The petite bourgeoisie is economically distinct from the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat social-class strata who rely entirely on the sale of their labor-power for survival; and also are distinct from the capitalist class haute bourgeoisie (high bourgeoisie) who own the means of production, and thus can buy the labor-power of the proletariat and lumpenproletariat to work the means of production. Though the petite bourgeoisie can buy the labor of others, they typically work alongside their employees, unlike the haute bourgeoisie.
I think "lower middle-class" is a reasonable apropos of this. That said, I don't think the Gateses would fit this definition either ...
The three basic classes are the working class which survived on wage labor, the petit borgeoisie that both rent labor and work as essential means of support, and he capitalists whose support is dominantly derived by renting labor to apply to capital.
The petit bourgeoisie is the middle class of the three. (The lower and upper middle class are both part of it.)
Bill Gates (the Microsoft one) parents appear to have derived wealth largely from his father's successful law practice, dependent on his own labor essentially alongside other rented labor, which would them petit borgeoisie, middle class. They were certainly at the quite high end of prosperity for that class, so upper middle class. (It's not impossible that they at some point crossed into the haut bourgeoisie, but the descriptions I've seen suggest mostly very successful petit borgeoisie.)
Bill Gates himself rapidly moved into the haut bourgeoisie with Microsoft's success.
Okay ... this is another one of those slippery terms. As a onetime student of European history I got hung up on the etymology [0]
Historically, the medieval French word bourgeois denoted the inhabitants of the bourgs (walled market-towns), the craftsmen, artisans, merchants, and others, who constituted "the bourgeoisie", they were the socio-economic class between the peasants and the landlords, between the workers and the owners of the means of production
I was incorrectly equating "upper class" with these "landlords", but I guess as of the French revolution, with the Aristocracy overthrown the semantics shifted and "haute bourgeois" became the term for the ruling class.
Contemporarily, the terms "bourgeoisie" and "bourgeois" (noun) identify the ruling class in capitalist societies, as a social stratum
I would contend that the modern phenomenon of "the 1%" more closely resembles the aristocracy of old than Haute Bourgeois but I would be at odds with accepted terminology.
So yeah Bill Gates is from a Bourgeois background (particular grade is unclear) but arguably now occupies a distant Aristocratic stratum beyond Haute Bourgeois.
Aren't those categories unactionable? I mean, a lady owns a beauty shop, spends 10 hours a day ordering supplies, doing payroll, managing advertising, hiring and fireing, somehow she's not working class because other people are involved and paid by her? A guy like Bill Gate's Dad is categorized middle class because he works alone, sort of, despite essentially bossing around his clients with autocratic decisions made in the quiet of his office?
Not really; I mean, both sides of the log ideological struggle over capitalism and left alternatives has centered around both sides understanding and basing action around pretty much precisely the divisions in class interest reflected by those categories; they're quite actionable.
> I mean, a lady owns a beauty shop, spends 10 hours a day ordering supplies, doing payroll, managing advertising, hiring and fireing, somehow she's not working class because other people are involved and paid by her?
Right. As a business owner, she has distinct differences of interest from those living by wage labor (including an interest in minimizing the cost of wage labor); as someone who most apply their own labor as well as capital, she has economic interests distinct from those of pure capitalists. Hence, she's in the middle class of capitalism.
> A guy like Bill Gate's Dad is categorized middle class because he works alone, sort of, despite essentially bossing around his clients with autocratic decisions made in the quiet of his office?
Sure (though the founder of successful law firm probably is a working employer, not working alone.) Again, a similar alignment of interest is at play. There is an important distinction orthogonal to class, aside from just the degree of success, though: the lawyer is also part of the intelligentsia as well as the petit borgeoisie, while the beauty store owner is not. The intelligentsia cuts across classes, and have distinct interests.
