Bourgeoisie - Embroidered

The word Bourgeoisie is embroidered in a quiet serif, with the letters OUR in the middle picked out in red – bOURgeoisie. From a few metres it passes for a tasteful preppy monogram; up close the red letters claim the word for everyone, a small joke about Marx’s idea that what the owning class holds should become common property. Dressed like the class, not on its side.

Bourgeoisie means the property-owning middle class. In everyday speech it refers to the comfortable middle class and its tastes and values. In Marxist theory it is the capitalist class that owns the means of production – factories, land, machines, capital – and employs wage labour. The adjective and the individual member are both called bourgeois.

From French. A bourgeois was originally a burgher, a free inhabitant of a bourg, a walled market town – from Late Latin burgus, a word of Germanic origin. In medieval Europe burghers were merchants and craftsmen who were neither nobles nor peasants. By the 18th and 19th centuries bourgeoisie meant the rising commercial and industrial class.

In The Communist Manifesto (1848) Marx and Engels call all history the history of class struggles and see modern society splitting into two great camps, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Engels’ note to the 1888 English edition defines the bourgeoisie as the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. The Manifesto also credits it with revolutionising production like no class before.

For Marx the difference is ownership, not income or taste. The bourgeoisie owns the means of production; the proletariat owns nothing but its capacity to work and must sell its labour power for a wage in order to live. In Capital, Volume I (1867) Marx argues that profit comes from the unpaid part of that labour, surplus value, which sets the interests of the two classes structurally against each other.

The petite or petty bourgeoisie is the lower middle class of small proprietors – shopkeepers, artisans, small farmers, the self-employed – who own some means of production but also work with them themselves. Marx and Engels saw it as a class caught in between, squeezed by big capital, and the Manifesto expected much of it to sink into the proletariat. Today the term also describes anxious middle-class respectability.

Not in those words – it is a later slogan that sums up his idea. The Communist Manifesto (1848) says the proletariat will use its political supremacy to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state. Capital, Volume I (1867) ends its account of capitalist accumulation with the line the expropriators are expropriated.

Since the 19th century bourgeois has also been a cultural put-down, not only from the left. Artists and bohemians used it for conformist, materialistic, comfort-loving taste; Marxists for anyone defending the interests of capital. Today calling something bourgeois usually means it is pretentious, conventional or a little too pleased with its own comfort.

Yes, for anyone who has read some Marx, argues about class over dinner or enjoys a joke that hides in plain sight. The embroidered lettering is subtle enough for the office or a family visit. The design comes as an embroidered classic T-shirt, embroidered premium hoodie, embroidered sweatshirt, cap and beanie hat.