Petty-bourgeois radicalism is a phenomenon much older than the version of it that exists in the modern United States, but the patterns within its older iterations directly parallel the ones we see in the ones from today. All petty-bourgeois radicalism entails a substitution of proletarian struggle for a politics that’s based within the petty-bourgeoisie, and within the ideological tendencies which are aligned with this class. As my political partners in the Party of Communists USA have stated about what modern U.S. petty-bourgeois radicalism is, and how it’s different from the mass-based mode of practice:
The New Left refers to a petite bourgeois and intellectual movement that emerged in the 1960s which continues today that is characterized by a lack of centrality of the working class, focus on intellectuals and students, decentralization/localism, Anti-Sovietism, and focus on non-class social movements (movementism). We oppose “Critical theory” and “Cultural Marxism” as ideologies promoted by the CIA which is anti-Communist and anti-working class. For example, Herbert Marcuse, early exponent of Critical Theory, worked for the Office of Strategic Services and later the CIA in order to promote these ideologies. Marcuse trained Angela Davis who rose to leadership in the CPUSA only to split it…
The PCUSA upholds the Marxist theory of class struggle, knowing that the working class is the primary agent of change. Critical Theorists and the New Left, on the other hand, believe non-class social movements and the lumpenproletariat to either be equal to or above the proletariat. Herbert Marcuse said that intellectuals, students, and the lumpenproletariat replaced the workers as the revolutionary class. “In contrast, Marxism utilizes dialectical materialism to understand that these ideas merely reflect reality rather than determine it.” (“On the Frankfurt School”, The Communist Vol III, pg12)
When we look at the petty-bourgeois radical movements from the 19th century, all the essential similarities are there. These different iterations of petty-bourgeois radicalism just focus on different social and class groups, with none of them being the working class. Wrote Lenin about the Narodniks, the Russian political current that put forth a “national” version of socialism: “The essence of Narodism is that it represents the producers’ interests from the standpoint of the small producer, the petty bourgeois.” Lenin observed that in order to justify this shifting of focus away from the working class, the Narodniks embraced a type of morality that comes from petty-bourgeois sensibilities; from a perspective of blaming the people for how capitalism’s contradictions persist:
The contradiction of interests has already begun to assume definite forms, and is even reflected in Russian legislation, but the small producer stands apart from this struggle. He is still tied to the old bourgeois society by his tiny farm, and for that reason, though he is oppressed by the capitalist system, he is unable to understand the real causes of his oppression and consoles himself with illusions about the whole trouble lying in the fact that the reason and sentiment of people are still in an “embryonic state.”
“Of course,” continues the ideologist of this petty bourgeois, “people have always endeavoured to influence the course of things in one way or another.”
But “the course of things” consists of nothing else but actions and “influences” of people, and so this again is an empty phrase.
“But they were guided in this by the promptings of the most meagre experience and by the grossest interests; and it is obvious that it was very rarely and only by chance that these guides could indicate the path suggested by modern science and modern moral ideas”
This is a petty-bourgeois morality, which condemns “grossness of interests” because it is unable to connect its “ideals” with any immediate interests—it is a petty-bourgeois way of shutting one’s eyes to the split which has already taken place and which is clearly reflected both in modern science and in modern moral ideas.
Though this passage is written in a different style than what modern readers are used to, the critique Lenin makes is a fairly simple one. He’s ridiculing the argument, made by the types of anti-capitalists who are disenfranchised by capital but lack a proletarian class character, that the people (especially the workers) are to blame for the big bourgeoisie’s continued rule. I’ve encountered this exact same type of argument in my personal confrontations with petty-bourgeois radicals. Upon seeing examples of the people being able to gain revolutionary consciousness, like with how most Americans have come to be against the Ukraine proxy war, they’ve sought to minimize the significance of these developments. To argue that because these kinds of antiwar or class conscious sentiments are embryonic, the emergence of these sentiments doesn’t truly represent progress.
These people who’ve been getting angry at corporate price gouging and the war machine are just seeking to influence the course of things, like people always have; therefore their consciousness shift means nothing. This is the same idea conveyed by the political actors on the left who’ve been dismissing the proto anti-imperialist awareness that’s appeared among libertarians and the MAGA base. Which shows why these left actors are drawing from a fundamentally petty-bourgeois mode of analysis: they view the people as fundamentally reactionary. They dismiss whatever revolutionary potential within the people as not really revolutionary, but merely a crude expression of the people’s “grossness of interests.”
These days, such derisiveness comes in the form of arguing that working class people who articulate social discontent are simply acting out of cynicism and bigotry. That when they object to our declining living conditions, they just want to hold on to their white privilege, or to their privilege as “labor aristocrats” according to the third-worldists. It’s a framing that ignores how white and nonwhite workers share an interest in proletarian revolution, and that acts to divide the proletariat. Which helps prevent the rise of an authentic mass workers leadership, and thereby keeps the New Left able to dominate organizing.
As one critic of this thinking has said while addressing the PSL, today’s foremost propagator of petty-bourgeois radicalism: “You reject this ‘America First Nationalism’ which is the real social response of the neglect of American citizens to our country falling apart which can create the groundwork for anti-war consciousness towards Ukraine and whatever future conflict comes next.”
When the Narodniks employed this kind of reasoning, they concluded that the real revolutionary subjects are not the workers but the small producers. When the New Left employ it, they conclude that the real revolutionary subjects are the lumpen and the members of the intelligentsia. It all comes from the same petty-bourgeois root. To be able to dismiss the working masses, to interpret all of their revolutionary activities as not truly being signs of hope, one needs to be based in a worldview that’s detached from the proletarian struggle. Not everyone who shares this petty-bourgeois radical mindset is petty-bourgeois; some of them are ironically workers themselves. Yet because they’ve taken example from the petty-bourgeoisie on how to view the masses, they all nevertheless are detached in this way.
We can overcome the problem of the New Left, like how the Bolsheviks overcame the problem of Narodism. The essential thing is for us to not act like communists are dependent on the left, and instead build beyond it. We should work to bring in the students who show themselves to be open towards a serious anti-imperialist and class struggle; this needs to be just one part of our practice, though. Our primary outreach needs to be towards the kinds of workers who’ve been alienated from bourgeois politics, and are looking for a way to advance their material interests. The New Left’s strategy is not the path towards winning these masses; this path runs through building a united front against monopoly capital. A united front which includes the proto-revolutionary elements that exist outside of leftism, rather than confining itself to the non-proletarian groups which the New Left seeks to center.
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