In the mid-19th century, the German economist Karl Marx and other Marxist theorists used the term "petite bourgeoisie" to identify the socio-economic stratum of the bourgeoisie that comprised small-scale capitalists such as shop-keepers and workers who manage the production, distribution and/or exchange of commodities ... Petite bourgeoisie - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Petite_bourgeoisie
Hour after hour in the dark, Chander Shekhar’s mind raced ahead to morning.
More than three months had dragged by since the coronavirus forced Shekhar to shut down his business — a narrow, second-floor shop racked with vibrantly colored saris, on a block in New York’s Jackson Heights neighborhood once thronged with South Asian immigrant shoppers. Today, finally, he and other merchants were allowed to reopen their doors.
But they were returning to an area where COVID-19 had killed hundreds, leaving sidewalks desolate and storefronts to gather dust. Now fears were fading. But no one knew what lay ahead on this late-June Monday as owners raised the gates at jewelry stores, tandoori restaurants and bridal shops clustered near Roosevelt Avenue’s elevated train line. Overnight, the stress had woken Shekhar nine times.
“You cannot tell everybody it’s safe to come and buy from us. This is an invisible enemy that nobody can see,” said Shekhar, a father of two anxious about the shop’s $6,000 monthly rent. “This is my baby,” he said, of the store, Shopno Fashion. “I have worked hard for this for more than 20 years, then I got my shop. It’s not easy to leave it.”
Amid the deaths of friends and customers, Shekhar is reluctant to complain. And he knows he is not alone. As economies around the world reopen, legions of small businesses that help define and sustain neighborhoods are struggling. The stakes for their survival are high: The U.N. estimates that businesses with fewer than 250 workers account for two-thirds of employment worldwide.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — Small businesses around the world are fighting for survival amid the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. Whether they make it will affect not just local economies but the fabric of communities. Associated Press journalists tell their stories in the series “Small Business Struggles.”
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In New Orleans, the owner of a gallery and lounge that launched just before the pandemic hit reopened it as a takeout eatery, with himself as the lone employee. In Tokyo, a florist grabbed a lifeline from shut-in customers who bought blossoms to keep their spirits up. In Minneapolis, a dentist who refitted his office to protect patients from infection is starting over after it was destroyed in riots.
All acknowledge that reopening is just the beginning. But it is a critical milestone, nonetheless, a testament to their grit, creativity and no small amount of desperation. It’s about finding whatever works, because for now, there is no such thing as business as usual.
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Stephanie Skoglund touches up paint on a giant chalk board where guests can leave messages for the bride and groom at The Vault, the wedding and event center she owns in Tenino, Wash. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Over the years, Stephanie Skoglund invested countless hours of sweat equity renovating what was once Tenino, Washington’s general store -- replacing the floors, wiring chandeliers, adding a kitchen. Everything to upgrade the old sandstone building in this long-ago frontier town for use as a wedding hall.
With this year’s wedding season approaching, 40 celebrations were already on the calendar at The Vault and its sister facility. Then the coronavirus shut them down.
“We’re basically wiped out,” Skoglund said.
Skoglund turned off the electric circuits and water lines at both venues. She sold a dance floor for $1,000 and a large party tent for $2,600, to help cover her family’s bills. Her husband works for her business, so his income is gone, too.
Skoglund was approved for $3,200 of the nearly $25,000 she sought from the federal Payroll Protection Program before learning even that wouldn’t be coming. Then Washington state halted her unemployment payments as it scrambled to sort out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent claims.
Reopening, if you can call it that, has proved just as tough.
Stephanie Skoglund poses for a photo with her husband, Rick, in the main entrance to The Vault, the wedding and event center she owns in Tenino, Wash. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
In June, Skoglund started getting calls from people looking to rent tables, chairs and tents for outdoor events, her only revenue so far. She’ll host her first wedding in late July, one of three events that remain on the calendar. The hall can seat 299, so with 80 guests expected social distancing rules should not be an issue.
Of 20 couples who had booked weddings through October, eight rescheduled for next year and a dozen canceled. Skoglund wrote letters to say she hopes to refund them eventually; it wouldn’t feel right to keep deposits, regardless of language in the contracts.
Once events restart, Skoglund’s older children, aged 16 to 25, will pitch in as her staff. She’s hoping business solidifies by October. But she and her husband have talked about selling their home and businesses and starting over, if it doesn’t.
“I have to start thinking about how to save what I do have and not put myself in a financial position where I lose it,” she said. “Just making that decision: what’s my next step? That’s what keeps me up at night.”
--By Gene Johnson in Tenino, Washington
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After Beirut went into lockdown in March, Walid Ataya returned to his bakery, pizzeria and wine room each morning, perching on a stool at the sidewalk bar to maintain an outpost of commerce and consider his next moves.
Before the pandemic, Lebanon faced an economic crisis rooted in years of government mismanagement and corruption that had sparked nationwide protests. Ataya, who fled when Israel invaded in the mid-1980s, had no intention of leaving again.
“Over here in Lebanon, we can deal with crises,” said Ataya, whose Bread Republic presides over a busy intersection fronting the swanky Furn al-Hayek neighborhood. “We have been through wars and turmoil. ... So the pandemic came and for us it is just another crisis to overcome.”
Bakeries were exempted from closure, so Ataya’s expanded beyond bread to sell fresh pasta. He also kept up a limited flower business, only delivering orders and selling bouquets at the bakery.
Ataya kept on 10 of his 40 employees, sending others home at half-pay. Eventually, he let 10 go, recalling the rest at full wages. He negotiated a rent reduction and cut ties with some suppliers when an 85 percent drop in the nation’s currency left many accepting only dollars.
Walid Ataya, right, speaks with one of his employees at his Bread Republic shop on June 18, 2020. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
When rules were eased in May, he reopened the wine bar and pizzeria, albeit at 30 percent of capacity. At first, no one sat indoors and staff circulated among the tables, spraying disinfectant. Police still fined Ataya for overcrowding at his outdoor tables. He is contesting it in court.
Finally, in early June, restrictions were reduced enough for Ataya to reopen his restaurant across the street from the bakery and pizzeria. Protests had resumed and he had his hands full dealing with government paperwork. Then masked men broke into his office and carried out a safe holding thousands of dollars.
In recent days, though, customers filled the tables outside his businesses.
“We are in the stage of surviving day to day now,” Ataya said. “You cannot sit and do nothing. You have to take your chances.”
--By Sarah El Deeb in Beirut
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Shinichiro Hirano walks through his Sun Flower Shop in Tokyo on June 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
Shinichiro Hirano walks through his Sun Flower Shop in Tokyo on June 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
When Japanese officials asked people to stay home in March, Shinichiro Hirano cut the hours at Sun Flower Shop, but stayed open.
The blossom-filled store, in a central Tokyo neighborhood bordered by the Sumida River, quickly lost its business making arrangements for restaurant openings and job promotions. Tourists disappeared. The area, adjacent to the Athletes Village built for the Tokyo Olympics, had been expecting a boom, only to see it fizzle when the games were postponed.
Hirano placed colored tape on the floor to encourage social distancing. As pandemic fears soared, he found an audience.
“People were working from home and wanted to cheer themselves up,” said Hirano, who estimates 100 customers a day came to the shop. “Some people said they can forget the coronavirus when they come in our store. Flowers can give energy to people.”
Shinichiro Hirano arranges flowers at his Sun Flower Shop in Tokyo on June 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
On June 19, Hirano pulled the tape from the shop’s floor, while leaving warning signs up. Officially, the emergency was over, but the challenges continue.
One of the first bouquets he sold in the days afterward was to a customer marking the closing of a nearby restaurant. As other businesses reopen, some have ordered flowers to celebrate. Still, total sales have dropped by up to 20 percent.
Hirano, though, is consistent, returning to the store each day, bowing to customers, donning his favorite New York Yankees cap. Flowers are what he loves, he said.
“As long as you have a store, you have to keep it open,” he said. “I never for a moment thought of closing it.”
--By Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo
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The velvet chairs in DJ Johnson’s new NOLA Art Bar were filled with customers sipping cocktails on a mid-March evening when the announcement came: the city had ordered all bars to close. Johnson, who had moved home to New Orleans and invested his savings, turned up the lights, asked everyone to leave and boarded the door.
Six weeks later, though, he adapted to rules that allowed food service businesses to stay open for takeout. His bar hadn’t done food. But he started making New Orleans staples like boiled shrimp and oysters, taking orders at a table set up in the gallery’s door on St. Claude Avenue. The first day he made $35.
DJ Johnson poses for a portrait on June 25, 2020, inside his new NOLA Art Bar in New Orleans, which opened just before the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Patrons relax over cocktails in the velvet chairs of DJ Johnson’s NOLA Art Bar in New Orleans on June 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
By late June, he was still not making enough to cover his costs. But he tapped income from rental units he owns to cover bills and to show residents of the Marigny neighborhood that he was there to stay.
“The more I can get the word out, the better it will be for me when things are able to reopen, post-COVID,” he said. “So just weather the storm. Stay open. Let as many people as possible see that you’re open.”
On June 13, Johnson started seating diners inside the gallery at half capacity. A week later, he restarted construction on a bookstore and coffee shop next door. He’s still trying to figure out how to respond to a recent decision by Louisiana’s governor to close bars for on-site service, after coronavirus cases spiked. But he’s determined to keep going, even if it means going back to selling to passersby at his gallery’s door. For motivation, he thinks back to biographies of people like Nelson Mandela, as models for overcoming adversity.
“It’s discouraging. But the only thing that kept me going is, there is no quit,” he said. “You go until you can’t go anymore.”
--By Rebecca Santana in New Orleans
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Shao Lin Tia, left, and her husband, Christophe Tia, look out from the window of their second Thai restaurant on Rue Daguerre in Paris on May 2, 2020, as they wait for takeout customers. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)
For the first few weeks, the hush that settled over Paris as restrictions known as “The Confinement” took hold, provided Shao Lin Tia with some much-prized rest.
Up until then, Tia had been working feverishly at Ginza, the pan-Asian restaurant she and her husband run, filling in for a chef who had left a few months earlier. That came not long after the couple opened a Thai restaurant next door on Rue Daguerre, a street near the city’s famed catacombs that hosts a classic Paris market district of cheese shops, florists and cafes.
With both restaurants closed, the Tias had unexpected time to spend with their three children. The family worked their way through the restaurants’ food stocks to limit household spending. And the couple took the government at its word that commercial rents would be frozen and stopped payments.
France exempted small businesses in the restaurant, tourism, sports and culture sectors from social security contributions and reimbursed employers about 84% of net salaries. But with no money coming in and expenses looming, the time off began to weigh on the couple’s peace of mind.
“The government doesn’t give anything for free,” Tia said.
Finally, in late April, the rules relaxed enough for the Tias to set up a takeout window. But with Parisians limited to a single outing a day, each requiring a timestamped authorization form, Daguerre emptied early, limiting the dinner trade to just two hours.
In recent weeks, Tia has added a few outdoor tables. But sales remain 30 percent lower than at this time last year, despite unusually beautiful weather. Many neighborhood residents left the city for second homes when the lockdown began and likely will not return until September.
Tia worries that as the government stops covering salaries in coming months, a wave of layoffs could increase pressure on businesses like hers.
“We’ll never catch up, never in our lives,” she said. “And the hardest is yet to come.”
--By Lori Hinnant in Paris
Petty Bourgeoisie and Middle Class. The lower middle class or the petty (petite) bourgeoisie (the bourgeoisie was sometimes called the middle class in this era), constitutes "the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant" (Giddens and Held, p. 24). The characteristic of this class is that it does own some property, but not sufficient to have all work done by employees or workers. Members of this class must also work in order to survive, so they have a dual existence – as (small scale) property owners and as workers. Because of this dual role, members of this class have divided interests, usually wishing to preserve private property and property rights, but with interests often opposed to those of the capitalist class. This class is split internally as well, being geographically, industrially, and politically dispersed, so that it is difficult for it to act as a class. Marx expected that this class would disappear as capitalism developed, with members moving into the bourgeoisie or into the working class, depending on whether or not they were successful. Many in this class have done this, but at the same time, this class seems to keep recreating itself in different forms.
Marx considers the petite bourgeoisie to be politically conservative or reactionary, preferring to return to an older order. This class has been considered by some Marxists to have been the base of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. At other times, when it is acting in opposition to the interests of large capital, it may have a more radical or reformist bent to it (anti-monopoly).
Note on the Middle Class. The issue of the middle class or classes appears to be a major issue within Marxian theory, one often addressed by later Marxists. Many Marxists attempt to show that the middle class is declining, and polarization of society into two classes is a strong tendency within capitalism. Marx's view was that the successful members of the middle class would become members of the bourgeoisie, while the unsuccessful would be forced into the proletariat. In the last few years, many have argued that in North America, and perhaps on a world scale, there is an increasing gap between rich and poor and there is a declining middle.
While there have been tendencies in this direction, especially among the farmers and peasantry, there has been no clear long run trend toward decline of the middle class. At the same time as there has been polarization of classes, there have been new middle groupings created. Some of these are small business people, shopkeepers, and small producers while others are professional and managerial personnel, and some intellectual personnel. Well paid working class members and independent trades people might consider themselves to be members of the middle class. Some segments of this grouping have expanded in number in recent years. While it is not clear that these groups hold together and constitute a class in any Marxian sense of being combined in opposition to other classes, they do form a middle grouping. Since Marx's prediction has not come true, sociologists and other writers have devoted much attention to explaining this middle grouping – what is its basis, what are the causes of its stability or growth, how it fits into the class structure, and what are the effects of its existence on proletariat and bourgeoisie.
http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/s28f99.htm
Marx considers the petite bourgeoisie to be politically conservative or reactionary, preferring to return to an older order. This class has been considered by some Marxists to have been the base of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. At other times, when it is acting in opposition to the interests of large capital, it may have a more radical or reformist bent to it (anti-monopoly).
Note on the Middle Class. The issue of the middle class or classes appears to be a major issue within Marxian theory, one often addressed by later Marxists. Many Marxists attempt to show that the middle class is declining, and polarization of society into two classes is a strong tendency within capitalism. Marx's view was that the successful members of the middle class would become members of the bourgeoisie, while the unsuccessful would be forced into the proletariat. In the last few years, many have argued that in North America, and perhaps on a world scale, there is an increasing gap between rich and poor and there is a declining middle.
While there have been tendencies in this direction, especially among the farmers and peasantry, there has been no clear long run trend toward decline of the middle class. At the same time as there has been polarization of classes, there have been new middle groupings created. Some of these are small business people, shopkeepers, and small producers while others are professional and managerial personnel, and some intellectual personnel. Well paid working class members and independent trades people might consider themselves to be members of the middle class. Some segments of this grouping have expanded in number in recent years. While it is not clear that these groups hold together and constitute a class in any Marxian sense of being combined in opposition to other classes, they do form a middle grouping. Since Marx's prediction has not come true, sociologists and other writers have devoted much attention to explaining this middle grouping – what is its basis, what are the causes of its stability or growth, how it fits into the class structure, and what are the effects of its existence on proletariat and bourgeoisie.
http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/s28f99.htm
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