La Bourgeoisie (document en anglais)

Origins and rise

In the 11th century, the bourgeoisie emerged as a historical and political phenomenon, when the bourgs of Central and Western Europe developed into cities dedicated to commerce. The organised economic concentration that made possible such urban expansion derived from the protective self-organisation into guilds, which became necessary when individual businessmen (craftsmen, artisans, merchants, et alii) conflicted with their rent-seeking feudal landlords who demanded greater-than-agreed rents. In the event, by the end of the Middle Ages (ca. AD 1500), under régimes of the early national monarchies of Western Europe, the bourgeoisie acted in self-interest, and politically supported the king or the queen against the legal and financial disorder caused by the greed of the feudal lords. In the late-16th and early 17-th centuries, the bourgeoisies of England and the Netherlands had become the financial — and thus political — forces that deposed the feudal order; economic power had vanquished military power in the realm of politics.[8]

From progress to reaction

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the bourgeoisie were the politically progressive social class who supported the principles of constitutional government and of natural right, against the Law of Privilege and the claims of rule by divine right that the nobles and prelates had autonomously exercised during the feudal order. The motivations for the English Civil War (1642–51), the American War of Independence (1775–83), and French Revolution (1789–99) partly derived from the desire of the bourgeoisie to rid themselves of the feudal trammels and royal encroachments upon their personal liberty, commercial rights, and the ownership of property. In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie propounded liberalism, and gained political rights, religious rights, and civil liberties for themselves and the lower social classes; thus was the bourgeoisie then a progressive philosophic and political force in modern Western societies.

By the middle of the 19th century, subsequent to the Industrial Revolution (1750–1850), the great expansion of the bourgeoisie social class caused its self-stratification — by business activity and by economic function — into the haute bourgeoisie (bankers and industrialists) and the petite bourgeoisie (tradesmen and white-collar workers). Moreover, by the end of the 19th century, the capitalists (the original bourgeoisie) had ascended to the upper class, whilst the developments of technology and technical occupations allowed the ascension of working-class men and women to the lower strata of the bourgeoisie; yet the social progress was incidental.

In the event, despite its initial philosophic progressivism — from feudalism to liberalism to capitalism — the bourgeoisie social class (haute and petite) became reactionary in their refusal to allow the ascendance (economic, social, political) of people from the proletariat (peasants and urban workers) in order to remain predominant.[8]

Denotations [edit]

The 19th-century German intellectual K.H. Marx (1818–83) identified and described the bourgeoisie as an economic class of great societal influence.

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The Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie [edit]

In the Middle Ages (AD 500–1500), the bourgeois usually was a self-employed businessman — proprietor, merchant, banker, entrepreneur, et alii — whose economic role in society was being the financial intermediary to the feudal landlord and the peasant who worked the fief, the land of the lord. Yet, by the 18th century, the time of the Industrial revolution (1750–1850) and of industrial capitalism, the bourgeoisie had become the economic ruling class who owned the means of production (capital and land), and who controlled the means of coercion (armed forces and legal system, police forces and prison system). In such a society, the bourgeoisie’s ownership of the means of production enabled their employment and exploitation of the wage-earning working class (urban and rural), people whose sole economic means is labour; and the bourgeois control of the means of coercion suppressed the socio-political challenges of the lower classes, and so preserved the economic status quo; workers remained workers, and employers remained employers.[11]

In the 19th century, the German economist Karl Marx distinguished two types of bourgeois capitalist: (i) the functional capitalist, the business administrator of the means of production; and (ii) the rentier capitalist whose livelihood derives either from the rent of property or from the interest-income produced by finance capital, or both.[12] In the course of economic relations, the working class and the bourgeoisie continually engage in class struggle, wherein the capitalists exploit the workers, whilst the workers resist their economic exploitation, which occurs because the worker owns no means of production, and, to earn a living, he or she seeks employment from the bourgeois capitalist; the worker produces goods and services that are property of the employer, who sells them for a price. The money generated by the sale of the goods and services yields three sums (i) the wages of the worker, (ii) the costs of production, and (iii) profit (surplus value). Thereby, the capitalist profits (makes extra money) by

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