Bourgeoisie is more than just a term of abuse used by the Left, it refers to a real people who led real lives and without understanding who these people once were and why Karl Marx hated them one cannot understand his ideas or deeply understand the Left. To simply leave the term unexamined and treat it as a mere insult or as a broad term for the wealthy, or all "capitalists" is to misunderstand Marx and the world he lived in and thus to misunderstand the entire Left, including the forms more moderate in their antagonism to the hated group of the day than the extreme example provided by their spiritual ancestor, Karl Marx.

That there is more to this term has been hidden by those who use it in order to hide the flaws of their programs and analysis. To know who Karl Marx was referring to when he use the term bourgeois is to understand why he was wrong and to understand what drove him to such a bizarre set of beliefs. It is to understand the frustrations, the shortcomings and everyday experiences which shaped Marx and thus formed his beliefs. It may well be overly dramatic to say that understanding who the bourgeoisie were is to understand the Left itself, but it is in no way inaccurate or undeservered.

That there really was a group of people who were uniquely the bourgeoisie which Marx hated separate from the set of all wealthy people came as a shock to me, as I had always been taught and had read that the term was vague and general, and merely referred to merchants and such. This is not the case. Marx had a very specific group of people in mind as the object of his hatred. These people were the traditional inhabitants of the self-governing cities of Europe.

Bourgeois literally means someone who lives in a town. The specific town dwellers meant by Marx and his fellow leftists were those who dwelled in the towns that had the right to self-government for hundreds of years, in many cases going back to circa 1000 AD. These were towns such as Lubeck, Magdeburg and Cologne and the democratic systems they lived under were called Lubeck Law, Magdeburg Law and Cologne Law. These systems were not perfect democracies or republics, but compared to the monarchies which ruled the entire rest of the world, including the world beyond Europe, they were paradises of self-governing equals.

These cities were regionally concentrated within the same regions of Europe that we know today as the wealthiest and most advanced regions, the regions which set the pace. Northern Italy was filled with self-governing towns, mid and Southern Italy had none. Spain had limited self-government and city rights until the Comunero Revolt of 1520, when these cities revolted against the King and so had their rights revoked as punishment. Germany along the Rhine and along the Baltic was studded with self-governing towns. Switzerland, Holland and England had self-governing towns and quickly came to have rural regions with rights similar to what only self-governing town dwellers had in the rest of Europe. France had self-governing towns and some rural freedoms, though fewer than the three just mentioned.

One city which did not have bourgeois self-government was the German city of Trier, which had been a theocracy run by a prince-bishop for centuries by the time Karl Marx was born their in 1818. The self-governing cities surrounding Trier had been enjoying self-government for a similar length of time. Over the years a new society had developed in these places with a new culture and habits and ideas. Marx was driven to hate all of these habits and ideas and especially the new culture. When Marx referred to the bourgeoisie he was not referring to urbanites, or the wealthy, or the merchants, but to these people and the world they had created, after first being created themselves by their new world of self-government.

The term had nothing to do with class. Marx was not driven mad with hate by income disparities. It is well known that he not hate the wealthy aristocrats as much as he hated the new world of the self-governing towns. It was not being wealthy in a world where many were poor which Marx strove against, and this is not what the Left truly strives against today. Marx was not opposed to income differentials, or to an economic class, but to a way of life and a way of looking at the world. He was above all, opposed to the idea that the bourgeois had gained their place in the world through merit and this hatred of merit drives the entire Left.

There were rich people before their was Marxism, there were rich people before there was a Left and there were always poor people. Income disparities did not create the Left and income disparities do not drive the Left. Before the rise of the self-governing towns of Europe wealth was almost entirely the product of physical power over others. The bourgeoisie were the first large grouping of people uniform enough to be seen as connected, as a tribe apart, to have wealth that was earned, and not stolen or otherwise a product power over others. Their wealth was a product of their own skill and efforts, and it was this novel quality to their wealth that led them to be seen differently than the pharaohs and kings and princes of the world that came before them.

Marx did not see the bourgeoisie as a people shaped by hundreds of years of self-government in a way that made them different from the serfs and less common serf-owners around them. He saw them as a group which was inherently morally diferrent from those around them whose moral difference led them to conspire against others and defraud them. He saw this conspiracy as being so successful that the bourgeois, a tribe apart, had come to rule the world. And only the Left could save this world from being ruled forever by this immutably evil race which identified themselves as evil to the world around them through their success.

By race I do not mean that the Left identifies the bourgeoisie, or successful self-governing people in general, with any actual race, but instead treats them in the manner of race. Specifically, membership in the bourgeoisie is seen as fixed as birth and unchangeable. It is also often seen as something inherited from the parent. The racial nature of the Left's attitude towards the bourgeoisie is most clearly expressed in the treatment of the Kulaks under the Soviets.

Kulak is a Russian term for a former landless serf who has come to own land and comes from the word for fist by way of the phrase 'tight fisted' which was applied to the Kulaks and refers to the same attachment towards one's own money that the phrase refers to in English. During the Soviet era it was held that only the morally bad among the former serfs had come to own land, thus identifying themselves as evil to all the world. The Communist attitude was that before the Russian serfs were given their freedom in 1860 the serfs appeared morally equal on the surface, but once freed the evil among some of them came out as they rose up the economic ladder and came to own land themselves, something forbidden to them before they received their freedom. The Soviets then blamed all their failures in agriculture upon the Kulaks and killed millions of rural dwellers on the suspicion of being this evil thing known as a Kulak.

On one level Communism claimed that class membership and class relations were governed by "the means of production" or even more abstract concepts, but in practice and also in theory it held that the bourgeoisie was a voluntary association of inherently evil individuals. The Soviets believed that after emancipation the evil among the former identified themselves by becoming successful. This belief that to succeed is to self-identify oneself as evil is one of the cornerstones of all degrees of Leftwing thought. In the same way that the evil among the former serfs were thought by the Soviets to have risen to the top, Marx believed that the bourgeoisie also rose up from the serfdom through the same manner. In "The Communist Manifesto" Marx wrote:

It was this same belief in the voluntary self-identification of the evil among us through their success that led to such bizarre events such as Pol Pot ordering the murder of any Cambodian who wore glasses. Why do they wear glasses, if they are not evil? Why would a former serf own land, if he does not deserve to be killed? A similar thought process was at work when the Soviets, having legalized private business from 1921 to 1928, then tried to kill all those who started business' during the period when it was legal. The act of starting a business, like the act of wearing glasses, served as a moral marker. These killing campaigns receive more attention, but in order to understand the underlying beliefs one has to remember that the first moral marker was the choice to leave the serfhood and live freely in a self-governing town.

It is important to make clear that the bourgeoisie were real and hated by Marx and others with a specific hatred, not a general hatred of all rich. It's important because the bourgeoisie were the most deserving rich the world has ever seen. It is not the oil sheiks of Saudi Arabia that are hated by the Left, but the entrepreneurs of the West, who succeed through their own merits. It is not the lottery winner who is hated for his millions, but the self-made millionaire. And firstly, it was not the land-owning aristocracy which was hated by the Left, but the bourgeoisie. The Left is not founded on hatred of unearned wealth caused by ownership of property, such as land, siezed by force and worked by serfs coerced into labor by violence, it is founded on the hatred of the earned success had by free living peoples. The world has always known unearned wealth. The world has always seen the physically powerful force others to labor for the benefit of the idle. This has always been with us. What is new is the creation of vast wealth without theft or violent intimidation. What is new is the bourgeoisie, and their creation was eventually followed by the creation of the Left, which denounces them in a manner unheard of before. The most deserved success in history has become the most hated.

"The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings."

Frederick Engels Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

"Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."

"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life."

Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto

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