mao's insight cannot be transposed onto advanced capitalist societies, but proletarianization does not automatically absolve the petty bourgeoisie. even when materially proletarianized, their symbolic status often persists, and they struggle precisely to preserve that distinction
You see this all the time with people thinking that, for example, Mao's understanding of the petty bourgeois character of teachers in pre revolutionary China still applying in advanced capitalist countries.