Capital in spe and its laborious binds: The class condition of small business owners in Portugal

“Which class position do small business owners occupy in the contemporary capitalist class structure, and which determinants contribute to explaining it?” This is the research question guiding this investigation. By inquiring about class position and its objective conditions, the research question situates the approach within Marxist thought. It promotes an understanding of the concrete while remaining attentive to the dialectics of praxis and to discourses as mediators between doxa and structural realms. Supported by socio-historical analysis and narrative interviews, the methodological approach examines the relations of contiguity and extension of the research object, critically analyzing secondary data and official political discourses. More than just a peculiar class position, research shows that small business owners are embedded in a complex set of productive, economic, financial, and institutional structures, blurred by the effects of legal ownership. Beneath this, labor ties the objective conditions in which small entrepreneurs pursue autonomy and independence as a form of emancipation, yet they find themselves trapped by a paradoxical subordination caused by the individuation of the process of creating their own means of production. In these processes, small entrepreneurs, along with their families and employees, find limited ways to escape their structural entrenchment.The dissertation is organized into five parts. Part I addresses theoretical issues, revisiting Marxian writings and the debate that guided class analysis until the 1980s. Part II, drawing on this socio-historical context, examines the transformations affecting productive institutions, employment relations, and labour conditions, focusing on their ideological, organizational, and institutional perspectives, and aims to place the research object within its historical and dialectical context. Part III outlines the methodological choices, detailing the methods and techniques used for empirical and critical analysis.Part IV discusses interviewees' trajectories and debates about the moral economy of small businesses in relation to the ideal types found in both neoclassical and common views on entrepreneurship. It emphasizes the pursuit of productive sovereignty as a key aspect of entrepreneurial attitude, which is intertwined with practical reasons shaped by economic and social structures. These themes are explored across three chapters in Part V, focusing on the structural and socio-institutional context of small businesses, including market structures, credit relations, and interactions with the State and legal-institutional frameworks.We conclude by recognizing that labor and its processes connect not only to the market structure in which entrepreneurship develops but also to the contradictions arising from the positions held within it. These contradictions limit the transformation of potential capital into actual capital, with the latter generating and capturing surplus value. These positions and their paradoxical effects operate within a “structurally granted space” and under a regulatory framework that, although claimed to be protective, increases small business owners' exposure to economic, social, and civic risks.