The Bourgeois Class No Longer Exists: An Essay on the Post-Bourgeois

Patrick
6 min readJul 16, 2021

The formulation of the bourgeois class was done out of reaction to monarchic overreach as people wanted more property but the monarchs refused and so with monarchs’ loving divine rights to rule. Well, how do you oppose the monarch? Say he is not divine. Boom. Protestant. Boom. Private property. Protestants were the first bourgeois who came around during (per Berardi) the humanist revolution.

Berardi says “In the context of a long-term anthropological evolution, contemporary capitalism can be understood as the turning point beyond the age of Humanism. The modern bourgeoisie embodied the values of Humanist freedom from theological destiny, and bourgeois capitalism was a product of the Humanist revolution.” “The bourgeoisie was a strongly territorialized class”, is such due to not only the power being held and based on the property of PHYSICAL assets.

One could mention the fact of also belonging to a stable community but that is not as important. The only issue with trying to find this bourgeois class was the issue that they no longer exist. The financial deterritorializing of our current day has created a post-bourgeois class which now no longer rests its relation of power (and or relation at all) on the PHYSICAL assets but rather IMMATERIAL ONES. This post-bourgeois class is not concerned with its future in regards to any territorial community because, by the click of a button, they can move their business to the other side of the country and or the world. Berardi gives them the title of the ‘elsewhere class’ as, “it continuously displaces the stakes of its investment.”

However, there is another name we can grant it, the ‘virtual class’. There are two reasons Berardi gives for this title. The first reason is that “the class that gains profits from virtual activities, like net trading, and high tech immaterial production.” The second reason is that “it is the class that does not actually exist.” The important change we see between the now non-existent bourgeois class and this new post-bourgeois class is how they hold and base power. They have engaged in a transformation transcending the material manifestation of power to a plane of immateriality. Berardi emphasized in one of his public lectures done at Simon Fraser University at about 20:10 just how unfazed this immaterial form of power lies within material change.

“Once upon a time, we knew that it was possible to face the enemy in the street, in the place of war, in the territory. In the real world, in the physical world! It was possible to fight in a physical way. And so to stop the aggression and start the process of negotiation, this is impossible nowadays. Because our bodies, our physical reality is unable to meet the ghost of the enemy, which is nowhere! You can burn the bank if you want. It’s an interesting experiment from the aesthetic point of view (irony) but it’s nothing from the political point of view because the power is not there. It’s not inside the bank. The real power is in the figures, in the algorithms, in the IMMATERIAL!”

Berardi emphasizes just how radical of a change, how radical of a shift in how we can not just interpret but interact with this new form of power. In good words from Gannon (@apoliticalteen on TikTok), “Even if let’s say we kill everybody, we kill the capitalists, we kill the government but, the actual power, the actual control over information is still there because technological information and the ownership over digitized information like algorithms and the way technology is working, that is the real power! Like Berardi said! You can burn every single bank in the world and that wouldn’t change s***, that wouldn’t change anything, the power isn’t there anymore!”. With this comes the almost impossible task of being able to locate who is investing within the financial market as all of us are obliged to depend upon it.

Berardi himself admits to being one who invests within this financial market. “In a sense, everybody is part of the class that is investing in the financial market. Including myself. As a teacher I am bound to wait for a pension, and I know that my pension will be paid if some investment funds will be profitable, therefore I am obliged to depend for my future revenue on the profitability of the financial market. The ‘elsewhere class’ has re-established the economic rationale of the rentier, as profit is no longer linked to the expansion of the existing wealth, but is linked to the mere possession of an invisible asset: money, or, more accurately, credit.”

Looking further into the dematerialization of money we can pull real-life examples of just how much has changed with things like making money fiat. Berardi uses an example of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to show this by saying, “Once upon a time officials of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were loading gold bars onto trolleys and rolled them from one country’s basement to another. Today some 1.3 trillion in currency is traded every day, and never takes a tangible form.”

As much as I have repeated myself I am attempting as the writer to stick into your skull that you have as the reader this powerful idea. Money is no longer by gold bars (in reference to the U.S.) but rather by ones and zeros on a screen which “piped through miles of wire, pumped over fiber-optic highways, bounced off satellites, and beamed from one microwave relay station to another.” I would make the assertion here that it is only time until this form of immaterial power must grow so sovereign that we will only rely on immaterial means of capital transaction which in this sense is just the transaction of power. This means that once gone with the gold bars it’s only a matter of time until we’re gone with the dollars and the coins and it will all be held within the immaterial realm to act as a ghost of power which this post-bourgeois class treats as means. Something to point out about this transition is the incapability to be able to trace a hideout, a homeland. The reason for this is because there is no homeland within this age and realm of virtual finance. Along with no homeland there is, “no community, no belonging, and also no money.”

It is rather only one thing that exists for this post-bourgeois class in this realm of virtual finance, virtual power. That is, “Just faith. Faith in signs, in figures.” The post-bourgeois have transformed and dematerialized their power to where now the only way we can materialize it through our cognition of it is through simply faith. Nothing is stopping the possibility of a system wipe to where now the performance of power will be most prevalent and strong through power’s absence. Ones and zeros on the screen with red and green arrows to hold whether or not the world will either break down or continue to turn properly. That is, for now. He then says, “The post-bourgeois class announces the return of the baroque.” What Berardi is saying here is that here occurs the return to aesthetic. The post-bourgeois class, how do they make money? Rather, how do they know they made money? Big numbers on a screen. Green and red arrows. All this simply shows is the worshipping of aesthetics. Not necessarily baroque aesthetic but just an aesthetic. Numbers, signs, arrows, etc. All this leads to them seeing big numbers on-screen = money, and this leads to the worshipping of aesthetics.

“Although defeated and marginalized during the age of bourgeois progress and the rational organization of social life, the baroque has never disappeared.” The easiest way to explain this is simply by replacing baroque with aesthetic fetishization. When mentioning this “age of bourgeois progress” Berardi is referring to the age of monarchy to private property. Increased property rights, bourgeois progress. But even then worshipping the aesthetic property rights held shows us that this practice of aesthetic fetishization has never died or disappeared for the bourgeois class. It seems as if the bourgeois classes cannot live without it!

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