Épater le Bourgeois...This common French phrase

means "to shock the middle class"

The shock is usually applied with relish

by those who see the bourgeoisie

as unimaginative, conservative, convention-bound,

safety-first and self-satisfied

As an undergraduate, I liked to annoy the dons at College by turning up at my tutorials in a leather biker jacket, a miniskirt, ripped fishnet stockings, and Doc Marten boots.

My hair (which has never recovered) was crimped and sprayed into black and pink spikes. "Épater le bourgeois" was the idea, I suppose.

I never identified myself as a goth, nor do my own students today who dress in a similar way, but they'd probably accept the term as a fair description of their style and sensibility

Bourgeois Society (Capitalism)

Karl Marx predicted the inevitable implosion of capitalism

He theorized that a much more humane, egalitarian, and democratic system would rise in its place.

It is little wonder that the bourgeoisie in the United States have striven so tenaciously to inculcate the unwashed masses to despise, fear, and ridicule socialism, communism, and nearly all aspects of Marxist thought.

Sound bites, emotionally evocative images, ahistorical presentations, fear mongering, jingoism, advertising, and numerous temptations of instant gratification comprise a vast array of highly refined and insidious propaganda that perpetually hammers our minds to create a potent and effective false consciousness, and an irrational fear of anything but capitalism.

The American bourgeoisie will never accept or tolerate the idea that the political struggle is between bourgeois and proletarian democracy.

In most cases, the bourgeoisie absolutely denies the mere possibility of a proletarian democracy.

The bourgeoisie does concede however that the political struggle may be between the bourgeois conservatives and the bourgeois liberals.

But as long as power democratically rotates among various sectors of the bourgeoisie, our democracy is irrefutably bourgeois.

Bourgois Society

Bourgeois Society is the social formation in which the commodity relation – the relation of buying and selling – has spread into every corner of life.

The family and the state still exist, but – the family is successively broken down and atomised, more and more resembling a relationship of commercial contract, rather than one genuinely expressing kinship and the care of one generation for the other.

The state retains its essential instruments of violence, but more and more comes under the sway of commerical interests, reduced to acting as a buyer and seller of services on behalf of the community.

The ruling class in bourgeois society is the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production as Private Property, despite the fact that the productive forces have become entirely socialised and operate on the scale of the world market.

The producing class in bourgeois society is the proletariat, a class of people who have nothing to sell but their capacity to work; since all the means of production belong to the bourgeoisie, workers have no choice but to offer their labour-power for sale to the bourgeoisie.

This system of buying and selling labour-power is called wage-labour and is characteristic of bourgeois society, though it has been around since the Peasant Revolt of 1381.

The classic form of wage labour is payment for work by the hour or week. Nowadays many workers work on the basis of contracts and piece-work but these forms only disguise the underlying relationship, which remains that of wage-labour.

Money and all forms of credit reach their highest development in bourgeois society. As a result, life in bourgeois society “happens” to people in much the same way as the weather happens to people, with money flowing around apparently according to its own laws.

To put this another way, in bourgeois society there is a “fetishism” of commodities.

Just as tribal peoples believed that their lives were being determined by trees and animals and natural forces possessing human powers, in bourgeois society, people's lives are driven by money and other commodities, whose value is determined by extra-mundane forces.