Towards a Structural Theory of the Middle Class

Abstract

In this paper I am going to discuss one of the most significant gaps in the analysis of contemporary capitalist society. Further this particular gap in our theoretical knowledge is not one that has been compensated for by adequate descriptive accounts. This lack of systematic discussion and analysis of the middle class, or should it be, middle classes, is of considerable significance, not only because of the way an intrinsically interesting subject has been neglected, but also because of the limitations it places upon analysis of the total class structure. We are therefore severely restricted in the development of satisfactory theoretical analysis of the class structure when one term or element is that analysis remains relatively undiscussed and unelucidated. I argue that if we approach that analysis in a theoretically somewhat unusual way we shall solve not only certain problems in any discussion of the middle class but will gain a generally improved theory of classes and the class structure of contemporary capitalism. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I discuss the various arguments that Marx puts forward regarding the position and development of the middle class. I consider his explanation of the growth of the new middle class but suggest certain limitations which can only be overcome by reconsidering exactly the nature of Marx's theory of capitalism as found in his later economic writings. I do this in the second section and then consider the two ways in which actual capitalist societies depart from Marx's pure form of the capitalist mode of production. This provides the basis for an analysis in section three of the class position of different sectors of the middle class this incorporates a multidimensional approach to stratification derived again from Marx. In the last section, I try to show how my structural theory of capitalism and of the middle class can be used to account for the development of this class over the last hundred years of European history. I conclude by making one or two comments about the implications for revolutionary action of different classes that follow from my discussion. Two further preliminary points. First of all, I shall depart to a degree from conventional positivist philosophy of science interpretations of the meaning of theory and theoretical. Secondly, the only works on the middle class to which I shall refer are those by Klingender and Lockwood. There are useful descriptions of the British middle class in Klein (1965) and Lewis and Maude (1949).