Bourgeoisie

Also known as the “capitalist class”. It refers to the social group that owns the means of production of society and makes use the wage-labor to extract surplus-value; its essence is to appropriate the labor of the wage-laborers without compensation by means of the means of production, the main exploiting class in capitalist society.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed out that the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. The bourgeoisie gradually formed and grew at the end of feudal society with the emergence and development of capitalist relations of production. Its emergence and development had certain phases: with the opening-up of new routes, the opening-up of the world market, capitalism has gained a rapid development, which has prepared conditions for the growth of the bourgeoisie; with the development of the manufacture, the middle class appears; with the accomplishment of the Industrial Revolution and the further expansion of the world market, modern mechanical large-scale industry has replaced manufacture, and the bourgeoisie developed rapidly and became a principal class of the capitalist society. As the bourgeoisie developed economically, it also continued to seek to develop politically, eventually establishing the capitalist society and ushering in the bourgeois epoch of history. The bourgeoisie went through two stages of development: liberal bourgeoisie and monopoly bourgeoisie.

After the conquest of political power, the bourgeoisie established the capitalist system, and the bourgeoisie became the ruling class of capitalist society. The capitalist system, despite its distinction from the feudal-despotic system, serves the bourgeoisie and puts the proletariat and the working people under a new yoke of exploitation and replaced the old exploitation with a new exploitation and the old oppression with a new oppression. The modern state power is nothing more than a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. With the development of capitalist mode of production, the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist society became increasingly intense. Especially at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, capitalism entered the stage of monopoly capitalism, the monopoly bourgeoisie arose, and capitalism developed into the stage of imperialism. This is the historical background against which the two world wars of the 20th century took place. After the war, the monopoly bourgeoisie tried by all means to harmonize social relations and alleviate social contradictions through various economic and political means, thereby enabling the economy to develop in some way. However, the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist society still exists, and the contradiction between the socialization of production and the private appropriation of the means of production in capitalism makes cyclical economic crises frequent and the contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat increasingly intense. With the development and growth of the proletariat, socialist revolution is bound to occur and lead to the fall of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is the last exploiting class in history.

In different countries, the bourgeoisie has different situations. The Chinese bourgeoisie arose in the semi-colonial and semi-feudal society in the second half of the 19th century, and developed further in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, forming within itself the bureaucratic-bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. The bureaucratic-bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie assumed different roles and played different parts in the new-democratic revolution and socialist revolution in China. The bureaucratic-bourgeoisie was the target of the new-democratic revolution, and national bourgeoisie was one of the driving forces of the new-democratic revolution. With the victory of the new-democratic revolution and the successful accomplishment of the socialist transformation of the private property in the means of production, the Chinese bourgeoisie has vanished.