Petty-Bourgeois Malaise

I. Roots
(1) Class character
The fundamental contradiction of the petty and micro bourgeoisie is that they belong both to the lower and middle classes, the working classes, and to an exploiting class. They firmly oppose the proletariat, are addicted to exploitation and enslavement, and have a reactionary willingness to struggle and sacrifice for their meager assets and the established order.
As members of an exploited class, they feel an impulse to complain and criticize. But as a class dependent on the exploiting class and beneficiaries of the established order, they have an instinct to suppress revolution. Hence their contradictions, vacillation, and compromises; when revolution is at a low ebb, the latter tendency prevails.
The petty bourgeois understand the suffering of proletarians very well. That is precisely why they cling all the more fiercely to their meager assets, trying to prevent downward class mobility and a plunge into the abyss, and striving to secure a stable position and financial freedom.
(2) The petty-bourgeois view of class

1. The petty bourgeoisie rejects and despises every other class.
   They identify only with their own class, with elites, knowledge, and the strong. Even the socialism they imagine is led by the petty bourgeoisie, using education and love to reform and guide other classes: an elitist, idealist view of history. (See my earlier essay, “A History of Petty-Bourgeois Socialism.”) German history amply demonstrates their vacillation between social democracy and Nazism.
2. Yet the petty bourgeois are often dissatisfied with, reject, and despise other petty bourgeois as well.
   This is a projection of their disgust with themselves and, by extension, with people like themselves. Their peers fail to live up to their fantasies of elites, intensifying their nihilism.
3. The petty and micro bourgeoisie’s rejection and fear of the lower classes
   This is one issue within petty-bourgeois malaise. Behind it lie complex issues involving class boundaries, feelings of superiority and belief in a just world, existential crises, families of origin and extended families, regional discrimination, self-loathing, and the projection of internal contradictions.
   Their rejection and fear of the lower classes, and their disconnection from the proletariat, society, and history, intensify their insecurity, anxiety, and existential crises. This creates a vicious cycle whose ultimate expression is German Nazism.
   (3) The characteristics of small capital
   The typical characteristics of small capital are dependence, instability, and speculation.
4. Dependence
   Small capital originates in a share of profits from localized monopolies, bureaucratism, and inequalities in human development. Engels: British industry’s monopoly position enabled it to obtain “superprofits” from the world market, part of which the bourgeoisie used “to buy off the working class,” creating a “labor aristocracy.”
   Small capital does not possess the character of large capital as a means of production or its resilience to risk. Instead, it is unstable, beset by upheaval and the risk of bankruptcy. All of this produces dependence: dependence on empires, large organizations, the division of labor across industries, and the established order. Dependence brings conservatism, feudalism, bureaucracy, and a comprador mentality. On the surface, the petty bourgeois are liberal and oppose bureaucratism; in practice, they actively train themselves to master bureaucratic techniques. Across major companies and large tech firms, one can see a seamless transition from petty-bourgeois malaise to bureaucratic malaise.
   Dependence often develops into worship:
   Worship of money, money fetishism, worship of power, grand narratives, faith, and heroic elites; messiah complexes and savior complexes; abandoning independent thought and the exploration of freedom and responsibility. (Fromm, *Escape from Freedom*.) Since the late 20th century, this has also taken the form of central-bank worship. (See my earlier essay, “Central-Bank Bonapartism.”)
5. Instability
   Small capital is unstable, changeable, prone to bankruptcy, and subject to multiple threats.
   Instability reinforces dependence, along with an obsessive, fanatical attachment to the “iron rice bowl” and “securing a stable position.”
   Instability brings anxiety about security and existential challenges.
6. Speculation
   Instability breeds speculation: opportunism, speculation, hypocrisy, snobbery, mercenary attitudes, vacillation, and compromise. Arrogance in victory and dejection in defeat; buying into rising markets and selling into falling ones.
   Vacillation combined with speculation produces the petty-bourgeois tendencies within organizations that Lenin criticized in such well-known works as *“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder*. These are also common in CCP history, with frequent shifts from leftist radicalism to rightist capitulation, and from leftist adventurism to rightist defeatism.
   (4) Ways of working
   Marx discusses the alienation of labor: alienation from the products of labor, the labor process, human nature and humanity, and other people. Compared with proletarians, the middle and upper classes are more deeply alienated. The work of the petty and micro bourgeoisie is itself often an alienated component of working-class labor, such as bureaucracy, supervision, and falsification.
   Offices and administrative systems: meaningful, effective labor accounts for a relatively small share of the work; more time goes into dealing with and producing bureaucracy. Managing upward, looking busy while slacking off, elaborate paperwork, falsification, deceiving superiors and subordinates, claiming credit and shifting blame.
   Unlike proletarians, the petty bourgeois have no “fellow workers.” Their colleagues are often rivals in escalating competition, competitors among their peers, enemies, or people treated as tools. This further intensifies their existential psychological challenges.
   (5) Ways of living
   The syndrome of being surrounded by the petty and micro bourgeoisie: judging human nature and the world by “the people around you,” meaning other members of the petty and micro bourgeoisie. (See my earlier essay, “The Chinese People and Chinese Internet Users Are Different Groups and Classes.”) They are separated from the world of proletarians.
   Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: they remain at the middle and lower levels, the foundational levels and existential needs. (See my earlier essay, “A New Model of Psychological Growth and Needs.”)
   Psychological identification: identifying with elites and the upper classes, with consumerism and the world of symbols; acting out and imitating the lifestyles of the elites they imagine.
   Superficial freedom: very high demands for outward “freedom,” as compensation for their underlying lack of freedom.
   Luxury goods form part of the worship of capital, power, and destructive desire, and of the demarcation of class and identity. The pricing of luxury goods corresponds directly to average wages and small capital. (“On the Petty Bourgeoisie and Luxury Goods.”)

II. From the Perspective of Individual Psychology
In my earlier essay, “The Fundamental Contradictions of University Students,” I discussed how university students are still developing and retain their humanity. Although they have many contradictions, these remain in motion and have not tipped entirely to one side. The petty bourgeois, by contrast, are more severely pathological: their development has stalled, they are “finished,” and they exhibit right-wing alienation. Unlike university students, then, they directly manifest pathology internally—their humanity is severely suppressed—while their contradictions manifest directly in the external world.
(1) Existential symptoms
Unlike the existential crises faced by university students, the petty bourgeois directly exhibit existential symptoms: anxiety and insecurity, loneliness, meaninglessness, freedom and responsibility, and issues surrounding death.
A. Anxiety and insecurity: intense feelings in the everyday lives of the petty bourgeois
On one hand, there are real pressures and challenges; on the other, petty-bourgeois psychological issues and suboptimal health.
These lead to the projection of aggression, divisions between friend and foe, exclusion, scapegoating, populism, and so on.
B. Freedom and responsibility:
The crisis of escaping from freedom. Fromm’s *Escape from Freedom*. In the capitalist era, everyone has nominal freedom. Yet vicious competition between people, enormous social changes, insecure livelihoods, and individual atomization leave everyone feeling profoundly insecure, inferior, and isolated, plunging them into existential crisis. Under this insecurity, people have a strong tendency to escape from freedom. They escape into dependence on an overarching system, abandon their independent selves and thought, and descend into totalitarianism and enslavement.
As discussed in the first section, dependence is the starting point of worship.
One direction this takes is the authoritarian personality and masochistic/sadistic impulses. Masochistic impulses manifest as self-deprecation and dependence, a longing to submit to a more powerful whole—such as the state, a leader, or religion—and to eliminate loneliness and helplessness by surrendering the independent self. Sadistic impulses are the other side of the same coin: attempts to make others dependent on oneself, to possess absolute control and dominion over others, and to gain a sense of power by turning the world into an extension of oneself.
C. Taking all responsibility upon oneself: social Darwinism, elitism, claiming superiority as one’s own achievement, and the belief that effort can accomplish anything
Yet this is contradictory: arrogance in victory and dejection in defeat. There are serious issues surrounding “effort and personal responsibility.” As a result, self-blame, self-doubt, self-attack, and a harsh superego are also very pronounced among the petty bourgeois. This is also why they cannot sympathize with people at the bottom, and instead despise and reject them.
Moreover, deep down they know that many achievements come from luck rather than themselves, so even success leaves them feeling empty. This is especially common among people who inherit various forms of parental privilege.
D. Superiority
They use a sense of superiority to counter emptiness and a lack of felt existence, but its essence is to objectify others and treat them as NPCs. A sense of superiority necessarily excludes compassion and empathy.
Even many petty bourgeois who turn to the left or to Marxism do so for a sense of superiority: philosopher-kings, mentors, salvation, enlightenment. They position themselves above ordinary people as their enlighteners: “The people of Goose Town follow whoever wins.” When they find that “they cannot enlighten them,” they become “angry at their failure to stand up for themselves,” and belittle ordinary people even more. Beginning in superiority and ending in superiority, they ultimately remain in emptiness. Many people who move from left to right are of this kind.
E. Loneliness
Alienation, class rejection, self-loathing, and other such issues naturally lead to intense, irremediable loneliness.
As discussed in the earlier section on “Ways of Working,” unlike proletarians, the petty bourgeois have no “fellow workers.”
Most petty bourgeois have no real friends, and avoid facing this truth. (See my earlier essay, “Social Relationships: The Differences Between Comrades, Confidants, Close Friends, and Friends.”)
F. Meaninglessness
The alienation of work. Their work benefits neither themselves nor others, society, or history; instead, it causes harm.
Looking outward in life rather than searching inward naturally intensifies the issue of “meaninglessness.”
G. Issues surrounding death
Death anxiety, self-destruction, and destructive desire;
Hypochondria, and excessive compulsiveness about “health, organic products, and the environment.”
H. The issue of “one’s own ordinariness and limitations”
Marx + Zhuangzi + psychology are enough to clearly explain human suffering. But because of their elitism, the petty bourgeois do not believe deep down that they are “ordinary people.” (Their thinking: I’m no ordinary person. I transcend class. I don’t have an inferiority complex, either—I’m conceited, if anything.)
Marx, Zhuangzi, and psychology all begin from the premise that human beings are limited and ordinary. That is why, generally after the age of 30, once people have been battered by society, recognize that they are ordinary, and have developed a somewhat more mature and resilient inner core, they find it easier to study Zhuangzi and psychology.
Zhuangzi, Zen, and psychology all recognize how difficult it is to accept one’s ordinariness and limitations. It requires maturation in areas such as omnipotent narcissism, a stable inner core, innate wholeness, and the ability to perceive reality. The petty bourgeois struggle to face the existential emptiness that accompanies “ordinariness, limitations, and mediocrity.”
I. Alienation
Marx’s famous *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844* analyzes several forms of alienation: alienation from the products of labor, the labor process, human nature and humanity, and other people. It analyzes the roots of modern people’s existential predicament through materialist philosophy.
The petty bourgeoisie and other middle and upper classes are more deeply alienated than the proletariat. This is also one reason for the proletariat’s progressive character.
*Modernity and the Holocaust*: modern civilization was a necessary condition for the Holocaust; bureaucratization, obedience to authority, and the dehumanization of victims were elements that sustained it.

(2) From the Perspectives of Self Psychology and Object Relations Psychology
See my earlier essay, “Psychological Growth for Ordinary People: Psychological Boundaries, Selfobject Relations Theory, and Object Relations Theory.”

1. The three major functions of selfobjects:
   a. Mirroring: being seen and recognized;
   b. Idealization: connection with a calm, powerful, perfect force;
   c. Twinship/alter ego: a basic similarity to others, a similar way of being, a sense of connection.
   Experiences of selfobject relations—mirroring, idealization, and alter ego—are profound experiences of peaceful connection and harmonious coexistence with other people and the world. They are also experiences that human beings instinctively long for.
   Yet because of the contradictions discussed above, the petty bourgeois are disconnected from other people, working people, society, history, themselves, and even nature. They therefore suffer from severe existential symptoms, a weak core of the self, and hollow-heart syndrome.
2. The pathological development of selfobject needs:
   a. Pathological mirroring: craving external validation. Seeking cheap, pathological recognition and praise. In extreme cases, becoming a compulsive contrarian or seeking attention.
   b. Pathological idealization: idealizing others—dream men, dream women, elites—only to become easily disillusioned. Worshipping idols and grand narratives, seeking a sense of power and belonging in them.
   In extreme cases, right-wing politics, populism, and Nazism. (Fromm, *Escape from Freedom*.) This is also very pronounced among Marxism enthusiasts. See my earlier essay, “Two Attitudes Toward Studying Marxism: Julien’s and Napoleon’s Dreams of Heroism vs. the Awakened Ordinary Person.”
   c. Pathological twinship/alter ego: seeking an infant-twin relationship, unlimited indulgence, and disregard for others’ boundaries; in extreme cases, factional favoritism and attacks on dissenters.
3. The pathological self, the inner core, and issues in object relations
   Self-destruction, self-hatred, self-attack: Horney’s trinity of “narcissism–inferiority–self-hatred.”
   Internal bad objects—related to a harsh superego and self-attack—and the false self—self-objectification and the persona;
   Reenacting pathological patterns of object relations by attacking or tormenting others, or inviting torment.
4. Fromm summarized the fundamental issues of personality as life vs. death, narcissism vs. equality, and independence vs. symbiosis.
   Concepts such as “necrophilia”—a fascination with death, destruction, and absolute control—and “malignant narcissism” can be used to analyze more deeply the pathological roots of Nazi and Hitler-like personalities.
   Precisely because their issues surrounding life and death, freedom, and control are so severe, they are all the more fixated on forms of “negative entropy” such as money.

(3) The Anti-Healing Character of Petty-Bourgeois Malaise
Precisely because petty-bourgeois malaise works against healing, it is crucial to break through it with Marxism and restore the natural healing of the authentic self.

1. Anti-humanism
   Because of their petty-bourgeois malaise and rejection of workers, peasants, and the masses at the bottom, the petty bourgeois firmly believe that human nature is evil and deny its goodness. They stigmatize, reject, and fear the proletariat, workers, and peasants as “the mob.” This also makes them more receptive to elitism and dependence.
   Avoiding reality, distancing themselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, and drawing closer to falsehood, ugliness, and evil.
2. Searching inward VS seeking outward
   The direction of the inner life is to search inward, toward the tranquility of the authentic self. But the petty bourgeois turn toward seeking outward.
   Fromm identified four main unhealthy character orientations, all of which take the form of “seeking outward”: receptivity and dependence—love, recognition, and happiness come from outside; marketing—self-objectification, treating oneself as a tool and a commodity; exploitation—appropriation through cunning or force; and hoarding—greed, aversion, delusion, and possessiveness.
3. Projecting malice outward
   Toxic issues such as one’s own insecurity, aggression, and destructive desire are directed outward through projection, transference, and other means, while energy is extracted from outside.
   See my earlier essays, “Demons and Monsters in Everyday Life” and “A Brief Account of Projection and Its Types.”
4. The petty bourgeoisie and personality disorders
   The following refers to personality disorders at the level of medical pathology: narcissistic personality disorder, NPD—extreme individualism—and borderline personality disorder, BPD.
   The relationship between the causes of different personality disorders and acquired or social environmental factors still requires scientific substantiation.
   But the petty-bourgeois environment is clearly unfavorable to recovery from various personality disorders. It often worsens and reinforces them, and even selects for them through adverse selection, as in bureaucratic systems.
   (4) Petty-Bourgeois Karmic Obstructions
5. Karmic obstructions
   I have studied psychology, the history of philosophy, and history, and integrated Marx, Zhuangzi, and psychology. In history and everyday life, I have seen many people arrive at humanism, existentialism, social criticism, and even socialism, and I have even seen many people arrive instinctively at Zhuangzi + Marx. Yet they did not take the further step of fully embracing Marxism and historical materialism. My conclusion is that petty-bourgeois karmic obstructions are too difficult to break through.

III. Directions for Healing
Petty-bourgeois malaise is a modern malady. We are atomized individuals born into and living in the cyberpunk era, falling ill in loneliness. Petty-bourgeois malaise is like diabetes: a modern malady that occurs on a mass scale. No one forces us to seek treatment, but for the sake of our own physical and mental health, we must resolve this issue. Before I was 30, I did not know much about Marxism. It was only after 30 that I turned to Marxism to heal my own petty-bourgeois malaise.
People have two broad directions of development. The leftward direction is to use Marxism and Zhuangzi’s philosophy to discern, draw nourishment from, and form connections with simple truth, goodness, and beauty amid an alienated, impoverished external environment, nourishing the inner life and allowing the heart, with its innate wholeness, to develop fully. The rightward direction is the opposite: becoming contaminated by toxic energies.
The approach offered by Marx, Zhuangzi, and psychology is to heal psychologically, treat petty-bourgeois malaise, explore the five elements of understanding oneself—studies, career, social relationships, body, and mind—develop deep relationships and agency, explore new experiences of object relations and selfobject relations, stop seeking outward, and form connections with the world’s simple truth, goodness, beauty, and underlying patterns: working people, nature, and historical materialism. Experience the harmonious coexistence of the self, others, and the world; experience unconditional confidence, freedom, and ease; experience the unity of humanity and nature, innate wholeness, and the tranquility of the authentic self. Then quietly observe as the authentic self heals and dispels karmic obstructions, resting at ease with the times and accepting the course of things, in natural, unforced action.
IV. Micro-Bourgeois Malaise
The micro bourgeoisie has assets too small to qualify as “petty bourgeois” or “middle class”; their holdings are tiny, and they are relatively “poor.” Viewed from other classes, they are often mistakenly classified as proletarians. They also frequently claim the labels of the working class, proletarians, or ordinary people, yet are often further to the right than the petty bourgeoisie.
This part is somewhat politically sensitive; see my earlier essay, “A Brief Account of the Micro Bourgeoisie.”
V. Feudal Malaise
The root of feudalism is not agriculture, but personal dependence and enslavement. In the age of agriculture, swords, and feudalism, personal dependence was severe. Modern capitalism still involves severe dependence: dependence on industries, the international division of labor, large companies, and large systems; reliance on a “clean, impressive” résumé; dependence on successive layers of superiors.
This is why deep attachments to hierarchy and authoritarianism are common among the petty bourgeois, especially white-collar workers, in contrast to the classical liberal petty bourgeoisie. The essence of sexual harassment is power and violation. It is common in petty-bourgeois groups with strong personal dependence, such as universities. It is relatively less common among the workers whom the petty bourgeois look down on.
Clearly, these feudal maladies are manifestations of worsening petty-bourgeois malaise.