Memes

No the petty bourgeoisie often do hire workers to supplement their own labour. The bourgeoisie own the major means of production and live by extracting surplus value from wage labor, they do not need to work themselves. Petty bourgeoisie own small-scale means of production (a shop, a workshop, a plot of land) and still rely on their own labor, however often employing workers to supplement their labour.

In periods of socialist momentum, the petty bourgeoisie frequently become the most zealous allies of reaction because their precarious ownership of small-scale means of production places them in direct fear of expropriation and descent into the proletariat. Unlike the bourgeoisie, who may calculate accommodation with a rising revolutionary order, the petty bourgeois sees their individual livelihood, status, and slim hope of advancement threatened by collective transformation; this material anxiety drives them to support reactionary and often fascist forces that promise to defend private property and social "order" against the working class. Their reaction is not an ideological accident but class instinct: when the choice appears to be between losing their small capital or joining the stable exploiters, many choose reaction striving to join the exploiters.