Bourgeoisie, Progressives, Dostoevsky

In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, written after his first trip to western Europe in 1861, Dostoevsky asks of the French bourgeois, 

Why does he so much want to convince himself that his newspapers are not open to bribery?

Servility keeps seeping into the very nature of the bourgeois and is increasingly taken for virtue. 

...In general, the bourgeois is very far from being stupid, but his intelligence is a short-term one somehow, and works by snatches. He has a great many ready-made conceptions stored up, like fuel for the winter, and he seriously intends to live with them for a thousand years.
And what indifference to everything, what short-lived, empty interests!”

Dostoevsky answers that the bourgeois needs to believe he has triumphed within the framework of society, and the external appearance of this victory is the most important thing. There is no yearning for something beyond the material plane - that would be an expression of dissatisfaction with the material plane! To disbelieve in the State and society is to disbelieve in the arena on which he has his victory. Thus all the servility beneath the State. He and the State are one.

So the true bourgeois is bourgeois in his depths, and opposed to the spirit. To add though, to be of the middle-class doesn’t mean you have to be bourgeois in the spirit.  

And so interestingly the socialists/progressives or whatever they are labelled should you’d think be felt a threat to the bourgeoisie, in actual fact if we push things a little, they become ideologically inseparable, as both are seeking satisfaction at the material level, both denying the spirit. The progressives have greater dynamic force for effecting the make-up of of society because they are fuelled by an idealism, pushing beyond the present, whereas the bourgeois simply will do all to maintain the present. However because evidently it is the progressive element that has taken the reins of worldly society, then the bourgeois to maintain his faith in the State, and the place where he has his victory, falls in line with the progressives, and if society is shifting and various ideologies being inserted into it, well then, that must be all for the best. And thus the unity of the left and the bourgeoisie regarding faith in the mainstream corporate and state media, the removal of evil liberties and all that kind of stuff. Both elements united un servility!