Coming to terms with the new middle class

The constant arguments within social theory over the size, nature and potential of the working class are irrevocably bound to confusions about the nature of the middle class under capitalism. According to the British Office of National Statistics, 53 percent of economically employed adults are managers and directors or in professional and associate professional occupations.1 If socialism is the outcome of “the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority”, its very possibility is compromised in accounts that accept this classification, paving the way to an insistence on the growing importance of an assumed conservative middle class.2

The criteria defining workers and the middle class have been the subject of a continuous and muddled debate reflected in both the variety of terms used to identify constituent groups (white-collar workers, the salaried middle class, professionals, managers, technician and engineers), and their individual, combined or collective social status (intermediate strata, a new petty bourgeoisie, a professional managerial class or a new middle class). These competing descriptions and outcomes would be of little significance were they simply idiosyncratic or interchangeable. However, they come attached to different definitions and assumptions about the class trajectory and affiliations of these groups.

The use of language is not innocent. One of its clearest and most cynical motivations is the use of the term middle class in the United States, where the myth is widely peddled that anyone earning stable wages, be they a manual or white-collar worker, is middle class. This view, propagated by both Republican and Democratic politicians, seeks to undermine the possibility of a confident and powerful working class, instead reassuring these groups that they are qualitatively different and superior to those who are poorer and more precarious, a message frequently inseparable from racist overtones.3 Despite the connotations that accompany this approach, on occasions, socialists also fall into this trap. Bernie Sanders, for instance, arguably the most popular US socialist politician, is not averse to using middle class in place of a clearer and more precise analysis: “We have got to expand union organising in this country if we’re going to save the middle class… The American people are sick and tired of corporate greed, of record-breaking profits, outrageous compensation packages for CEOs while workers in many cases are earning starvation wages”.4

The Occupy Wall Street movement exhibited a similar lack of precision that effectively dissolved the entire middle class.5 Society, it claimed, is now riven in two: on the one hand, a 1 percent overwhelmingly controlling societal assets, on the other, the 99 percent, controlled and exploited. Although it may be comforting to know that we are the vast majority, it ignores the complexities of social divisions: the chain of command and control by the mega rich 1 percent extends via managerial hierarchies into nearly all workplaces and social institutions, a fact recognised by the re-emergence of the idea of a professional managerial class (PMC), a class based on maintaining social and cultural control on behalf of the ruling class.6

In Britain, by contrast, and despite hostility to the concept of working class by the Labour Party and its attempt to blunt it through terms such as “ordinary people” or “hard-working families”, the idea of the working class has been more persistent. Historically, being working class was, erroneously, largely synonymous with manual workers as typified by largely male, unionised workers, with images of miners, dockers, printworkers and railwaymen easily springing to mind. White-collar employees (civil servants, insurance workers, bank and building society staff, teachers and local government workers) were popularly considered middle class, a conclusion underwritten by most sociological accounts. Moreover, this view was seemingly confirmed in everyday social exchanges where modes of dress, cultural interests, and particularly speech and regional accents, immediately confirmed whether someone was “one of us”. The growth of public sector militancy and the decline in the size of the industrial workforces have weakened but not altogether eradicated this dichotomy.

What follows in this article is, first, a short review of Karl Marx’s thoughts on the middle classes, as a base from which to assess; second, the several attempts to revise Marxist theory of classes in the 1970s; third, the continued influence of these latter revisions in some contemporary accounts of the middle classes; fourth, the contention that Guglielmo Carchedi’s account of the new middle class, based more soundly on Marx’s own approach, is the most comprehensive and satisfactory analysis; fifth, its use is demonstrated through applying it to contemporary workplace developments; sixth, the final section looks beyond the workplace to wider politics, by examining the role of the middle classes in the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany and its implication for contemporary Marxists.

Marx and the middle classes: old and new

In the early stages of capitalism, many small independent producers with their origins in feudal society continued outside the growing wage-labour/capitalist nexus. However, this middle class—the petty bourgeoise, as it was termed by Marx—was to be progressively squeezed by the growth of large-scale manufacturing. As the Communist Manifesto of 1848 declared: “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”.7

Marx and Friedrich Engels outlined the process through which this occurred:

The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all of these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialist skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.8

Marx concluded that the progressive threats lead these groups to oppose the bourgeoisie in order “to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history”.9

Marx’s bold picture of the disappearance of the petty bourgeoise and the concomitant polarisation of classes needs qualification. First, it was produced for a popular and polemical pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto. If the same claims were made in Capital, it would be a different question. Second, the process of polarisation described related to an exceptional period of capitalist crisis and revolution. Hence, to take Marx’s account as a universal and timeless view of the class structure of capitalist societies is mistaken, giving Marx’s formulation little purchase on the world we face.10 Hal Draper examined Marx’s writings thoroughly and, while he finds them in places unsatisfactory, the overall picture he drew of Marx’s account of the petty bourgeoisie was a more sophisticated one. Draper showed that Marx identified the petty bourgeoisie not only being “pulled in a reactionary direction insofar as they sought to turn back the clock of social development; they turned in a progressive direction insofar as they allied themselves with the proletarian movement for a joint battle against joint enemies”.11 Draper went on to document Marx and Engels’s fight against subsequent socialist leaders’ characterisation of the petty bourgeoisie as “one reactionary mass”, concluding:

They are not reactionary under all social conditions; not all sectors of the class are equally reactionary under the same conditions; different sectors and groups might vary widely on different issues; and last but not least, the difference must always be borne in mind between parties and groups based on this class and the possibilities of recruiting the rank and file of the class or of parts of it, in a fight against their own parties. In other words, we enter the realm of intelligent political leadership of a broad revolutionary movement that is striving to reach out, without compromising its own politics.12

The wider interpretation of the Communist Manifesto’s account of the petty bourgeoisie was not innocent. The manifesto’s claims gave rise to a vacuum filled by all kinds of speculative and anti-socialist ideologies. AJP Taylor, for instance, was not alone in believing that the “proletariat has tended to remain a static element in society, or even to decline”.13 Sociologists were similarly unimpressed with the dichotomous model attributed to Marx, with Anthony Giddens maintaining that it was unable to “encompass that grouping, which has always escaped adequate analysis in Marxist terms, the new middle class”.14 Here, the new middle class, “the middle men and administrators who make capitalism work”, are constituted within the capitalist production process in contrast to the traditional petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, the “more capitalism flourishes, the more there are of them”.15

This challenge needs to be taken up, a task made possible by Marx’s wider writings and their later interpretation and development. Marx was not unaware of these developments. Commenting on David Ricardo, he stated:

What he forgets to emphasise is the constantly growing number of the middle class, those who stand between the workmen on the one hand and the capitalist and the landlord on the other. The middle classes maintain themselves to an ever increasing extent directly out of revenue, they are a burden weighing heavily on the working base and increase the social security of the upper 10,000.16

It is not enough to castigate hostile critics of Marx for their ignorance as similar polarised models were promoted by many Marxist writers, attracted to a version of class being determined solely by the ownership and non-ownership of the means of production. All wage and salary earners here are simply classified as part of a differentiated working class, thereby rescuing white-collar and professional workers from their middle-class designations, if not from their own illusions.17 Senior managers sit uncomfortably in this framework, which necessitates, at one and the same time, treating them as a middle stratum while nevertheless including them within an expanded working class:

The position of the middle strata is that we must underline their membership of the working class properly defined; the separation that exists is subjective and ideological in character, and its objective base is less stable. In this context it is important that in the definition of “working class” emphasis must be placed upon the primary criterion, that of the sale of labour power for wages and salaries, rather than on the particular type of work done.18

This approach generates further problems. In relegating the importance of the “particular type of work” undertaken, it rightly undermines those accounts that automatically separate white-collar and non-manual workers from the working class: importantly, however, it also rests on the legal formalism of ownership and non-ownership of the means of production, ignoring the social relations at work. It is possible to see ownership working at three levels through the inter-related concepts of possession (factory management), ownership of the means of production (economic ownership) and legal ownership.19 Without the connection of class to forms of ownership, other than legal, disputes arising from managerial strategies would not be class conflict but a dispute between sections of workers. Although the sale of labour power, indicated by the receipt of wages and salaries, is frequently important in revealing social relations of exploitation and oppression, it is insufficient for revealing concrete relations that are more complex. Harry Braverman expresses most succinctly the problem of the tension between the formal status of some waged work and the reality of its roles in the workplace:

I have no quarrel with the definition of the working class on the basis of its “relationship to the means of production”, as that class that does not own or otherwise have proprietary access to the means of labour and must sell its labour power to those who do. But in the present situation, when almost all of the population has been placed in this situation and this definition encompasses occupational strata of the most diverse kinds, it is not the bare definition that is important but its application.20

New approaches to the new middle class

1) The Professional Managerial Class

Braverman’s sensitivity to the inadequacy of a simplistic approach to the changing class composition of capitalist societies was part of wider attempts to offer a more convincing account. Different approaches arrived at different conclusions as to the significance of those groups outside what had traditionally been regarded as the working class. The approaches variously identified: a new petty bourgeoisie (Nicos Poulantzas, 1975); a new middle class (Guglielmo Carchedi, 1978); a professional-managerial class (PMC) (Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, 1979); and contradictory class locations (Erik Olin Wright, 1985). None of the approaches gained dominance within socialist thought. The influence of Poulantzas was ultimately made unattractive by his exaggeration of the size of the new petty bourgeoisie through, amongst other devices, the automatic exclusion from the working class of “non-productive” workers who produced services and in consequence not only of clerical workers and teachers but also the majority of public sector labour.21

Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich’s concern with the PMC focused primarily on “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labour may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class”. This class, they argued in contradistinction to Poulantzas, was not part of a wider petty bourgeoisie but a new class brought into being by developments in the capitalist mode of production. Their account gave the distinct impression that specific occupations were dedicated to the perpetuation of capitalist culture and reproduction. Indeed, it is relatively easy to agree that certain occupations help secure the cultural hegemony of capital, but even here there is unevenness (mainstream newspaper journalists, for instance, might once have unambiguously performed this role, but a flailing industry and worsening conditions make this less certain). However, the idea that teachers, social workers and numerous other service workers are unambiguously responsible for the security of capitalism remains unconvincing. Moreover, were it accepted that the PMC acted as enablers and securers of capitalism’s longevity, and were being handsomely rewarded for it, it is difficult to envisage mutually driven conflict between capital and the PMC.

In contrast, the PMC’s tension with the working class stemmed from their occupational roles as managers and engineers and their collusion with capital.22 With aggressive employment restructuring, the decline in working-class organisation from the late 1970s, and a concomitant retreat of interest in class theory, concern with analysing the new middle class also largely disappeared. Writing in hindsight, the Ehrenreichs described how the semblance of PMC independence from capital has dissolved in the face of the capitalist offensive that directly or indirectly undermined their conditions and functioning through a ruthless expansion of the market, reductions in the welfare state, the deregulation of business, privatisations of public services and attacks on union organisation. In the US, these initiatives merged into a crusade to crush the “liberal elite”: “Conceived as ‘the middle class’ and as the supposed repository of civic virtue and occupational dedication, the PMC lies in ruins”.23 They concluded that: “In the coming years, we expect to see the remnants of the PMC increasingly making common cause with the remnants of the traditional working class for, at a minimum, representation in the political process”.24

This conclusion, like the very conception of the PMC, is in practice too general. Notwithstanding the employers’ offensives on work organisation and the conditions of managerial and professional staff, the PMC has not been decimated. According to Peter Ikeler and Laura Limonic, using the Ehrenreichs’ 1979 formulation to examine US Census data from 1970 to 2010, the PMC grew in 1970-2010 from just under 20 percent to 32 percent of the active workforce.25 One weakness of their approach stems from their uncritical acceptance of the original concept of the PMC. In consequence, like the original, it is unable to reveal the real relations and experiences of the groups making up the claimed PMC. Workplace studies suggest that the restructuring during this period curtailed the levels of managers and supervisors’ discretion. New accountability mechanisms measuring the performance of workers simultaneously held managers and supervisors accountable for the results.26 Any superficial attraction to the idea of a coherent PMC withers when equating the experiences of, for instance, social workers with managers or lawyers, or classifying all teachers as part of this PMC. To make sense of their class positions, relations to capital and labour, as demonstrated through their roles in the capitalist labour process, requires a closer examination.27

2) Contradictory classes

If the ideas of the Ehrenreichs found little traction outside of the US, the same cannot be said of Wright’s work. Championed by the journal New Left Review, he emerged as the most influential of left writers on the complexities of the capitalist social structure. In part a reaction to Poulantzas, Wright argued that not all locations should be forced into one class or another. Instead, ambiguities in the class structure should be recognised. These ambiguities mean that certain groups occupy objectively contradictory relations within class relations, that is, they are torn between the basic classes of capitalist society:

The concept of contradictory locations within class relations…does not refer to the problem of pigeon-holing people within an abstract typology; rather it refers to the objective contradictions among the real process of class relations.28

As a general approach, it proved attractive.29 Wright perceived the basic polarisation of classes into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat structured through three central processes: control over the physical means of production, control over labour power and control over investment and resource allocation. Capitalists controlled all three and workers were excluded. Control over some of the aspects and exclusion from others produced contradictory class locations. This schema was compatible with a recognition of the centrality of exploitation in the formation of class structures. However, there was no attempt by Wright to link class analysis with the process of production and workers’ active role in surplus-value or surplus-labour production: workers achieved their status as workers only negatively, through the absence of dimensions of control, rather than through their positive performance of useful labour. This approach already signalled a detachment from any Marxist concerns with the basis of workers’ power, confidence and position as subjects of history. However, more critical attention was paid to the logical coherence of the contradictory locations, causing Wright to revise his approach.30

He responded in Classes, producing an auto-critique of his earlier work, concentrating particularly on the lack of sufficient weight given to the importance for class relations of exploitation, although explicitly not a concept of exploitation derived from Marx. As he was later to state: “While the idea of labour as a source of value may be a useful device for illustrating the idea of the exploitation of labour, there is no persuasive reason for believing that labour and labour alone causally generates value”.31 Rather, he saw sources of exploitation, and thereby classes, based on the possession or non-possession of three exploitable assets: property, organisational position and skill. In all, Wright identified twelve class locations constructed from an amalgam of assets. This shift to an emphasis on exploitation therefore took him not towards a more orthodox Marxism but towards Weberian sociology and academic life, a move noted by Carchedi and indeed, Wright himself.32

It is not surprising therefore that in Wright’s later work, the revolutionary mantle passes from the working class: “it is no longer axiomatic that the proletariat is unique, or perhaps universally the central, rival to the capitalist class for class power in capitalist society…there are other class forces that have the potential to pose an alternative to capitalism”.33 In short, managers, and others with no assets in capital, have an objective interest in establishing statism and thereby installing organisational assets as the principal form of exploitation.34

The resurgence of Poulantzas and the petty bourgeoisie

In contrast to the US, the concept of the PMC never took hold in British political theory. The widespread acceptance of a clearer division between working class and middle class meant that there was little need to invent new terms of differentiation between the two classes. Middle class was a term given great license—it was often used, for instance, to imply that the class structure comprised only of a working class and an extended middle class. Where this approach was criticised for insufficiently acknowledging a ruling class, there were alternative terms—such as intermediate strata or petty bourgeoisie—that at least recognised this. In his much-promoted work, Dan Evans prefers the latter.35 Like Poulantzas, he distinguishes between an old and a new petty bourgeoisie. The latter comprises white-collar service workers, including “declassed graduates, call centre workers, teachers and teaching assistants, salesmen, estate agents, nurses, firemen, public sector workers and more”.36

Like Poulantzas, Evans also considers the old and new petty bourgeoisie two sides of the same class, a claim that lands him in difficulties. Evans maintains that his journey from a working-class background, through university to a series of low-paid jobs and back to university as a lecturer, places him in the same class as his petty-bourgeois school mates, “many of whom were now very successful self-employed tradesman…, salesman, cops, soldiers.” The friends were married to “beauticians, hairdressers”, presumably indicating in Evans’s eyes that their petty bourgeois status was reinforced by their similarly located spouses.37 Although acknowledging that the petty bourgeoisie is bifurcated into an old and a new fraction, he explicitly identifies as a member of the latter:

I and my school mates who have done very well are both members of the same class: the petty bourgeoisie. We are both members of a very specific, historical and powerful class that has grown and grown to the extent that it now constitutes at least a third of the British population.38

The justification for the fusion of the old and the new into a unified class is personal:

While the different fractions of the petty bourgeoisie are ostensibly different in many ways…we also share many similarities. Almost all of my own concerns were individualistic and aspirational, just like my old school friends were. We both wanted housing, we both wanted security and status. While they marked themselves off from the working class through flashing the cash, I marked myself off via cultural and educational capital.39

Everyone, including workers and revolutionaries, has individual aspirations. Nor is having a wad of cash a significant differentiating factor. Classes are defined by common interests and a collective way of prosecuting them. There are few people who do not want housing or security. These issues intersect with class formation through the strategies needed to achieve these ends. The self-employed are more likely to seek individual means, such as extending their working hours, to achieve these ends. Working-class desires of necessity require trade unionism, public policy and collective provision. Evans’s new petty bourgeoisie will not replicate the actions of the old petty bourgeoisie. Teachers and nurses are trade union members, and even other more senior sections will have professional bodies and associations to advance their interests. There are too many structural and experiential differences between the self-employed and those in employment: common wants in themselves do not prove class coherence.

By adhering to Poulantzas, borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu’s invention of cultural and social capital, and misreadings of Marx, Evans has produced an interesting but ultimately flawed account that exaggerates the size of the new petty bourgeoisie at the expense of the working class.40 He can only achieve this by inclusion of white-collar groups that have no overall unifying characteristics, many of them belonging to the working class. At one point, it seems that the claim is these groups “perform policing or disciplinary functions, either directly or indirectly, and whether on behalf of the state or private capital—the police, prison guards, DWP workers, parking wardens, security guards, human resources; associate professionals and the lower boundary of the professional classes”.41

He can make this very general claim because no attention is paid to studies of actual capitalist production and its associated labour processes. Neither the majority of teachers nor teaching assistants exercise meaningful authority over the labour of others, and recent teacher strikes in both the US and Britain, building links with wider working-class communities, are outward signs of membership of the working class.42

A structural account of the middle class: Marx and Carchedi

There is no shortage of unsuccessful models of the role and position of the new middle class, but several of the problems raised by the attempts are solved by reverting to Marx. Particularly useful is Guglielmo Carchedi’s 1977 work On Economic Identification of Social Classes. Carchedi brought to the analysis of the nature of the new middle class elements ignored by other theorists—a focus on the changing nature of the capitalist labour process, its effects on the production of both labour and surplus value, and what these factors did for class relations inside the production process.

Following Marx, he maintained that under a pure model of capitalism, there are two classes: capitalists and workers with all remnants of earlier classes and petty bourgeois classes temporarily removed for maximum clarity. Capitalists own the means of production (owners), do not produce value (non-labourers) and appropriate surplus value (exploiters) or surplus labour (oppressors).43 Workers do not own the means of production (non-owners), produce surplus value (labourers) and have surplus value or surplus labour expropriated (exploited or oppressed). Capitalists in this model, although necessary to guarantee capitalist production, do not add use values and are not part of the labour process. Here, Carchedi prefigured his later argument. Capitalists have real ownership of the means of production and, whether they operate in a productive or unproductive sphere of the economy, they are in an analogous position of exploiting or, where surplus labour rather than surplus value is extracted, economically oppressing workers. This similarity between public and private sectors has become increasingly apparent as the managerial organisation and work processes in government offices, schools and universities have come, with the spread of New Public Management, to resemble insurance offices and call centres.

Clarifications and qualifications should be noted here to avoid confusion. Carchedi’s book is entitled On the Economic Identification of Social Classes, a simultaneous indication that there are other spheres of class determination. Indeed, he stated: “I will restrict my field of analysis to classes in relation to the economic structure. This limit should not be interpreted as an attempt to define classes in purely economic terms”.44 Similarly, when Carchedi started from capitalism at a high level of abstraction, he was following Marx in specifying it as a pure model with capital and labour standing in opposition with all mediations and third parties removed. Society was always more complex and messier than this model. Notwithstanding claims that Marx only envisaged two classes, Marx explained:

In England, modern society is indisputably most highly and classically developed in economic structure. Nevertheless, even here the stratification of classes does not appear in its pure form—middle and intermediate strata here even obliterate lines of demarcation everywhere (although comparably less in rural districts than in the cities).45

Early capitalist production was characterised by employers concentrating on traditional craftworkers, who largely continued to produce using the same tools and methods, only now under one roof. Marx termed this stage the formal subsumption of labour. As capitalism developed, products were increasingly the result of large-scale mechanisation and the division of labour. Products became the result of a more socialised, collective labour: “The product is transformed from the direct product of the individual producer into a social product, the joint product of a collective labour, ie a combination of workers, each of whom stands at a different distance from the actual manipulation of the object of labour”.46

The possibility of carrying out your craft independently outside the workplace became impossible. Marx regarded this situation as the real subsumption of labour. Meanwhile, with the advent of the joint stock company, the individual capitalist withdrew from the productive sphere to be replaced by a managerial hierarchy. Part of the old middle class of independent producers and providers of services increasingly became reconstituted as salaried managers and specialists, a new middle class, within capitalist organisations.

The work of management, Marx noted, comprises two elements. Firstly, the supervision and control necessary to ensure the production of surplus value—something Carchedi calls the global function of capital. This function only arises because of the exploitive and hence antagonistic relations at the centre of capitalism. Whatever its appearance, it is neither productive nor unproductive labour: it is non-labour. Necessary as it may be for capitalist production, it is not part of the labour process. The second element of management work concerns unifying and coordinating production, activities necessary under any system of social production. These activities add to use values and fall within the concept of the collective worker. Hence, they are part of the labour process. As managerial hierarchies have expanded, the varying configurations of these elements gives rise to complexity and to a new middle class that carries out a combination of control, on the one hand, and coordination on the other. This new middle class also includes those who carry out exclusively tasks of control but who do not have strategic control over resources or own the means of production. All things being equal, where the weight of tasks falls towards one pole or the other, those performing them will tend to be more attracted to labour or capital. However, Peter Meiksins is wrong to state that Carchedi implies, “there is a direct correspondence between high position and capitalist function (or low position and function of labour)”.47 Relationships are likely more complicated. Supervisors, the lowest level of management, may spend more of their day controlling workers than some layers of higher management who might combine supervision with specialist contributions to the labour process (for instance, clinical doctors/management and senior engineers). In such circumstances, supervisors have no power independent of their employer, whereas the manager may have a degree of specialist knowledge and of indispensability that can be the source of resistance. As competition forces capitalist production to periodically restructure, Carchedi’s framework enables an analysis of the changing class relations at work.

This summary of Carchedi provides a rudimentary defence from his critics. Not that criticisms of Carchedi are numerous. Writers on class are far more likely to either simply dismiss or ignore him altogether. Raju Das, for instance, in a Marxist account of class of over 650 pages, makes no pertinent references to Carchedi’s work. This omission is made despite the recognition of the centrality of exploitation to class formation. Das notes with some justification: “Unfortunately, whatever little work there is on the labour process aspect of class has fallen for the more fashionable culturalist concerns, almost banishing the element of material-political antagonism from the sphere of work”.48 Yet, he offers no systematic account of the capitalist labour process and its relationship to class.

Subsequent to Braverman restating Marx’s emphasis on the antagonistic nature of capitalist work relations and the strategies within it to generate a surplus, many revisionist academic writers, critical of Braverman’s insights, have both neglected serious consideration of work relations as class relations and ignored the role of the new middle class in production.49 In the process, Carchedi’s approach has been labelled as sterile structuralism, with its analytical perspectives on social classes necessarily ending in “an aversion to empirical work and a tendency to create classes alfresco”.50 On the contrary, Carchedi’s approach is entirely consistent with Marx’s method in Capital, which centres on the major forces at work before making allowances for counter-tendencies. How capitalist social structures and practices are manifested in concrete conjunctions is determined by numerous influences on social relations. In short, it was a theoretical work, albeit with some illustrations, not a template. This conception of the new middle class will not satisfy those wanting a list of occupations that fall within the class or require descriptions of its present and uniform political behaviour. It has no exclusive political representation or programme. It is attracted to either capital or labour; during crises, it has the potential to be attracted in large numbers in one direction or the other. In these respects, the analysis might appear little different from previous accounts. Nevertheless, it can be useful in explaining relationships at workplace and wider societal levels, as the following sections show.

The restructuring of work and class relations

Structural components of class are fundamental, but they ultimately comprise relations in process and change. Every major change in the workplace alters the balance of class relations. Nowhere is this clearer than in the reorganisation of the British public sector.51 What has happened to teaching is a good example.52 Since the 1980s, this sector in England and Wales has been subjected to constant changes through a combination of fragmentation, local management of schools, a national curriculum, standardised tests and targets producing league tables, and a widely-feared inspection regime. Consequently, teachers have been subject to de-skilling, intensification and rising levels of stress. Rather than controlling others, teachers are now subject to more control and supervision. This increased domination cannot take place without an active management structure at school level, and this was consciously constructed.

In Britain, following a threat of united teacher strike action against workload and teacher shortages in 2001, a Workforce Remodelling Agreement (WRA) promised to relieve teachers of what consultants considered tasks peripheral to teaching. The roles of teaching assistants and support workers were to be expanded. Teachers were expected to teach more and cease carrying out 22 tasks, including pastoral work, photocopying, mounting displays, collecting dinner money and other roles requiring temporary absence from the classroom and allowing informal interactions and conversations. Although teachers thought they had secured some lightening of their workload, the agreement Raising Standards, Tackling Workload was more concerned with securing more control of them.53 The idea of responsibility for children was replaced by delivering a narrower national curriculum, performance management and an emphasis on exam results, and this required the establishment of new management regimes to establish and police the arrangements.

The new structures were engineered in part by the creation of new Management Allowances (MAs). Following the WRA’s logic, which redefined the role of the teacher, MAs for non-teaching responsibilities were removed and replaced by Teaching and Learning Responsibilities (TLRs). All schools were required to produce new staffing structures that no longer gave additional payments (MAs) for various extra duties (for instance, timetabling or pastoral work), but only to a smaller, more highly remunerated group of staff with responsibilities for the teaching performance of their colleagues and the achievements of students. Heads of Department assumed titles such as Directors of Learning with new roles that made them accountable for the results of their departments and for carrying out new performance management procedures. These roles developed together with the formation of disciplined Senior Management Teams, relieving members of teaching duties and removing them further from their colleagues.

Examined through the lens of the capitalist labour process, these new roles reflected a shedding of tasks that were part of the collective worker (teaching and coordination) and the expansion of activities of supervision and control (capitalist functions). These latter tasks can be classified as non-labour in the sense that no use values are added.54 They do not contribute to teaching. Indeed, they transmit demands that are frequently inimical to effective teaching and learning. They are only necessary because of the antagonistic relations arising from capitalist priorities as refracted through the state. With the development of more explicit, hierarchically organised line management, it is increasingly unrealistic to maintain that, even excluding headteachers and their deputies and assistant heads, all teachers are simply workers and that control is solely the prerogative of “higher officials”.55

A caveat should be added to these outcomes. The intention of the government was clear: to seize hold of teaching, meld it to the perceived needs of employers and make schools more efficient. Clarity of intent does not guarantee success and the government faced varied resistance. Heads have been far from universally supportive. Their own formal subordination is not the same as identification with the new emphasis. In many cases, their compliance is secured either by being subject to the undemocratic and authoritarian regimes that run multi-academy trusts or by being under constant fear of being dismissed if their school is the recipient of a poor Ofsted report. Moreover, the heads’ ability to run schools in the ways expected of them has been undermined by lack of funding. Add to this cocktail residual attachments to memories of sounder pedagogic practices and rising workplace trade union organisation, and the result is a growing number of heads retiring early and difficulty in replacing them.56

Under some versions of class theory, teachers shedding what in many instances were ostensibly less skilled elements of their work to teaching assistants would appear to consolidate their position in the new middle class. The claim to upskilling masks the routinisation and intensification of their roles and their loss of job control. They have no control or supervision of teaching assistants and are themselves subject to greater supervision and control. The clearest development is the creation and consolidation of managers who formerly engaged more in the collective and collegial labour of teaching and who are now more involved in the non-labour of supervising the work of others.

A second caveat is that there is nothing precise about consciousness: identification and politics cannot be read from the structure. Workers bring all manner of experiences and personal ties into work. They may be married to a high earning spouse, have inherited wealth or almost inexplicably think in ways that do not appear to accord with their situation. Not all unambiguously categorised workers will have the same consciousness, and neither will the new middle class. However, at a collective level, the relative social positions of the two groups are still of significance. The degradation of teachers’ work and their falling levels of pay have seen not only the move towards more national action but also the growth of workplace organisation and a notable rise in local disputes.57 Consciousness changes as solidarities and traditions are built. Historical evidence would suggest that the stronger and more confident working-class trade unionism, the more it is a pole of attraction to the new middle class, and at school workplace level, strong teacher organisation provides encouragement and gives confidence for sections of management to use the counterweight against governors and academy chains.

The new middle class: agency and politics

Changes at the workplace, or in the legal framework governing rights at work, affect the balance of power between labour and capital, weakening or reinforcing management. Class is a social relationship of exploitation and domination, experienced as both micro and macro social exchanges. To take an everyday example, consider the significance of an apparently simple question from a supervisor: “When are you going to finish that work?”. The meaning can only be understood within the process of ongoing class relations. The question might be loaded with obvious, but unspoken, threat or could merely arise from the need to coordinate production. The context and history of the exchange must be understood in relation to individuals and in the context of class powers represented by management and unions.

In addition, managers and supervisors vary. Not all managers start off or even become managers because they are after personal power. Sometimes, they take the role from frustration with what they and their colleagues see as a series of inefficient and inappropriate changes violating collective ideas, policies and expectations—a scenario particularly common in the public sector. How long or effectively they can maintain their original values depends in large part on the unity and strength of workplace cultures and unions. Workers at ChemCo, for instance, characterised their foremen as “bastards” and “bad bastards”, recognising the structural role of all foremen but distinguishing between how they chose to operate in practice.58 Strongly organised workers have been known to threaten strike action to defend their supervisor from management attempts to discipline them, knowing that if the attempt was successful, life would be made worse for them.

In the British government’s tax offices, supervisors, termed front line managers (FLMs), were in the same bargaining unit and the same union as those they supervised.59 Some were also among the leading militant trade unionists. Their unionism reflected and reinforced practices of supervisors that emphasised coordination of work and giving advice to workers on dealing with tax questions. They exhibited an ethos of cooperation and had a confidence that stemmed from their recognised contribution to the service provided, making them an inherent part of the collective worker. The introduction of lean production shattered these relations by stripping FLMs of their coordinating and advice roles and restricting them to monitoring the increased performance targets of the workforce.60 Should these not be achieved, FLMs were charged with exercising their increased authority to discipline those who failed to keep up. Arguably, management was successful in the face of strikes only because of national unions undermining strike action. The resulting demoralisation and a high rate of FLM retirement allowed leavers to be replaced by more quiescent staff, sometimes from the Customs and Excise wing of the service who had neither knowledge of the work nor sympathy with the staff, but who were willing to execute the supervisory and disciplinary procedures. There was no longer a question of whether or to what extent they were part of the collective worker: they had become agents of unambiguous control.

The new middle class and fascism in Germany

These above accounts illustrate the complexity of class relations at workplace level and the degree to which the behaviour of the new middle class must be understood in the context of their structural position, immediate experiences and working-class power at the point of production. Interaction with national politics can also prove decisive. The characterisation of large sections of the workforce as new petty bourgeoisie by Poulantzas and Evans, for instance, and their supposed fusing into the traditional petty bourgeoisie, only makes sense if these groups clearly have common interests and act politically in ways that cohere. A frequent supposition amongst social democratic writers is that they will indeed unite as a reactionary bloc. Germany before the Second World War is frequently cited as evidence of support for fascism among the traditional petty bourgeoisie (small business, independent artisans, small shopkeepers and self-employed) and white-collar workers. Jürgen Kocka, for instance, maintained that:

Confronted with a vehemently socialist labour movement, with an apparently revolutionary proletariat imperfectly integrated into bourgeois society, most white-collar workers stressed their ties with the bourgeoisie, with the non-proletarian anti-socialist camp. The more working conditions and wage levels between workers and employees converged with the advance of industrialisation, the more doggedly and actively white-collar workers thought to maintain their traditional privileges.61

Kocka was aware of the strong support amongst white-collar workers for trade unions and socialist politics immediately after the First World War, but he declared that feudal, corporatist and bureaucratic pre-capitalist traditions, compatible with National Socialism, inevitably triumphed.62 He thus gave the impression of an innate and unchanging predisposition awaiting the historical circumstances to realise itself. Earlier, Emil Lederer had contended that “should they ever attach themselves to some social class, that could only be the class of organised labour… As a result of the post-war collapse of the economy the alliance with labour has now become a fact”.63 After the victory of fascism, his revised take on the class differed little from what was fast becoming the prevailing orthodoxy: “The new middle classes…formed a new layer of society, the size as well as the character of which was a new phenomenon… They did not consider themselves as proletarians; they revolted against the idea that they should be of the same class”.64

In contrast to these general factors, Hans Speier added a more sociological perspective, pointing out that most white-collar labour was still employed in small- and medium-sized organisations where, in contrast to the larger ones, the division of labour had not advanced far.65 Consequently, the feeling of belonging to the proletariat was much less tangible. In addition, Speier pointed out that with the division of labour, there had been a feminisation of the workforce, with men dominating jobs that had expanded in the growing managerial hierarchies. Although the socialist-orientated white-collar unions represented large numbers of women and argued for equal pay, the more reactionary ones excluded women. It was therefore not just ideology that separated the differing orientations of unions, but the conflicting material interests of their members.

Too little scholarship distinguishes the social bases of support for fascism by disaggregating the middle class. Support of the traditional petty bourgeoisie, hostile to both big business and the trade unions, is hardly contentious. In many areas, these groups provided the backbone of Nazi support. White-collar support, however, is more problematic. Dick Geary argued:

The voting behaviour of white-collar workers was far from uniform, with civil servants more likely to register higher levels of support for Hitler than their counterparts within the private sector. There were divisions even within that sector, as sales assistants and supervisory, rather than technical staff, were more likely to vote Nazi, while white-collar workers from manual backgrounds and those who lived in the working-class districts of large cities often gave their votes to the [social democrats].66 

This is entirely understandable within a Marxist perspective. Civil servants had a special protected legal status in Germany and were shielded from the vicissitudes of the economy. Sales assistants rarely have a sense of power and unlike technical staff are remote from the influence of production workers. White-collar workers in large cities would have been more exposed to the possibilities of trade unions and socialist politics. As Richard Hamilton notes, the largest and most reactionary of white-collar organisations, the German National Union of Commercial Employees (Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfen-Verband, DHV), comprising mercantile employees, had a membership of just over 400,000 in 1931. At the same time, the liberal-democratic Employees’ Trade Union Federation (Gewerkschaftsbund der Angestellten, GDA) had 327,00 members and the socialist aligned General Federation of Free Employees (Allgemeiner freier Angestelltenbund, AFA) just over 200,000. In addition, 125,000 foreman and 62,000 technicians were also in socialist unions.

There is no clear evidence that most of the members of the DHV were fascist supporters, and it represented less than 50 percent of organised white-collar employees.67 Hamilton’s qualifications notwithstanding, the balance of evidence still indicates disproportionate new middle-class support for the Nazi party. Hamilton underplayed this support together with the extent of the economic crisis underpinning it that caused “a relentless rise in joblessness among white collar personnel”, but it should be kept in mind that the old middle class was much more enthusiastically supportive of the Nazi Party and that German workers were not immune from its appeal, albeit in lower proportions.68

That the economic crisis drove new middle-class employees towards the fascists was, however, neither automatic nor inevitable. There is no doubt that the division of the German left between two bitterly hostile parties weakened and demoralised opponents of fascism and conveyed to any vacillating groups that they had no confidence to act decisively to overcome the magnitude of the social crisis. The weakness of the German Social Democratic Party (Sozial-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) was not that they refused to defend the democratic gains of the Weimar Republic but that, in a time of economic crisis, these gains appeared insubstantial and useless to large numbers of people. At every phase of the Weimar Republic, the SPD adopted measures which, if not directly designed to undermine working-class organisation and confidence, certainly had that effect. Social and industrial legislation, for instance, which within a reformist perspective would count high amongst the party’s achievements, incorporated trade unions into state functions and curtailed their willingness to take independent action. It was the passivity encouraged by the extensive use of arbitration and special labour courts during the period of relative prosperity up to 1928 that in part explains why trade union membership remained stagnant.

Evelyn Anderson’s judgement is that by the late 1920s, “the majority of Germans came to identify the Weimar democracy, and then democracy in general (because the Weimar Republic had been their only practical experience) with sheer misery and inefficiency”.69 As the distinguishing feature of the party was its identification with, and defence of, the Republic, it is hardly surprising that its fortunes were closely tied to the success of it. Its problem attracting support outside the working class was neither association with Marxism nor its failure to construct a popular front, but its lack of militancy and decisiveness. With its suppression of workers and toleration of hated counter-revolutionary military groups, it had demonstrated to the middle classes that real power still lay in the hands of the bourgeoisie and its agents; consequently, “they turned their back on democracy and reverted to siding with the rich and powerful”.70

To understand the reactions of middle-class labour and its support for fascism, it is no more sufficient to rely on the theories stressing the overly narrow class base of the SPD than it is to resort to the deterministic theories of white-collar psychology or cultural tradition. All these approaches have in common a static, ahistorical conception of consciousness. Leon Trotsky’s analysis, in contrast, all the more impressive for being written as events unfolded, not only places the petty bourgeoisie and the new middle class at the centre of political developments. It also examines the balance of class forces between the two major classes and the effect that this has on the psychology of middle-class labour.71 Unlike the widely paraded caricature of the Marxist position, therefore, he presents no picture of the class as inevitably reactionary. It is quite capable, he argued, of linking its fate with that of the proletariat: “when revolutionary hope embraces the proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie”.72 However, “if the proletariat vacillates, becomes confused, contradicts itself, then the petty bourgeoisie loses patience and begins to look upon the revolutionary workers as those responsible for its own misery”.73

Conclusion

The use of the very term “new middle class” is contentious, but it would be a mistake to centre on terminology when sometimes different terms mask agreements about analytical substance. The important feature of the use of new middle class is its ability to illuminate this group’s relationships to capital and labour. Most analyses of the new middle class have been plagued by the inability to address two questions. First, they are unable to distinguish the underlying causes of the new middle class’s attraction and repulsion to capital and labour respectively. Second, they have a strong expectation or desire that the class reacts or develops in a standard way. Approaching the class through the lens of labour process theory recognises that it is forged at the centre of struggle between the capitalist organisation of production and the dual demands placed on the new middle class to perform the imperatives of capital and the tasks of labour. The specific contours of their occupational make-up will influence how they relate to labour, but this relationship is far from mechanical and will depend both on the confidence and good sense of their worker colleagues and the level and nature of class conflict in the country. This proviso removes a further objection to the idea of a new middle class—the implied expectation that naming it a class requires automatic unity of action.74

This latter observation also recognises that the socialist movement has no grounds for curtailing political demands for fear of driving this class further rightward. There is no such predetermined path, as the history of 1930s Germany shows. The Labour Party in Britain, albeit in historically different circumstances, has played the same role as the SPD in Germany in the 1930s. Richard Hunt, a leading historian of the party, for instance, argues that “the drive to win over middle-class voters necessitated…a soft peddling of the class struggled doctrine…The SPD had to appear a responsible and respectable party that a decent burger would not be ashamed to support”.75 It is just this conclusion that should be challenged.

Amongst the parallels between the two parties are their constant compromises with capital, their hostility to strikes, their restrictions of the rights of trade unions and the encouragement of the use of tribunal and legal resolution of disputes. Once, it was a source of self-satisfaction that Labour held together an alliance of the working class and sections of the middle class, particularly professionals. That alliance has been fractured, but not through the wholesale desertion of the middle classes. Rather, it is large numbers of working-class voters who no longer have confidence in the party, a desertion matched by large sections of what were considered middle class professionals (teachers, doctors, nurses). In a 2025 YouGov survey, voting intentions show that only 19 percent of electors with household incomes under £20,000 would vote Labour compared with 31 percent earning over £70,000—in contrast to 32 percent and 17 percent respectively for Reform.76 Only 33 percent of households earning under £20,000 voted for Labour in 2024, compared with 40 percent for both households earning between £50,00 and £70,000 and those over £70,000.

With few expectations of the Labour Party, and every indication that political and economic crises will deepen, not only will the attraction of Reform continue, it will continue to mutate towards fascism. The organised sections of the working class will continue its hostility towards right-wing and fascist policies. The question facing us is whether that resistance will be reduced to a rump or whether it can be transformed into a force that gives confidence and leadership to wide sections of the working class and the new middle class.

Bob Carter was Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Leicester. He is the author of Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Class (Routledge, 2015) and of numerous articles on class, trade unions and the restructuring of public sector labour.

Notes