秦始皇帝

By the grace of god

I’m not European.

Oh you’re a troll. Fuck. I can’t believe I fell for the bait. Honestly hats off to you genuinely impressive. Honestly if you didn’t go full mask off alternate reality deranged I might not have realised. Very impressive work.

The interference by Russia in the last three elections is well-established by EVERY American intelligence agency, as well as the intelligence agencies of every one of our allies

Groups famous for telling the truth about their enemies.

a traitor at worst

Being a traitor against a genocidal empire is good actually

Russia has already become what they want to to do to America, and then everywhere else.

What Russia is today was largely imposed upon them by your beloved EuroAmerikan empire.

You say billionaires, I say Russians, but they are the same thing.

Holy chauvinism.

These people aren’t really politicians, trying to take their country in a specific political direction, no matter how misguided they may be. They don’t care about politics, they are CRIMINALS.

I take it back this is the holy chauvinism. Also ironic an American talking about other countries having criminal politicians.

Sociopathic Oligarchs, aka organized crime billionaires, managed to take over Russia

Holy passive voice. “Managed”. You mean were boosted to power during shock therapy as the former USSR was looted by the EuroAmerikans

You are fucking deranged I can’t wait to piss on the grave of the EuroAmerikan empire and all of its bootlickers.

“I’m an ultra/anarchist who hasn’t thought this out at all and I’m being contrarian with no substance so I can feel like I’m contributing without doing anything”

Feels almost like interacting with the reincarnation of Bordiga himself. Nothing is convincing and thus nothing is worth supporting.

Your opening argument is an extremely long-winded way of saying that you do not understand how democracy functions under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, so you universalise the defects of bourgeois representative institutions instead of applying class analysis to explain why representatives under bourgeois rule do not, in fact, represent the oppressed classes. Every state is an instrument of class rule. Under capitalism, the representative system is embedded in a total structure of bourgeois domination: property relations, the press, the courts, the civil service, the officer corps, the educational system, the party system, and the international order of capital. In that context, representatives are not corrupted merely by the psychological fact of holding office; they are integrated into a machinery whose material logic is the reproduction of bourgeois social power.

Your whole argument displaces the problem from class power to institutional design. You treat the problem as though the main obstacle to emancipation were inadequate coordination procedures, insufficiently horizontal structures, or the lack of a technically sophisticated mechanism for large-scale consensus. But class society is not primarily a design failure. It is a relation of domination rooted in property, force, ideology, and institutional continuity. A better preference aggregation model does not answer the question of which class rules. It does not answer who controls the means of production, who commands the armed bodies of men, who suppresses sabotage, who plans investment, who disciplines hostile classes, or who withstands imperialist encirclement. A decision procedure is not a theory of power.

That is why, even after all the rhetoric about “democracy by design,” you still did not actually describe any mechanism by which your vision could come into being. You named an aspiration, not a path. Referring to LSGDM or other large-scale deliberative techniques is not a mechanism in the political sense. At most, it is a possible technical supplement to administration or consultation. It is not an account of revolutionary transition. Marxism-Leninism is not simply saying “let a few people decide things vertically.” It is a theory of how a politically organized proletariat, through its vanguard and mass organizations, contests for power, smashes the old state machinery where necessary, establishes new organs of class rule, reorganizes production, and conducts socialist construction under conditions inherited from capitalism and imperialism. Whether one agrees with every historical application or not, that is at least a theory of movement, force, contradiction, and institutional reproduction. Your framework remains at the level of procedural idealism.

When I asked what institutions would embody your model, “all institutions” was not an answer. It was a dodge. The issue is not whether, in some abstract sense, every sphere of social life should eventually be transformed. Of course it should. The issue is which institutions first, in what order, under what constraints, and through what political line. Are we talking about the workplace, local committees, militia structures, planning bodies, the judiciary, schools, ministries, party structures, neighborhood assemblies, agricultural cooperatives, trade organs, popular congresses? How are contradictions between them mediated? What is their relation to central coordination? How is minority obstruction handled? How are class enemies excluded from using “horizontality” as an opening for restoration? Unless you specify institutional form and relation, “all institutions” is just a way of avoiding concrete politics.

You evaded the next question in the same way. How would these institutions be built? Your answer was essentially that they can be invented by anyone and will spread if they are effective. That is not a theory of construction. That is passive technological diffusion dressed up as politics. History does not move that way. The ruling class does not step aside because a more elegant collaborative form appears. New institutions are built through struggle, through organization, through coercive and ideological contestation, through line struggle within the revolutionary movement, and through the seizure or creation of durable organs capable of displacing the old order. Socialist institutions do not “spread” in the same way a useful software platform spreads. They are built in and through class struggle. They require cadre, discipline, program, mass line, material resources, and the capacity to suppress organized opposition. Without that you have no institution-building.

Your answer to the problem of counterrevolution makes the weakness even clearer. Boiled down, your position is that if enough people participate in the system, then collective intelligence and manpower will overpower the opposition. That is not material analysis. It is fantasy. It ignores the actual historical means by which threatened ruling classes respond: economic sabotage, capital flight, hoarding, black markets, assassination, propaganda warfare, infiltration, terror, sanctions, coup plotting, proxy warfare, diplomatic isolation, technological denial, and direct military violence. Imperialism is not simply an external “opponent” that can be outvoted by a larger collaborating network. It is a global system of organized force. It has intelligence services, monopoly media, financial chokepoints, military alliances, comprador strata, NGO networks, and centuries of experience in destabilizing states that attempt autonomous development. Any serious theory of socialist transition has to account for repression and defense. Marxism-Leninism does. Your model dissolves those problems into the hope that cooperation at scale will become so efficient that antagonism loses efficacy. That is not how class enemies behave when their power is threatened.

Your critique of Marxism-Leninism also never rises above the level of impressionistic moral suspicion. You say projects such as China “dubiously represent” the collective interests of their citizens and have not moved “convincingly” toward communism. But what is the standard here? If your standard is immediate abolition of contradiction, then you are not criticizing Marxism-Leninism from a materialist standpoint; you are comparing historical transitions to an abstract ideal. Marxism has never held that socialism abolishes contradiction overnight. On the contrary, socialism is the historical period in which the proletariat holds power but inherited inequalities, technical backwardness, uneven development, remnants of class society, and international pressure persist. This is precisely why Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh and others treated socialist construction as a prolonged and conflictual process rather than as instantaneous harmony.

The line about a “red bourgeoisie” especially shows that you do not grasp the transitional period in any serious way. Of course there is a constant danger of bureaucratic degeneration, class recomposition, and bourgeois restoration under socialism. Marxism-Leninism has never been blind to that danger; it has treated it as one of the central contradictions of socialist development. The question is not whether such a contradiction exists. The question is how it is fought: through party rectification, anti-corruption struggle, ideological education, mass supervision, public ownership in command of key sectors, state planning, control over finance, discipline over private capital, and the preservation of political power in proletarian hands. You cannot simply point to the danger of restoration and infer that centralized socialist state power is the cause of the problem in the abstract. The alternative is not some contradiction-free horizontal commons. The alternative, if proletarian state power is abandoned, is generally the far more rapid and open restoration of bourgeois rule.

And your claim that it only “dubiously” represents the collective interests of its people is weak as it does not engage reality in class terms. I’ll talk specifically on China as it’s what I’m most familiar with. One can debate many concrete questions about line, policy, market reforms, contradictions between public and private sectors, rural-urban inequalities, and the risks of revisionism. Those are serious debates. But it is not a serious debate to ignore the fact that the bourgeoisie in China does not rule politically in the same way it rules in liberal capitalist states; that capital is subordinated to a state led by a Communist Party; that the commanding heights remain under public control; that anti-poverty and development gains have been enormous; that capital can be disciplined, broken up, redirected, or punished; and that the overall trajectory is not reducible to the simple liberal formula of “officials got power, therefore they formed a new ruling class identical to the old one.” A Marxist analysis has to examine which class holds state power, how surplus is allocated, what the development line is, how contradictions are managed, and whether socialist construction remains the principal direction despite concessions and tensions. Your response does not do that.

Most importantly, you still dodged the DPRK question. I did not ask you to indulge in empty speculation. I asked for a material analysis. The DPRK is a country formed through anti-colonial revolution, devastated by genocidal war, left in a permanent armistice system rather than a peace settlement, surrounded by hostile powers, subjected to sanctions, military pressure, ideological warfare, and continuous threat. If your theory cannot tell us how a state in those conditions could survive without centralized authority, disciplined organization, strategic planning, and a unified defense apparatus, then it is not even worth consideration.

Your latest reply does not resolve the argument. It mostly confirms my original criticism.

Starting with the Newton point: that “just wait until relativity” line is a gotcha that does not work. Newton was not refuted in the childish sense you are implying his formulae are still widely used across science and engineering fields. Physics advanced by deepening and superseding earlier formulations while preserving their real explanatory content within a broader framework. The point of the analogy was obvious: Marx did not invent social laws out of thin air any more than Newton invented gravity. He identified real mechanisms already operative in society. Later Marxists developed, refined, and extended that analysis in light of further historical experience. That is how a science develops. It does not become arbitrary because it advances.

On Marxism more broadly, you say Marx “provides theories about reality that may or may not be true.” That is more empty skepticism. Any scientific theory is either confirmed, refined, or overturned through engagement with reality. The relevant question is whether Marx’s core account of capitalism and class society has been historically vindicated. In the main, it has. The concentration and centralization of capital, the recurrent crises of capitalist production, the persistence of class antagonism, the political domination of the state by ruling-class interests, and the tendency of capital to subordinate social life to accumulation have all been borne out repeatedly from Marx’s time to the present. Marxism is not reducible to a moral preference just because Marxists also hold political values. Its explanatory core is an analysis of objective social relations and contradictions.

And no, “why one should support North Korea” may be the core question of the thread as a whole, but it is plainly not the question of this current exchange. The question in our exchange was whether the class character of the revolution can be treated as primary while the class character of the state issuing from it is treated as secondary, and by what mechanism that separation is supposed to work. You keep retreating from that question into a different one because you cannot answer the original without conceding the state is the concrete expression of the revolution’s class content and thus primary in the analysis of socialist countries/movements.

You then return again to this confused notion that once workers gain “power over the means of production” they thereby cease to be proletarian and become a new class. That does not follow. Administrator is not a class. It is a function. Nor is every exercise of authority a new relation of production. A planner, cadre, manager, or official can be part of a differentiated stratum within a socialist transition, but a stratum is not the same thing as a class. To demonstrate a distinct class, you would have to show a distinct relation to the means of production and to the appropriation of surplus. Differences of role, authority, or institutional responsibility do not by themselves establish that. Engels’ distinction between the “government of persons” and the “administration of things” makes precisely the point that administration as such is not identical with an exploiting class relation.

You still have not answered the actual question I posed earlier. The issue was not whether class disappears once all of society has equally distributed control. The issue was your claim that the proletariat ceases to be the proletariat simply by gaining state power. You have still not explained the mechanism for that. If the proletariat takes power in a society where antagonistic classes still exist, where bourgeois remnants still exist, where the means of production are still being transformed, and where class struggle still continues, then the proletariat does not vanish merely because it now rules. The whole point of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that proletarian rule is required precisely because the transition is incomplete.

Finally, your point on ownership is simply wrong. Ownership is not merely a legal title in the narrow juridical sense. It is a social relation. It concerns who has the effective right and power to dispose of the means of production, to sell them, transfer them, inherit them, command their use, and appropriate the surplus generated through them. Law is one expression of that relation, not its whole content. So when you say “what matters is control,” that is only half-formed. The question is: control by whom, on what basis, for what class end, and with what relation to surplus appropriation? If an administrator cannot alienate the means of production as private property, cannot pass them on as personal property, and cannot appropriate surplus as owner, then you have not shown capitalist ownership. You have shown administration within a different social relation. That is exactly why reducing ownership to “who seems to have practical control” is inadequate.

So the problem remains the same. You are substituting skepticism for analysis, authority for class, and “control” in the abstract for a concrete relation of production and appropriation.

Further supported by how Pendleton was one of those “leftists” who spent the whole 2024 election shitting on Harris, helping pave the way to Trump 2.

I don’t know or care about anyone else you mentioned to this point but this is fucking silly blueMAGA nonsense. Harris lost because she refused to distance herself from an active genocide and spent her entire run courting republicans and ignoring the left who then proceeded to not vote for the genocide enabler.

You have described an aspiration, not yet an argument. What are the actual mechanisms here? What institutions would embody this horizontal collaboration, how would they be built, and how would they survive internal and external threats? Why should this model be preferred to Marxism-Leninism as it has existed in practice in countries like Vietnam, Cuba, and China? More specifically, in the case of the DPRK, how would it be workable, and why would it be preferable to Juche given the country’s political and economic position as a state under siege?

You are still evading the question I asked earlier.

I asked you to explain the mechanism by which the class character of the revolution remains primary if it is not expressed in the class character of the state that the revolution establishes. You still have not answered that. Instead, you have shifted again into a discussion of your personal political commitments, your preference for democracy, and your moral reasons for embracing communism. That is a different discussion. It does not resolve the theoretical issue I raised.

No one denied that people hold values, preferences, or moral commitments. That is not the point. The point is that materialist analysis does not begin from those commitments. It begins from the objective structure of social relations, class antagonism, and state power. You are repeatedly replacing the question of what a state is materially with the question of what kind of politics you would prefer to endorse. That is precisely why your replies keep sliding away from the issue.

You say democracy is necessary for communism to emerge. But you still leave “democracy” at the level of an abstract good rather than analyzing its class content. Democracy for which class, through what institutions, under what property relations, and against which class enemy? Bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy are not the same thing. A democracy that preserves bourgeois property is not a neutral framework within which communism gradually appears. It is one form of bourgeois rule. So simply invoking democracy explains nothing unless you specify its class basis.

You also misstate the issue when you contrast “personal intuition” with “arbitrary scientific laws that someone made up.” That is a false opposition. Marx did not “make up” Marxism in the sense of inventing a doctrine out of thin air any more than Newton invented gravity. Newton identified and documented a mechanism already operative in nature. In the same way, Marx identified and explained real mechanisms already operative in social development: class struggle, contradiction within the mode of production, and the conflict between the forces and relations of production. Marxism is not an a priori prophecy about the future. It is a scientific account of the real tendencies and antagonisms internal to class society. The point is not that history unfolds by wish or intuition, but that social forms have objective structures and move through determinate contradictions whether one finds that persuasive at the level of personal impression or not. Once again, instead of engaging those mechanisms, you retreat into skepticism about theory itself.

Your point about administrators shows the same confusion. Of course an administrator can occupy a distinct function within the division of labor. That was never in dispute. But function is not the same as class. A school principal, factory manager, a party cadre, a planner, a technician, a doctor, or a local official is not thereby a separate class merely by exercising authority. To become a distinct exploiting class, they would have to stand in a distinct relation to the means of production and the appropriation of surplus. If they do not privately own the means of production and do not appropriate surplus as a property-bearing class, then you have not demonstrated a new class, only a differentiated role within an ongoing socialist transition. You keep substituting differences in authority or political influence for differences in class position. That is a basic category mistake.

Likewise, when you say you are “speculating on the possible material interests of given social constructions,” that only confirms the problem. You are treating class analysis as a loose exercise in conjecture rather than a determination of structured relations within production. Material interests are not invented by speculation. They arise from an objectively given position within the relations of production. Without that anchor, the term “material interest” becomes empty and can be attached to almost any institutional arrangement you happen to distrust.

Your final question makes the confusion most obvious. You ask: if not on the basis of personal preferences, morals, or ideals, then on what basis embrace communist goals? But this again sidesteps the actual issue. Of course political commitment involves conviction. The question is not how an individual justifies commitment to communism at the level of ethics. The question is how communism is analyzed scientifically as the historical movement generated by capitalism’s own contradictions. You are collapsing two distinct levels: normative commitment and materialist analysis. Because you collapse them, you keep answering a question about why you might want communism when I am asking you how class power, state power, and transition are to be understood.

So the problem remains exactly where it started. You have not explained how the class character of a revolution can be primary while the class character of the state that issues from it is treated as secondary or even irrelevant. You have not explained how class ceases to be class once it rules without dissolving the entire concept. And you have not shown that differences in administrative function amount to a distinct class relation in the absence of distinct ownership and appropriation.

Also idealism and materialism are mutually exclusive because they begin from opposite answers to the most basic philosophical question: what is primary, consciousness or material reality? Idealism holds, in one form or another, that ideas, consciousness, spirit, or categories of thought are fundamental, and that social or historical reality is ultimately shaped by them. Materialism holds the reverse: matter exists independently of thought, and consciousness is a product of material conditions rather than their creator. They are compatible in the same way Last Thursdayism is compatible with Evolution.

The main issue here from my perspective is that you are trying to discuss class, state, and transition without the minimum political-economic precision those concepts require. You keep replacing analysis with preference, relation to production with institutional suspicion, and concrete class content with abstract democratic language.

So you’re not interested in reality. Communism and class abolition are only possible globally whether you hold your breath or not.

Comrade Bordiga limits himself to upholding a cautious position on all the questions raised by the Left. He doesn’t say: the International poses and resolves such and such a question in this way, but the Left will instead pose and resolve it this other way. He instead says: the way the International poses and resolves problems doesn’t convince me; I fear they might slip into opportunism; there are insufficient guarantees against this; etc. His position, then, is one of permanent suspicion and doubt. In this way the position of the “Left” is purely negative: they express reservations without specifying them in a concrete form, and above all without indicating in concrete form their own point of view and their solutions. They end up spreading doubt and distrust without offering anything constructive.

1. The state will cease to be when class does as the state is simply the instrument of class rule.
2. When the state ceases to be the government remains as administration and coordination is necessary for modern production.
3. When the state ceases to be and socialism has reached its end goal that is called communism and is impossible in one country as the antagonism between the proletariat and international bourgeoisie remain. Then so does class society.

You still have not answered the actual question I posed.

I asked how the class character of the revolution operates independently of the state it produces. You did not explain that mechanism. Instead, you restated your preference for a democratic outcome after the revolution and described conditions you think make that outcome likely. That does not resolve the point. A revolution is not a free-floating event. It is the seizure or construction of political power by a class. If you say the revolution’s class character is primary, but then detach that from the state form that emerges from it, you are asserting a cause while refusing to identify its concrete political expression.

Your reply also shifts from class analysis to normative preference. You say you would only consider a class to have gained power if it succeeds in doing so in a democratic context. But that is not a meaningful definition of class power. It is an external political criterion you are imposing onto the analysis. The state is not validated by whether it conforms to an abstract democratic ideal. It is analyzed by which class holds power, through what institutions, in whose interests, and against which opposing classes.

You also continue to treat class as though it were mainly a question of sentiment, solidarity, or personal disposition. It is not. Class is defined by a group’s place within the social relations of production, its relation to the means of production, and its role in the social organization of labor. Individuals can move between classes, yes. Political degeneration is possible, yes. But none of that abolishes the category itself.

On your use of probabilistic language, the issue is that you retreat from determinate analysis into vague possibility. Substituting schema, impression, or what one finds unconvincing for concrete engagement with the real movement of social forces. To say the proletariat may or may not act in accordance with its structural position, and to leave it there, is not nuance. It is a refusal to complete the analysis. It is ridiculous to proceed by asking whether a development feels persuasive at the level of personal intuition. Instead one must ask what contradictions are operative, what class interests are materially constituted, and how they express themselves through political organization, struggle, and state form.

You also still do not understand class in a rigorous way. Administrator is not a class category. Administration is a function. Class is determined by relation to the means of production and to the appropriation of social surplus. So long as those administering do not privately own the means of production and do not expropriate surplus value as a distinct property-owning stratum, they do not thereby cease to be proletarian simply because they hold office or carry out administrative tasks. The socialist transition does not abolish the proletariat the moment it takes power. It is the period in which proletarian rule continues the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, suppresses restoration, and transforms the relations of production until class antagonisms are rendered void through the abolition of class society itself. The endpoint is not your abstract democratic test. The endpoint is the historical supersession of antagonistic classes through there ultimately being only the associated producers, at which point class in the antagonistic sense disappears.

On not being “hard science”. This is not a matter of arbitrary plausibility. Dialectical and historical materialism have repeatedly proven their explanatory force precisely because antagonisms and contradictions are the drivers of history. The contradiction between forces and relations of production, between exploited and exploiting classes, between an emergent mode of production and the decaying order that contains it, is the motor of historical development. That is why Marxism can explain the rise, development, crisis, and replacement of social orders with a seriousness your framework cannot match. Once you reduce these determinate antagonisms to mere probabilistic tendencies, you empty the theory of its strongest content and replace analysis with hesitation.

The problem is not heterodoxy as such. The problem is that you have tossed aside the core of the theoretical framework and replaced it with an eclectic mix of idealism and materialism, despite the fact that the two are incompatible as methods. You want to retain Marxist terminology while hollowing out what makes it coherent: class without a stable relation to production, revolution without determinate state expression, and political power judged by external moral-democratic criteria rather than by its material class content. That is not a serious reinterpretation. It is a conceptual patchwork. And eclecticism of that sort cannot critique Marxism from within because it has already abandoned the premises that make Marxist analysis possible in the first place.

Some books:

1. Lenin, The State and Revolution

2. Marx, The Civil War in France

3. Lenin, A Great Beginning

4. Mao, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People

5. Mao, On Contradiction

6. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

If you wish to continue to troll I think we should end this here. Citizens of the DPRK are allowed to travel (just not defect to a country they are at war with) what stops them is visa refusals due to UN sanctions. The US and USSR were never at war that’s why it was the cold war. India and Pakistan have normalcy as core parts of their ceasefire terms from the most recent scuffle (which never did escalate to all our war). Funny you bring up Iran who the US never declared war on but do you know where they aren’t allowed travel by the American government, the DPRK because they are at war with them. Please educate yourself and grow up trolling is unbecoming once you mature past 12.

First off no. That was not the core question. You said:

Take, for example, the claim that North Koreans are permitted to leave the country.

The answer is yes they are permitted. Despite how you attempt to twist what the law says and what we were talking about to dodge this fact.

Secondly obviously you can’t move to a hostile power during wartime that’s called defecting. No country on Earth currently or has ever allowed that.

Are you trolling?

That’s a disgustingly bad faith interpretation of what is said and is patently false. They have laws surrounding surrender that are inline with international norms same with defection and espionage none of these apply to leaving legally as you would know if you went to university in China plenty of non 30 year olds learning there. Citizens of the DPRK are permitted to travel by the government it’s the UN sanctions stopping them travelling beyond China and Russia.

I don’t see any reason to believe it wouldn’t also continue into the reserve period or even after

Because surrender has a specific meaning that requires the person in question be an active combatant. The law applies to citizens as it cover this but also espionage and defection which do not require this caveat.

What do you mean by taking the class character of the revolution as primary. The revolution is not an abstract event. It is the process by which a class seizes or establishes state power. To treat the revolution’s class character as separate from the state it produces seems to detach the act of seizure from the instrument seized. Can you clarify how you understand the relationship between the revolutionary moment and the state form that follows?

Also you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what “abolishing all classes” means in socialist theory and practice. It is not a moral injunction or an immediate erasure of social differentiation. It is a historical process where class distinctions disappear through the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, whose members are then, together with the peasantry, gradually folded into the proletariat through transformed relations of production. Once there is a single class, there is effectively no class antagonism. That is the endpoint.

Your phrasing that the proletariat “may be likely to democratize the economy” reveals an idealist lens on a structural question. This is not about likelihood or moral inclination. It is about material interest. The proletariat, as a class, has an objective interest in expropriating the petty and large bourgeoisie because its own emancipation requires the abolition of capitalist property relations. This interest does not depend on goodwill. It is inscribed in the position of the proletariat within the mode of production. To treat it as contingent is to substitute voluntarism for political economy.

Finally, the state is not an abstract motivator. It is the concrete instrument by which one class exercises rule over others and advances its class interest. Under bourgeois rule, the state organizes the accumulation of capital, reproduces wage labor, and suppresses challenges to private property. Under proletarian rule, the same apparatus, transformed in class content, organizes the socialization of production and the proletarianization of any remaining classes. The direction of transformation follows from which class commands the levers.

I’m not saying this to be accusatory, and I hope it lands as intended. It just feels like your grasp of communist theory and the history of socialist practice is shallow to put it mildly. I can give you some book recommendations that might clear some of this up if it would help.

No the petty bourgeoisie often do hire workers to supplement their own labour. The bourgeoisie own the major means of production and live by extracting surplus value from wage labor, they do not need to work themselves. Petty bourgeoisie own small-scale means of production (a shop, a workshop, a plot of land) and still rely on their own labor, however often employing workers to supplement their labour.

In periods of socialist momentum, the petty bourgeoisie frequently become the most zealous allies of reaction because their precarious ownership of small-scale means of production places them in direct fear of expropriation and descent into the proletariat. Unlike the bourgeoisie, who may calculate accommodation with a rising revolutionary order, the petty bourgeois sees their individual livelihood, status, and slim hope of advancement threatened by collective transformation; this material anxiety drives them to support reactionary and often fascist forces that promise to defend private property and social “order” against the working class. Their reaction is not an ideological accident but class instinct: when the choice appears to be between losing their small capital or joining the stable exploiters, many choose reaction striving to join the exploiters.