Abstract
There is a now famous short passage in the “fourth volume” of Capital, Theories of Surplus Value, in which Marx criticizes Ricardo for having neglected “the constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other.” These middle classes, Marx declares, “are a burden weighing heavily on the working base and increase the social security and power of the upper ten thousand.”1 The statement is an enigmatic one, in spite of some recent attempts to make it appear otherwise,2 because it does not accord with the main weight of Marx’s theoretical thinking, either on class in general, or the “middle class” in particular. It must be attributed to the remarkable prescience of a man whose insights not infrequently broke the bounds of the theoretical formulations whereby he sought to discipline them. That it describes a fundamental aspect of modern social reality is unquestionable; and the same is true of the more characteristic Marxian conception that the tendency of capitalist development is to diminish the proportional significance in the class structure of those whom he normally designated as the “petty bourgeoisie.” I shall henceforth refer to this grouping, however, as the “old middle class,” using the term “middle class” without qualification to refer to propertyless non-manual, or “white-collar,” workers.
Reprinted from Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of Advanced Societies (New York: Harper Collins, 1975).
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Notes
Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 2 (London 1969), p. 573.
cf. Martin Nicolaus, “Proletariat and middle class in Marx: Hegelian choreography and the capitalist dialectic,” Studies on the Left, 7 1967. The author’s analysis of Marx’s problems with the “middle class” turns upon what I consider to be a mistaken separation between Marx’s concern with “the market” in his early writings and with the theory of surplus value in his later works.
The attention given to what Lederer and Marschak called “Der neue Mittelstand” in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s obviously relates to the internal problems of Social Democracy and the rise of Nazism. It might be pointed out that the “official” theory of the right-wing, anti-semitic Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen-Verband emphasized the significance of the participation of the white-collar worker in the delegation of entrepreneurial authority, and the existence of promotion opportunities, as distinguishing him from the manual worker. For the basic sociological works of the period see Emil Lederer and J. Marschak, “Der neue Mittlelstand,” Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, vol. 9 (I), 1926; and Lederer, Die Privatangestellten in der modernen Wirtschaftsentwicklung (Tübingen 1912).
For some cross-national comparisons, see Bert F. Hoselitz, The Role of Small Industry in the Process of Economic Growth (The Hauge 1968).
Vide Joseph Bensman and Arthur J. Vidich, The New American Society (Chicago 1971), for an exposition of the latest in a long line of putative “revolutions” stretching from Burnham onwards: the “revolution of the middle class.”
Figures for the USA calculated by Gavin Mackenzie from US census data; the additional 4 per cent and 5 per cent represent farm-workers. Other data are taken from Guy Routh, Occupation and Pay in Great Britain, 1906–60 (Cambridge 1965); and Solomon B. Levine, “Unionisation of white-collar employees in Japan,” in Adolf Sturmthal, White-collar Trade Unions (Urbana 1966).
Michel Crozier, The World of the Office Worker (Chicago, 1971), pp. 11–12; and “White-collar unions—the case of France,” in Sturmthal, op. cit., pp. 91–2.
cf. Routh, op. cit.; Robert K. Burns, “The comparative economic position of manual and white-collar employees,” The Journal of Business, 27, 1954; US Department of Labor, Blue-Collar/White-Collar Pay Trends. Monthly Labor Review, June 1971; and Crozier, The World of the Office Worker, pp. 12–15. For an assessment of how far progressive income tax affects these income profiles, see Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order (London, 1971), pp. 119–21.
M. P. Fogarty, “The white-collar pay structure in Britain,” Economic Journal, 69 1959. Hamilton points out that statistics concerning skilled manual workers often include foremen, whose wages are normally markedly higher than those of skilled workers as such; foremen are more appropriately regarded as supervisory, non-manual workers: Richard Hamilton, “The income difference between skilled and white-collar workers,” British Journal of Sociology, 14, 1963. As regards the “declining curve” of income, however, Mackenzie indicates that this probably holds for a certain proportion of clerical workers, as well as manual workers: See Gavin Mackenzie, “The economic dimensions of embourgeoisement,” British Journal of Sociology, 18 1967, p. 32; this article critically examines the preceding work by Hamilton.
George Sayers Bain, The Growth of White-Collar Unionism (Oxford 1970), p. 59.
A survey in Britain in 1961 showed that, whereas 86 per cent of white-collar workers were involved in sick pay schemes, only 33 per cent of manual workers were so covered: HMSO, Sick Pay Schemes (London 1964). See also The Industrial Society, Status and Benefits in Industry (London 1966); aspects of this work are criticized in Bain, op. cit., p. 64.
Enid Mumford and Olive Banks, The Computer and the Clerk (London 1967), p. 21.
S. M. Miller, “Comparative social mobility,” Current Sociology, 1, 1960. Blau and Duncan show that, in the American social structure at least, the first job has a basic influence on achieved mobility: while the gross amount of mobility experienced by those starting their careers in white-collar occupations may be about the same as that of those starting in manual jobs, the former tend to experience much greater net mobility, even judged in relation to parental occupation (Peter M. Blau and O. D. Duncan, The American Occupational Structure New York 1967).
David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker (London, 1958), p. 81.
Fritz Croner, Die Angestellten in der modernen Gesellschaft (Cologne 1962), pp. 34ff.
An interesting example of an attempt to reduce class differentiation in housing in Britain is given in Leo Kuper, Living in Towns (London 1953). While recognizing the existence of class segregation in neighbourhood organization in Japan, Dore stresses in his study of a Tokyo ward that, as he puts it: “ ‘Japanese-ness,’ as opposed to ‘Western-ness,’ is still a criterion of some importance for dividing men from their fellows and one which does not necessarily follow economic status lines” (R. P. Dore, City LIfe in Japan, London 1958, pp. 12–13).
The leading works are: Alfred Willener, Images de la société et classes sociales (Berne 1957); Heinrich Popitz et al., Das Gesellshaftsbild des Arbeiters (Tübingen 1957). See also Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict (Stanford, 1959), pp. 280–9; John Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge 1969), pp. 116–56; Hansjürgen Daheim, “Die Vorstellungen vom Mittelstand,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 12, 1960; Siegfried Braun and Jochen Fuhrmann, Angestelltenmentalität (Neuwied 1970). This latter work, however, questions some of the traditional views.
cf. Ezra F. Vogel, Japan’s New Middle Class (Berkeley 1963), pp. 142–62; and Chie Nakane, Japanese Society (London 1970), pp. 115ff.
Terence J. Johnson, Professions and Power (London 1972), pp. 54ff.
C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York 1951), p. x.
Dahrendorf, “Recent changes in the class structure of European societies,” in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, op. cit., pp. 248–9.
According to Taira, 87 per cent of Japanese unions are of the enterprise type, and about 80 per cent of organized labour belongs to them. Koji Taira, Economic Development and the Labor Market in Japan (New York 1970), p. 168.
Solomon B. Levine, “Unionisation of white-collar employees in Japan,” in Sturmthal, White-Collar Trade Union, op. cit., p. 238. On the development of enterprise unionism, see also Levine, Industrial Relations in Postwar Japan (Urbana 1958).
cf. Edouard Dolléans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier, (Paris 1953), vol. 2, pp. 13–56.
cf. Asher Tropp, The School Teachers (London 1957).
cf. Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker, op. cit., pp. 89ff.
For figures on Britain, see Bain, The Growth of White-Collar Unionism, op. cit., pp. 38–9.
Jon M. Shepard, Automation and Alienation (Cambridge, Mass. 1971), p. 43. cf. also Dorothy Wedderburn, “Annäherung von Angestellten— und Arbeiterätigkeiten?,” and subsequent contributions in Günter Friedrichs, Computer und Angestellte, vol. 2 (Frankfurt 1971).
US Department of Labor, Adjustments to the Introduction of Office Automation, Bulletin no. 1276 (Washington 1960). Other contributions to a now very large literature include Leonard Rico, The Advance against Paperwork (Ann Arbor 1967); H. A. Rhee, Office Automation in Social Perspective (Oxford 1968); Enid Mumford and Olive Banks, The Computer and the Clerk, op. cit.; W. H. Scott, Office Automation (OECD 1965).
Maurice Bouvier-Ajam and Gilbert Mury, Les classes sociales en France, vol. 1 (Paris 1963), p. 63.
Alain Touraine, La société post-industrielle (Paris 1969), pp. 82–3.
Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière (Paris 1963); Pierre Belleville, Une nouvelle classe ouvrière (Paris 1963). See also Mallet, “La nouvelle classe ouvrière en France,” in Les classes sociales dans le monde d’aujourd’hui, op. cit.
cf. Stanley Aronowitz, “Does the United States have a new working class?,” in George Fischer, The Revival of American Socialism (New York, 1971), p. 203.
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Giddens, A. (1973). The Growth of the New Middle Class. In: Vidich, A.J. (eds) The New Middle Classes. Main Trends of the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23771-5_5
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