A large number of small capitalists inevitably continue to exist in every capitalist economy, in fact, being numerically preponderant, but they are all simply on a trajectory to becoming fully bourgeois, or fully proletarianised, and are all dominated by the large-scale capital that characterises the mode of production.
“Actually, the small producer, whom the romanticists and the Narodniks place on a pedestal, is therefore a petty bourgeois who exists in the same antagonistic relations as every other member of capitalist society, and who also defends his interests by means of a struggle which, on the one hand, is constantly creating a small minority of big bourgeois, and on the other, pushes the majority into the ranks of the proletariat. Actually, as everybody sees and knows, there are no small producers who do not stand between these two opposite classes, and this middle position necessarily determines the specific character of the petty bourgeoisie, its dual character, its two-facedness, its gravitation towards the minority which has emerged from the struggle successfully, its hostility towards the “failures,” i.e., the majority. The more commodity economy develops, the more strongly and sharply do these qualities stand out, and the more evident does it become that the idealisation of small production merely expresses a reactionary, petty-bourgeois point of view.” (p 221)
Its not that Sismondi, Proudhon or the Narodniks, or today's romanticists are themselves reactionaries. It is that the ideas they promote are reactionary. They are reactionary because they are Utopian and petty-bourgeois. The petty-bourgeois is reactionary, compared to the bourgeois, because the petty-bourgeois seeks to limit the development of capitalism, which is the process by which its contradictions are heightened, and history moves forward to Socialism. The bourgeois seeks to encourage that development. It is the difference between Sismondi and Ricardo, as set out by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9.
As Marx points out, Sismondi did not seek to defend or promote the petty-bourgeois. He was on the side of the labourers in all their manifestations; he supported measures to protect workers through factory legislation. All of this can, of course, be said of today's “anti-capitalists”. It was not the aims that Sismondi, Proudhon or the Narodniks had which made them petty-bourgeois, but the policies they advocated as the means of achieving them. Again, the same applies to today's “anti-capitalists” and “anti-imperialists”. In short, it is the failure to recognise the need to push beyond the achievements of big industrial capital, and not to try to hold it back, or turn it back, be it via anti-monopoly measures, Brexit, or whatever. All such measures are petty-bourgeois and reactionary.
“The question is: on what grounds, then, is he described as a petty bourgeois? On the grounds that he does not understand the connection between small production (which he idealises) and big capital (which he attacks). On the grounds that he does not see that his beloved small producer, the peasant, is in reality becoming a petty bourgeois.” (p 221)
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