got a hot maybe lukewarm take here. for a minute i saw a lot of posts going around saying "calling you petty bourgeois is not an insult it's an objective evaluation of your class position!" which is true....but it's also true that people were mainly bringing it up in frustration over people parroting reactionary rhetoric, in this case over a.i.️ art debates.
if you are an artist who primarily makes your living through self-employed commissions, most marxists would characterize you as a member of the artisan class, which is a precarious position under capitalism. capitalism pushes all the classes of previous societies towards either bourgeois capitalists (owners) or proletarians (workers)--from nobility to farmers to musicians etc etc, everyone finds themselves being pushed into one of these positions. clear examples for artists can be walt disney, who could sketch and all but ultimately owned a massive media empire (bourgeois), versus the animators he employed at said company, who made their living working in his studios. they were (and are) proletarians, and as such organized in high-profile labor organizing like strikes in the 1940s, for example.
but what of the artist who makes money off commissions and print-on-demand services? especially in the latter case, you are not doing the screenprinting and packing yourself, yet you don't own redbubble. this is where the "petty" or "petit" part comes in. someone else is doing some labor for you, yet you still do a lot of legwork and dont enjoy the same security as a larger capitalist. (the moment you hire an employee, you become a capitalist, albeit a small one, because at least part of your income now relies on your employee helping you bring in more money than you pay them. ex. youtubers hiring editors) this can and should be an objective judgement of your economic position from a marxist/communist/whatever perspective. it doesnt make you suddenly an irredeemably evil person. after all, engels was a capitalist and look what he did for workers! but many capitalists do indeed do horrible things in the name of profit, living lavishly at the expense of everyone else, so we can't pretend like there's not a wealth of deserved hatred for capitalists generally.
so what happens in the case of AI art debates is that people are understandably upset that the very thing they used to promote their work and get clients (public-facing internet) has been used to make a machine that appears poised to take away a lot of their income sources, maybe even forcing them out of artisanry altogether and into fully alienated wage labor (proletarianization). im not going to get into the weeds of the many arguments here because what i want to emphasize is that capitalists are also afraid that image generators will infringe on their profits, control of their image (ex. deepfakes), and many other reasons....AND that one route they have chosen to try and wrestle back control is that of intellectual property and copyright law.
so the frustration communists have here is that intellectual property, like any form of private property, ultimately serves to funnel wealth to the largest capitalists who own things at the expense of and to the detriment of everyone else, the majority of whom are workers. petty bourgeois artisans like independent artists and musicians can utilize copyright law to their advantage in some contexts, but can also be victims of lawsuit trolling or bigger capitalists just generally pushing them out of the market (monopolies are an inbuilt consequence of capitalism once it develops enough). being petty bourgeois means you do have a foot in either camp (to varying degrees), and it's frustrating to see someone who could ally with communists & workers instead side with capitalists who will ultimately screw them over anyway. it's that whole "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" thing all over again.
im not claiming to know the answers about the future of art re: AI, nor do i want to discuss it. rather what im trying to say is that being an artist, artisan, or other middle class that's not uniformly proletarian or bourgeois doesn't mean that you have a uniquely spiritual calling that exists outside the economy (...and a lot of MLs on here are way too unsympathetic about these economic anxities. saying "lol get proletarianized idiot!" doesnt really help anybody here). you are likely either petty bourgeois, or (what i suspect to be more common) a proletarian aspiring to become petty bourgeois. and it's not inherently a moral indictment to point this out, but it is something you have to wrestle with if you're serious about left-wing politics or even just want a sensible explanation of things (lbr liberal economists mostly spin fairy tales). if you really are in a petty bourgeois position, then siding with workers in different parts of class struggle can and will go against your economic interests at times, either personally or for your class as a whole. i used the example of artisans here but i think a lot of us in the global north are in similar positions with mixed interests. eventually the tensions boil over, the scales tip, and we're all pushed one way or another. and the question is, with whom will you align?
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