Orleans the dynasty of money, so the Bonapartes are the dynasty of the peasants, that is, the French masses. [...]

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself. [emphasis mine]

Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: “Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.” After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people."

And furthermore:

"Finally, the culminating “idée napoléonienne” is the ascendancy of the army. The army was the “point d’ honneur” of the small-holding peasants, it was they themselves transformed into heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer world, glorifying their recently won nationhood, plundering and revolutionizing the world. The uniform was their own state costume; war was their poetry; the small holding, enlarged and rounded off in imagination, was their fatherland, and patriotism the ideal form of the sense of property."

Very similar dynamics were at play in the Russian Revolution.  Russia, even more so than France, was a country where, as Marx put it, "Peasants constitute more than half of the population."  And again, a foolish form of socialism chose to ally itself with these small-holding peasants - an alliance that came to be symbolized by the hammer and sickle.  Once again, just as Marx predicted, this resulted in a movement that was at once utopian and reactionary, reviving ancient patriarchal relations.  Again, the result was both the ascendancy of the army, with war as its poetry, glorifying recently won nationhood, plundering and revolutionizing the world.  Indeed, the proletariat was transformed into an "army of labor".  And inevitably, the political influence of the small-holding peasantry found its expression in an executive power that subordinated society to itself - this time named Lenin, and later, Stalin.  As with Bonaparte, these leaders were the representative of a kind of socialism that allied itself with the small-holding peasantry and represented its interests (against the large-holding peasantry, the so-called "kulaks".)  And again, a similarly misguided political alliance would arise in Mongolia, in China, in Vietnam, in Cambodia, and so on.  Everywhere, the hammer and sickle is the symbol of Bonapartism.