In the U.S. 49.7 Million Are Now Poor, and 80% of the Total Population Is Near Poverty

[JDPriestly]

61. Actually, bourgeois probably comes from the word "burg" which means town in German.

Hamburg, Regensburg, etc.

So a bourgeois was a person who lived in a town as opposed to nobles who lived in castles or fortifications of some sort and peasants who lived on farms and in the villages.


Bourgeoisie

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bourgeoisie
(bo͝orzhwäzē`), originally the name for the inhabitants of walled towns in medieval France; as artisans and craftsmen, the bourgeoisie occupied a socioeconomic position between the peasants and the landlords in the countryside. The term was extended to include the middle class of France and subsequently of other nations. The word bourgeois has also long been used to imply an outlook associated with materialism, narrowness, and lack of culture—these characteristics were early satirized by Molière and have continued to be a subject of literary analysis.
Origins and Rise

The bourgeoisie as a historical phenomenon did not begin to emerge until the development of medieval cities as centers for trade and commerce in Central and Western Europe, beginning in the 11th cent. The bourgeoisie, or merchants and artisans, began to organize themselves into corporations as a result of their conflict with the landed proprietors. At the end of the Middle Ages, under the early national monarchies in Western Europe, the bourgeoisie found it in their interests to support the throne against the feudal disorder of competing local authorities. In England and the Netherlands, the bourgeoisie was the driving force in uprooting feudalism in the late 16th and early 17th cent.

In the 17th and 18th cent., the bourgeoisie supported principles of constitutionality and natural right, against the claims of divine right and against the privileges held by nobles and prelates. The English, American, and French revolutions derived partly from the desire of the bourgeoisie to rid itself of feudal trammels and royal encroachments on personal liberty and on the rights of trade and property. In the 19th cent., the bourgeoisie, triumphantly propounding liberalism, gained political rights as well as religious and civil liberties. Thus modern Western society, in its political and also in its cultural aspects, owes much to bourgeois activities and philosophy.

Subsequent to the Industrial Revolution, the class greatly expanded, and differences within it became more distinct, notably between the high bourgeois (industrialists and bankers) and the petty bourgeois (tradesmen and white-collar workers). By the end of the 19th cent., the capitalists (the original bourgeois) tended to be associated with a widened upper class, while the spread of technology and technical occupations was opening the bourgeoisie to entry from below.

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/bourgeoisie

One of the problems with Marxism is that it tends to characterize this potentially creative and independent group in society as something negative. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Depends on the facts. It's kind of a term that has become increasingly pejorative over time. Interestingly the more people move into towns and cities and away from farms and agriculture, the more negative is the view of the bourgeoisie -- the people living in towns and cities, neither belonging to the nobility nor to the serfs or peasantry.

So the meaning of the term has changed, but the need for a middle class of people who provide for themselves, who work, who do not rely almost entirely on a trust fund or income from passive investments or the ownership of property but also do not work the land and produce food is very great. Today, the bourgeoisie is less and less independent and creative and is being turned into a sort of urban serfdom. That is really sad.