In Praise of the Petty Bourgeoisie!

James C. Scott on an Oft-Maligned Class

Dear Nevermorons,

I started Nevermore during the dark days of COVID. Initially, it was aimed at my friends and comrades, most of whom fit somewhere in the Venn diagram between anarchists and libertarian leftists.

At one point, I was debating a veteran anarchist organizer from Kingston and brought up the forced closure of many small businesses, arguing that the state had effectively destroyed the livelihoods of countless families. My interlocutor was unmoved by my argument, making it clear that he didn’t care about small business owners, who, after all, were “capitalists”.

I was taken aback. My comrade didn’t seem to differentiate between Jeff Bezos and, say, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in small town Ontario. Both were “capitalists”, and therefore the enemy of the people.

I could sense right away that there was something profoundly stupid about the conflation of these two classes of capitalists, but had no snappy retort at the time.

Later, I told this story to my brother, who owns a small coffee importing business. He responded in exasperation.

“It’s just so cold-hearted. People don’t understand. Imagine looking into someone’s eyes and telling them that what they’ve worked for their whole lives, everything they’ve built up, the way they feed their families… that all of that is null and void because we changed the rules all of a sudden. Like, is that fair? Of course not! It’s a huge injustice but no one cares, because they think that small business owners are rich. But I’m not fucking rich! I’m not making half of what all those people in those government buildings are making, and the grind never stops. Do you have any idea how hard it is to turn a profit running a restaurant or cafe? It’s not fucking easy. You know how of them go under within a few years? Most of them! What exactly am I doing that’s so wrong that I get thrown in with arms manufacturers and payday loan places?”

Neither of us could come up with a good reason why most Leftists had zero sympathy for small business owners forced to close their doors during COVID. Did people not see that Wal-Mart and Amazon were raking it in as a result? Did they prefer that multinational corporations were profiting? What the hell was wrong with the Canadian left? Why do they see small business owners as their enemies? The only answer we could come up with was the magic word “capitalist”, which apparently applied equally to Bill Gates and my brother.

“I’m telling you,” my brother told me, “the Left, or liberals or whatever… they do not give a fuck about small business owners. They don’t even pretend to care… no lip-service, nothing. The conservatives aren’t much better, but at least they have to pretend to care.”

We then discussed whether or not he qualified as a capitalist.

“Well, if we were to use Marxist criteria,” I said, “I guess you would need to own your own means of production.”

“Well, I guess that would be my coffee roasting machine.”

“Okay, so I guess you own your own means of production, but you don’t own the building where you actually do the roasting.”

“True. I could get evicted at any moment!”

“So do you really own the “means of production” then?”

“Hmm… I guess not.”

After a bit of back and forth, we decided that if he didn’t own his roastery, and if he didn’t own his own cafe, he didn’t own the “means of production” and therefore wasn’t a capitalist.

Given that he shares the same antipathy to the word “capitalism” that I do, he was somewhat pleased, although we both realized the discussion was fairly absurd. After all, in 5 or 10 years he probably will own his own roastery and/or cafe. If that were to occur, would he magically transform into a capitalist, thereby becoming the mortal enemy of the working class? If we accept this logic, we would be basing our condemnation of “capitalism” on the attainment of a certain degree of success, not any objective criteria pertaining to class relations, such as treatment of workers. After all, what would change for his baristas if he owned the building his cafe is in? Probably nothing.

I tell this story because I think that it points in the direction of a needed update to anarchist class analysis. What is the difference between a small business owner and a capitalist?

Sometime later, I encountered the answer in a wonderful book called Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott, the world’s most distinguished living anarchist scholar.

The book is delightful, and I highly recommend it. It’s a quick read, and there’s a good audiobook version available on Audible. It takes the form of a series of brilliant insights introduced conversationally, full of colourful anecdotes from the author’s own life experience. Basically, it is a book of anarchist sermons. Six banging anarchist sermons. More, please!

One of them is in praise of the petty bourgeoisie, which Scott argues has been unfairly-maligned by Leftists since the time of Marx.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, the “petty bourgeoisie” refers to people who are self-employed. The prime archetype of this class would be a shopkeeper, though it would include any number of occupations, ranging from tradespeople to farmers to artists. It refers to everyone who is neither a rich capitalist nor a wage slave. It includes many people who have managed to retain a degree of autonomy over their livelihood. For that reason, many proletarians aspire to become petty bourgeois themselves. A huge number of working class Americans, for instance, dream of opening up a shop or a restaurant.

This is a problem for Marxists, who want people to identify as proletarians. And what is a proletarian? An industrial wage slave. Marxist class analysis is ridiculously outdated. Many people these days would love to become proletarians, but most factory jobs have been outsourced overseas.

Many former proletarians now belong to the precariat, eking out a living in the gig economy. Meanwhile, many Leftists now belong to class Marx never described, which David Graeber called “the professional-managerial class”.

So, if Marxist class analysis is so outmoded, why are we still talking about it? Well, because it’s still the predominant body of theory that really talks about class.

Since the 1960s, academia has been dominated by postmodernists, who have tended to de-emphasize class, preferring to focus on biological differences such as race and gender, or on ideological differences such as religion or party affiliation. Therefore, when people talk about class, they tend to do so using modified Marxist verbiage.

Personally, I feel strongly that we should be organizing on the basis of class, because economic self-interest as a basis for unity is the logical point of departure for impoverished workers who wish to organize in broad-based coalitions. That said, Marxist class analysis is overly reductive at the best of times, dividing people into two classes - exploiters and exploited. But things just aren’t that simple. After all, cops and prison guards are working class, but they do the dirty work for the ruling class. So are they exploited or exploiters? If you ask me, they’re both.

If I were to make a humble suggestion, I would propose that we begin developing our own class analysis, incorporating David Graeber’s critique of bureaucracy and the professional-managerial class, as well as James C. Scott’s differentiation between parasitic capitalists and the productive petty bourgeoisie. Whereas it is the duty of anarchists to oppose the former, we should seek to ally ourselves with the latter when possible.

Even if we lived in a fully anarchist society where money didn’t exist, restaurants would still exist. Artisans and workshops would still exist. Cobblers would make shoes and tailors would make clothes. The ambitions of workers who wish to control the terms of their labour should not be disparaged or thwarted, they should be encouraged. Anarchists should not be opposed to entrepreneurship.

Across almost every culture, entrepreneurs are admired. There’s a good reason for this - they are seen as the people who have managed to create a livelihood for themselves. In traditional societies, the whole community benefits from the gumption of ambitious, industrious, and hardworking people. To associate such traits with greed and selfishness is disingenuous and counter-productive. It kind of makes Leftists look like losers, to be honest.

Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski explains the psychology of leftists, oversocialization & surrogate activities

Indeed, anarchists who are coming from Leftist backgrounds would do well to take note of the theory of counter-economics promoted by Agorists such as Derrick Broze, Etienne de la Boetie2, and Samuel Konkin.

If you haven’t heard of Agorism, I refer you to Derrick Broze’s excellent 2016 essay Agorism is Not Anarcho-Capitalism. If you’d like to go a little deeper, I suggest his book How to Opt Out of the Technocratic State, now the classic introductory text to the counter-economic theory of Samuel Konkin.

Personally, I think that a rapprochement between anarchists of different stripes is likely to emerge in coming years, and I think that counter-economics will be an important part of a new synthesis. After all, anarchist opposition to taxation is something that holds appeal to small business owners, who are continually raped up the asshole by the taxman.

There is nothing inherently revolutionary about the petty bourgeoisie. Indeed, they may tend to be more conservative than most, for the simple reason that they have more to lose from political turmoil. People typically become conservatives because they have something they want to conserve, usually wealth, property, and a family. But when governments becomes tyrannical and/or ineffective, all bets are off.

One thing I can say with confidence is this: a movement which is supported by a coalition of small business owners is much likelier to succeed than one supported only by the proletariat, the precariat, the professional-managerial class, and the unemployed.

So here’s to the Petty Bourgeoisie! We need you guys on our side.

Can you do me a favour, though?

Can you come up with a better name? “Petty bourgeois” just ain’t doing it for me. No one likes petty people.

Sincerely,

Crow Qu’appelle

TWO CHEERS FOR THE PETTY BOURGEOIS

INTRODUCING A MALIGNED CLASS

No increase in material wealth will compensate . . . for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom.

-R.H. Tawney

It is time someone put in a good word for the petite bourgeoisie. Unlike the working class and capitalists, who have never lacked for spokespersons, the petite bourgeoisie rarely, if ever, speaks for itself. While capitalists gather in industrial associations and at the Davos World Economic Forum, and the working class congregates at trade union congresses, the one and only time, as near as I can tell, the petite bourgeoisie gathered in its own name was at the 1901 First International Congress of the Petite Bourgeoisie in Brussels. There was no Second Congress.

THE PETTY BOURGEOISIE

Why take up the cudgels for a class that remains relatively anonymous and is surely not, in the Marxist parlance, a class fur sich? There are several reasons. First and most important, I believe that the petite bourgeoisie and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies. Autonomy and freedom are, along with mutuality, at the center of an anarchist sensibility. Second, I am convinced that the petite bourgeoisie performs vital social and economic services under any political system. Finally, given any reasonably generous definition of its class boundaries, the petite bourgeoisie represents the largest class in the world. If we include not only the iconic shopkeepers but also smallholding peasants, artisans, peddlers, small independent professionals, and small traders whose only property might be a pushcart or a rowboat and a few tools, the class balloons. If we include the periphery of the class, say, tenant farmers, ploughmen with a draft animal, rag pickers, and itinerant market women, where autonomy is more severely constrained and the property small indeed, the class grows even larger. What they all have in common, however, and what distinguishes them from both the clerk and the factory worker is that they are largely in control of their working day and work with little or no supervision. One may legitimately view this as a very dubious autonomy when it means, as a practical matter, working eighteen hours a day for a remuneration that may only provide a bare subsistence. And yet it is clear, as we shall see, that the desire for autonomy, for control over the working day and the sense of freedom and self-respect such control provides, is a vastly underestimated social aspiration for much of the world's population.

The Etiology of Contempt

Before we start heaping praise on the petite bourgeoisie, we might well pause to consider why it has, as a class, such a bad press. The Marxist contempt for the petite bourgeoisie is, in part, structural. Capitalist industry created the proletariat, and therefore it is only the proletariat whose emancipation entails the transcending of capitalism as a system. Curiously, but logically, Marxists have a grudging admiration for capitalists who transcended feudalism and unleashed the enormous productive forces of modern industry. They set the stage, as it were, for the proletarian revolution and the triumph of communism amid material plenty. The petite bourgeoisie, by contrast, are neither fish nor fowl; they are mostly poor, but they are poor capitalists. They may, from time to time, ally with the Left, but they are fair-weather friends; their allegiance is fundamentally unreliable as they have a foot in both camps and desire themselves to become large capitalists.

The direct translation of the French "petite" into English as "petty" rather than, say, "small" does further damage. Now it seems not just to mean small but also contemptibly trivial, as in "pettifoggery," "petty cash," and just plain "petty." When compounded into "petty-bourgeoisie," it joins the contempt of Marxists, the intelligentsia, and the aristocracy for the philistine tastes and crass concern for money and property of the nouveau riche. After the Bolshevik Revolution, a petty bourgeoisie label could mean prison, exile, or death. The contempt for the petty bourgeoisie was joined to the germ theory of disease in terms foreshadowing Nazi anti-Semitism. Bukharin, stigmatizing the striking workers and sailors at Kronstadt, noted that "the petty bourgeois infection had spread from the peasantry to a segment of the working class." Those small peasants who resisted collectivization were castigated in similar terms: "the real danger of bourgeois miasma and petty bourgeois bacilli still remains—disinfection is necessary." In this last case, the bacilli in question were almost entirely smallholding farmers with a modest surplus who might, at harvest, hire a few laborers. Of course, the vast majority of the petty bourgeoisie are relatively poor, hardworking, and own barely enough property to make ends meet; the exploitation they practice is largely confined to the patriarchal family—what one writer has termed "auto-exploitation."

The distaste for the petty bourgeoisie also has, I believe, a structural source: one that is shared by the erstwhile socialist bloc and large capitalist democracies. The fact is, almost all forms of small property have the means to elude the state's control: small property is hard to monitor, tax, or police; it resists regulation and enforcement by the very complexity, variety, and mobility of its activities.

The crisis of 1929 that led to Stalin's headlong campaign to collectivize was precisely the failure to appropriate sufficient grain from the smallholding peasantry. As a general rule, states of virtually all descriptions have always favored units of production from which it is easier to appropriate grain and taxes. For this reason, the state has nearly always been the implacable enemy of mobile peoples—Gypsies, pastoralists, itinerant traders, shifting cultivators, migrating laborers—as their activities are opaque and mobile, flying below the state's radar.

For much the same reason, states have preferred agribusiness, collective farms, plantations, and state marketing boards over smallholder agriculture and petty trade. They have preferred large corporations, banks, and business conglomerates to smaller-scale trade and industry. The former are often less efficient than the latter, but the fiscal authorities can more easily monitor, regulate, and tax them. The more pervasive the state's fiscal grasp, the more likely that a "gray" or "black" informal and unreported economy will arise to evade it. And it goes without saying that the sheer size and deep pockets of the largest institutions guarantee them a privileged seat in the councils of power.

Petty Bourgeois Dreams: The Lure of Property

To make a very long story very short, Homo sapiens has been around for something like 200,000 years. States were only "invented" roughly five thousand years ago, and until about a thousand years ago most of humankind lived outside anything that could be called a state. Most of those who did live within those states were small property owners (peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, traders). And, when certain rights of representa­tion developed from the seventeenth century on, they were accorded on the basis of status and property.

The large bureau­cratic organizations that characterize the modern era may be originally modeled on the monastery and the barracks, but they are essentially a product of the last two and a half centu­ries.

This is another way of saying that there is a long history of life outside the state and that life inside the state until the eighteenth century sharply distinguished between a formally unfree population (slaves, serfs, and dependents), on the one hand, and a large smallholder population on the other that disposed, in theory and often in practice, of certain rights to found families: to hold and inherit land, to form trade asso­ciations, to choose local village leaders, and to petition rulers. Relative autonomy and independence for subordinate classes thus came in two forms: a life on the margins, outside the state's reach, or a life inside the state with the minimal rights associated with small property.

I suspect that the tremendous desire one can find in many societies for a piece of land, one's own house, one's own shop owes a great deal not only to the real margin of independent action, autonomy, and security it confers but also to the dig­nity, standing, and honor associated with small property in the eyes of the state and of one's neighbors. For Thomas Jeffer­son, independent, smallholding cultivation promoted social virtues and was the bedrock of a democratic citizenry:

“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens, they are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most vir­tuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty of interest by the most lasting bonds.”

In the course of living in and reading about peasant soci­eties, I found it impossible to ignore the incredible tenacity with which many marginal smallholders clung to the small­est patch of land. When pure economic logic suggested they would be far better off seeking a profitable tenancy or even moving to town, they held on by their fingernails as long as they possibly could. Those who had no land of their own to farm sought long-lease tenancies, preferably from relatives, that represented the next best thing, in terms of status, to owning one's own fields. Those who had neither their own land nor a viable tenancy and who were reduced to working for others hung on to their house lot in the village to the bitter end. In terms of sheer income, a good many tenant farmers were better off than smallholders, and a good many laborers were better off than small tenants.

For the peasantry, however, the difference in autonomy, independence, and hence social standing was decisive. The smallholder, unlike the tenant, de­ pended on no one for land to farm and the tenant, and unlike the laborer, had at least land for the season and control over his or her working day, while the laborer was cast into what was viewed as a demeaning dependence on the good will of neighbors and relatives. The final humiliation was to lose that last physical symbol of independence, the house lot.

Each of the descending rungs of the village class system rep­ resented a loss of economic security and independent status. The substance of the petty bourgeois dream, however, was not some abstract calculation of income security but rather the deep desire for full cultural citizenship in their small commu­nity. What property meant was the ability to celebrate mar­riages, funerals, and, in a small Malay village, the feast at the end of Ramadan, in a way that gave social expression to their worth and standing. The secure "middle peasants" with the steady wherewithal to celebrate these rituals were not only the most influential villagers but also the models to emulate and aspire to. Falling far short of this standard was to become a second-class cultural citizen.

Thwarted petty bourgeois dreams are the standard tinder of revolutionary ferment. "Land to the tiller," in one form or an­ other, has been the effective rallying cry of most agrarian revo­lutions. The rural revolution in Russia in 1917 was accelerated by the rush of Russian conscripts, defeated on the Austrian front, to return home and participate in the land seizures tak­ing place.

For many of the so-called "bare sticks" (unattached, "surplus"), landless laborers in pre-revolutionary China, the People's Revolutionary Army represented the precious chance to have land of their own, found a (patriarchal) family, and achieve a passionately desired cultural citizenship that, among other things, meant an honorable burial. The key (bait?) to the enthusiastic participation of the peasantry in virtually all twentieth-century revolutions has been the prospect of land ownership and the standing and independence that came with it. When land reform was succeeded by collectivization, it was experienced and resisted by most ofthe peasantry as a betrayal of their aspirations.

Petty bourgeois dreams infuse the imagination of the in­dustrial proletariat as well. The reddest of the red proletar­ians, the militant coal miners and steelworkers of the Ruhr in 1919, on whom Lenin reposed his revolutionary hopes, are a striking case in point. When asked what they wished for, their desires were remarkably modest. They wanted higher wages, a shorter day, and longer rests, as one might expect. But beyond what Marxists would disparagingly call "trade-union consciousness," they yearned to be treated honorably by their bosses and aspired to have a small cottage with a garden to call their own.

It is hardly surpris­ing that a newly industrialized proletariat would retain social aspirations from their village origins, but their demand for the amenities of social respect and for the cultural trappings of an independent life on the land ill fit either the stereotype of an "economistic" working class with both eyes fixed on the loot or that of a revolutionary proletariat.

Over the past several decades, standard opinion polls in the United States have asked industrial workers what kind of work they would prefer to factory work. An astonishingly high percentage pines to open a shop or a restaurant or to farm. The unifying theme of these dreams is the freedom from close supervision and autonomy of the working day that, in their mind, more than compensates for the long hours and risks of such small businesses. Most, of course, never act on this wish, but its tenacity as a fantasy is indicative of its power.

For those who have known real slavery as opposed to "wage slavery," the possibility of an independent subsistence, how­ ever marginal, was a dream come true. Slaves throughout the Confederate states, once emancipated, took to their heels and settled on the frontiers of plantation agriculture, making a bare independent livelihood off the unclaimed commons. With a shotgun, a mule, a cow, a fishhook, a few chickens, geese, and a plow, it was finally possible to live independently and to work rarely for "the man," and then only so long as to satisfy the temporary need for cash.

Poor whites lived from the commons in much the same way, avoiding a degrading dependence on their wealthier neighbors. The result was the end of the plantation economy, which was only restored, in greatly modified form, with the enactment of the "fence laws" throughout the South from the 1880s on and explicitly designed to close the com­mons to independent blacks and whites and drive them back into the labor market. The notorious share-cropping system, the closest thing the United States has ever had to serfdom, was the result.

The desire for autonomy seems so powerful that it can take quite perverse forms. In factory settings, where the as­sembly line is fine-tuned to reduce autonomy to the vanish­ing point, workers manage nonetheless to steal back autono­mous time for "horseplay" as an expression of independence.

Auto workers on the line at River Rouge rush to get ahead so they can find a corner to doze in or read or to play a danger­ous game of rivet hockey. Workers in socialist Hungary stole time to make "homers" - small lathe pieces for themselves - even when they had no earthly use for them. In a system of work devised to exterminate play, the workers refuse this objectification and boredom, asserting their autonomy in creative ways.

Modern agribusiness has, almost diabolically, managed to exploit the desire for small property and autonomy to its own advantage. The practice of contract farming in poultry­ raising is a diagnostic example. Knowing that huge confine­ment operations are epidemiologically dangerous, the larg­est firms subcontract the raising of fryers to "independent" farmers. The subcontractor is solely responsible for building the large shed required according to the detailed specifica­tions laid down by Tyson or other agribusiness corporations and is responsible for the mortgage needed to finance it. The agribusiness delivers the young chicks and minutely speci­fies in the contract the feeding, watering, medication, and cleaning regimen, for which it sells the necessary supplies. A subcontractor's daily performance is then closely monitored, and he or she is paid at the end of the contract according to the animals' weight gain and survival rate, with payment calibrated to shifting market conditions. Often the contract will be renewed repeatedly, but there is no guarantee that it will be.

What is perverse about this system is that it preserves a simulacrum of independence and autonomy while emptying out virtually all of its substantive content. The subcontrac­tor is an independent landowner (and mortgage owner), but his workday and movements are nearly as choreographed as those of the assembly-line worker. There is no one immedi­ately breathing down his neck, but if the contract is not renewed, he is stuck with a mortgage as large as his shed.

The agribusiness in effect transfers the risks of landownership, of capital on credit, and of managing a large workforce - a workforce that would demand benefits-while reaping most of the advantages of close supervision, standardiza tion, and quality control that the modern factory was origi­nally designed to achieve. And it works! The desire to hold on to the last shred of dignity as an independent property owner is so powerful that the "farmer" is willing to forfeit most of its meaning.

Whatever else they may have missed about the human con­ dition, the anarchists' belief in the drive for the dignity and autonomy of small property was a perceptive reading of the popular imaginary. The petty bourgeois dream of indepen­dence, though less attainable in practice, did not die with the Industrial Revolution. Rather, it gained a new lease on life.

The Not So Petty Social Functions of the Petty Bourgeoisie

From the Diggers and the Levellers of the English Civil War to the Mexican peasants of 1911, to the anarchists of Spain for nearly a century, to a great many anticolonial movements, to mass movements in contemporary Brazil, the desire for land and the restoration of lost land has been the leitmotif of most radically egalitarian mass movements. Without appealing to petty bourgeois dreams, they wouldn't have had a chance.

Marx's contempt for the petite bourgeoisie, second only to his contempt for the Lumpenproletariat, was based on the fact that they were small property holders and therefore petty capitalists. Only the proletariat, a new class brought into being by capitalism and without property, could be truly revolutionary; their liberation depended on transcending capitalism. However sound this reasoning in theory, the historical fact is that in the West, right up until the end of the nineteenth century, artisans— weavers, shoemakers, printers, masons, cart makers, carpenters—formed the core of most radical working-class movements. As an old class, they shared a communitarian tradition, a set of egalitarian practices, and a local cohesiveness that the newly assembled factory labor force was hard put to match. And, of course, the massive changes in the economy from the 1830s onward threatened their very existence as communities and as trades; they were fighting a rear-guard action to preserve their autonomy. As Barrington Moore, echoing E. P. Thompson, put it,

the chief social basis of radicalism has been the peasants and the smaller artisans in the towns. From these facts, one may conclude that the wellsprings of human freedom lie not only where Marx saw them, in the aspirations of classes about to take power, but perhaps even more in the dying wail of classes over whom the wave of progress is about to roll.

Throughout the Cold War, the standard counterrevolutionary option was preemptive land reform, though it was as often as not blocked by elites. Only after the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989 did the neoliberal consensus in organizations like the World Bank delete land reform from their policy agenda. While it is also true that beleaguered small property has given rise to more than one right-wing movement, it would be impossible to write the history of struggles for equality without artisans, small peasants, and their passion for the independence of small property near the center of attention.

There is also a strong case to be made for the indispensable economic role of the petty bourgeoisie in invention and innovation. They are the pioneers, if not usually the ultimate beneficiaries, of the great majority of new processes, machines, tools, products, foods, and ideas.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the modern software industry, where virtually all the novel ideas have been created by individuals or small partnerships and then purchased or absorbed by larger firms.

The role of larger firms has essentially become one of "scouting" the terrain of innovation and then appropriating, by employing, poaching, or buying out, any potentially promising (or threatening) idea.

The competitive advantage of large firms lies largely in their capitalization, marketing muscle, lobbying power, and vertical integration, not in their original ideas and innovation. And while it is true that the petty bourgeoisie cannot send a man to the moon, build an airplane, drill for oil in deep water, run a hospital, or manufacture and market a major drug or a mobile phone, the capacity of huge firms to do such things rests substantially on their ability to combine thousands of smaller inventions and processes that they themselves did not and perhaps cannot create. This, too, of course, is an important innovation in its own right. Nevertheless, one key to the oligopoly position of the largest firms lies precisely in their power to eliminate or swallow potential rivals. In doing so, they undoubtedly stifle at least as much innovation as they facilitate.

"If you can't smile, don't open a shop."

–Chinese proverb

Not long ago, I spent a few days with a friend in Munich at the home of her aging parents whom she had gone to visit. They were relatively frail and largely confined to their apartment, but insistent on walking briefly in the cool summer mornings in their immediate neighborhood. For several days, my friend and I accompanied them on their morning shopping rounds, and "rounds" they were. They went first to a small grocery, where they bought a handful of vegetables and some non-perishables; then they proceeded to a nearby shop that carried butter, milk, eggs, and cheese; then to a butcher for a small pork loin; then to a stall selling fruit; and finally, after pausing to watch children playing in a small park, to a newspaper stand for a magazine and the local paper. It seemed a nearly invariant routine, and at each shop there was always a conversation, brief or extended, depending on the number of other shoppers. There were comments on the weather or on a recent traffic accident nearby, inquiries after mutual friends and relatives, mentions of births in the neighborhood, questions on how a son or daughter was getting on, reflections on the annoying traffic noise, and so on.

One could say the conversations were shallow and filled with little more than pleasantries, the small change of daily life, but they were never anonymous; the discussants knew one another's name and a fair amount of each other's family history. I was forcibly struck by the easy, if thin, sociability that prevailed and came to realize that these rounds were the social highlight of my friend's parents' day. They could easily have done most of their shopping more efficiently at a larger store no farther away. On a moment's reflection, one sees that the shopkeepers are unpaid social workers, providing brief but amiable companionship to their steady clientele. "Unpaid" is, of course, not quite right, inasmuch as their prices were surely higher than at the larger outlets; the shopkeepers understood implicitly that the smiles and pleasantries they offered were one way in which they built up a steady and loyal clientele and hence their business. Lest we become overly cynical about the mask of shopkeeper smiles, however, it is worth noting that such pleasantries may well also take the hard edge off a day otherwise spent behind a counter cutting, weighing, and counting money.

The petty bourgeoisie in this small setting perform a kind of daily and reliable social service free of charge that would be hard for a public official or agency to replicate. It is merely one of many gratuitous services the small shopkeepers find it in their own interest to provide in the course of doing business.

Jane Jacobs, in her deep ethnographic insights into the texture of neighborhoods and public safety, has catalogued many of them. Her phrase "eyes on the street," a wholly original observation in 1960, has become a contemporary design principle for urban neighborhoods. It refers to the constant informal monitoring of a neighborhood by pedestrians, shopkeepers, and residents, many of whom are acquainted with one another. Their presence, the animation of the street scene, works to informally preserve public order, with little or no need for intervention.

The point for our purposes is that "eyes on the street" requires a dense, mixed-use neighborhood, with many small shops, ateliers, apartments, and services that ensure the steady foot traffic of people on errands, window-shopping, or making deliveries. The anchors of this process are the petty bourgeoisie shopkeepers, who are there most of the day, who know their clients, and who keep an informal eye on the street. Such neighborhoods are far safer than more deserted locales with little foot traffic. Here again, a valuable service, in this case ensuring public safety, is provided as a by-product of a combination of other activities and at no cost to the public. Where such informal structures are absent, even the police will find it difficult to maintain effective safety.

The petty bourgeoisie provided services, like the smile of the shopkeeper, that simply cannot be purchased. Jacobs noticed that on virtually every block there was at least one shopkeeper with long hours whom residents asked to hold their apartment keys for out-of-town relatives and friends who would be using their apartment briefly while they were away. The shopkeeper provided this service when asked as a courtesy to his customers. It is impossible to imagine a service like this being provided by a public agency.

It is surely the case that "big box" stores can, owing again to their clout as buyers, deliver a host of manufactured goods to consumers at a cheaper price than the petty bourgeoisie. What is not so clear, however, is whether, once one has factored in all the public goods (the positive externalities) the petty bourgeoisie provides—informal social work, public safety, the aesthetic pleasures of an animated and interesting streetscape, a large variety of social experiences and personalized services, acquaintance networks, informal neighborhood news and gossip, a building block of social solidarity and public action, and (in the case of the smallholding peasantry) good stewardship of the land—the petty bourgeoisie might not be, in a full accounting, a far better bargain, in the long run, than the large, impersonal capitalist firm. And, although they might not quite measure up to the Jeffersonian democratic ideal of the self-confident, independent, land-owning yeoman farmer, they approach it far more closely than the clerk at Wal-Mart or Home Depot.

One final fact is worth noting. A society dominated by smallholders and shopkeepers comes closer to equality and to popular ownership of the means of production than any economic system yet devised.