The exploiting class of the capitalist mode of production that organizes and directs the process of surplus value production and capital accumulation.
The origins of the bourgeoisie
The bourgeoisie was born as a mercantile class linked to long-distance trade. Medieval merchants and money-changers would use their profits to progressively take control of the guilds and craftsmen, beginning the production of surplus value.
It would not be, however, until it achieved the conversion of land into a commodity that it could extend the cycle of accumulation and reorder society around itself and the needs derived from the reproduction of capital. The peasant masses driven from the countryside would become the basis of the first modern proletariat and the condition that made the mass industrialization of production possible for the bourgeoisie.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns; from this urban estate the first elements of the bourgeoisie developed.
The discovery of America and the rounding of Africa opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The markets of India and China, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation and to industry an impulse never before known, and thereby accelerated the development of the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society.
The old feudal or guild organisation of industry could no longer meet the demand, which grew with the opening of new markets. Manufacture took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; the division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of the division of labour within each single workshop.
But the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by modern large-scale industry; the place of the industrial middle class was taken by industrial millionaires — the leaders of whole industrial armies —, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. The world market prodigiously accelerated the development of commerce, of navigation and of communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation and railways extended, the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how 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.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance. An oppressed estate under the sway of the feudal lords; an armed and self-governing association in the commune; here an independent urban republic; there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy; afterwards, in the period of manufacture, a counterpoise against the nobility in the semi-feudal (estates-based) or absolute monarchies and, in general, the cornerstone of the great monarchies, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself exclusive political sway in the modern representative State.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
The bourgeoisie as ruling class of an ascendant capitalism
Throughout the 19th century, the heart of the ascendant period of capitalism, as it extends the world market, the bourgeoisie will seize power in practically every country where capitalism has become the organizing axis of society. It will, however, find an objective limit to its revolutionary expansion across the world in the size of the remaining extra-capitalist markets and their capacity to absorb and realize surplus value. Capitalism enters its imperialist phase and the needs of accumulation transform its internal organization and the very form of the bourgeoisie.
What, in the last instance, does the economic phenomenon of the joint-stock company mean? It represents, on the one hand, the unification of a number of small fortunes into one large capital for production. It represents, on the other, the separation of production from capitalist ownership. That is to say, it denotes that a double victory has been won over the capitalist mode of production: but still on a capitalist basis.
What, then, do the statistics cited by Bernstein mean, according to which a growing number of shareholders participate in capitalist enterprises? The statistics demonstrate precisely this: at present a capitalist enterprise does not correspond, as before, to a single owner of capital but to a number of capitalists.
Consequently, the economic notion of "capitalist" no longer corresponds to an isolated individual. The industrial capitalist of today is a collective person, composed of hundreds, even thousands of individuals. The category of "capitalist" has become a social category. It has been "socialised", within the framework of capitalist society.
Rosa Luxemburg. Reform or Revolution, 1899
The decadent bourgeoisie
This tendency towards the "socialization" of the concept of capitalist will be radicalized with the entry of capitalism into decadence. From 1914 onwards, the fusion of the industrial bourgeoisie around the banks, and of the resulting finance capital into the state, the refuge of the last remnants of the aristocracy, becomes the generalization of state capitalism throughout the world.
Under different forms, ranging from the almost total statization of national capital under the Stalinist regimes to the nominal "liberalism" of the US, the bourgeoisie is transformed into a "state bourgeoisie".
Its power as a class is no longer defined by the individual ownership of the means of production, already blurred by the change in ownership structure that the explosion of joint-stock companies represented, but by its collective position as manager of the state and of a national capital that definitively no longer "fits" within its borders.