26.06.2025

Completely different foundations

As with now, the economic significance and politics of the middle classes was being hotly debated among socialists back in the 1890s. Some claimed their growth as disproving Marxism. Others could only see proletarianisation. Ben Lewis has translated a highly pertinent passage from Karl Kautsky’s Anti-Bernstein (1899), which offers still valuable insights. Mike Macnair provides the introduction

In the Forging Communist Unity discussions, we have been debating, among other issues, the political significance of the middle classes. The reason is that in the CPGB’s Draft programme we argue for the need for a minimum programme that contains both decisive elements of extreme democracy and more limited elements of immediate socialisation (as, for example, of the pharmaceutical industry), and other immediate demands that strengthen the position of the working class under capitalism.

Part of the justification for this approach is that we argue that the working class must and can win political power under conditions where there are still substantial middle classes: both small businesses and family farms, and the employed middle class.¹ The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which we in the CPGB call ‘socialism’ for short-hand (as writers in the early 20th century Second International did), is then the political class rule of the working class over the state and the middle classes. This will then provide a political framework for the more or less rapid socialisation of the assets of the middle classes: by promoting cooperatives in the case of small businesses, and by pressing the overproduction of specialist skills and knowledges, through expanded formal education, measures of workers’ control and the rotation of managerial offices.²

We do not argue at length in the Draft programme for the real existence and political dynamics of the middle classes. That would be inconsistent with the purpose of a programme. Nonetheless, the issue is an important and debated one. A recent book that I propose to review (belatedly) in the near future is Dan Evans’s 2023 A nation of shopkeepers: the unstoppable rise of the petty bourgeoisie, which argues that since Thatcher the petty bourgeoisie has been rising as a class in the UK. Evans points to a rise in the numbers of the ‘classical’ petty bourgeoisie (self-employment and micro-businesses), but also for the Ehrenreichs’ “professional-managerial class”³ (which in the terms used in our Draft programme is merely the upper stratum of the employed middle class) and a “new petty bourgeoisie” below it, which consists, in essence, of university graduates employed in precarious jobs that do not use their qualifications.

The issue is not a new one. Comrade Ben Lewis has on his Patreon page, ‘Marxism translated’⁴, been gradually translating Karl Kautsky’s 1899 Anti-Bernstein (Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm: eine Antikritik), and it happens that in the not long ago he arrived at Kautsky’s discussion of the ‘new middle class’. Ben suggested that this passage would be a useful contribution to the present discussion.

Polemics began

Anti-Bernstein was Kautsky’s response to Eduard Bernstein’s book of the same year, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus (in English The preconditions of socialism⁵) - and to the 1896-97 Neue Zeit series on ‘problems of socialism’, on which the book was built. The polemics had begun when Bernstein proposed that the German SPD should support what would now be called ‘humanitarian intervention’ in favour of Christians oppressed in Ottoman Turkey, provoking polemic initially from Ernest Belfort Bax.

Bax argued that imperialism was a way for capitalism to escape from domestic overproduction/underconsumption and thereby stave off its expected collapse; Bernstein’s response then segued into arguing that capitalism was not in danger of collapse - and thence towards a variant of Fabianism. This argument then produced sharp critiques from Parvus (Alexander Helphand/Gelfand/Israel Lazarevich - unknown surname) and from Rosa Luxemburg.⁶ Kautsky was initially reluctant to write against Bernstein, hoping to win him back to Marxism by private correspondence, but was eventually driven to do so.

The shape of Kautsky’s argument in the passage translated is given by its character as a response to Bernstein’s argument in Preconditions. Bernstein used the middle classes for two purposes. In the first place, they allegedly showed that the economy was not dominated by exploitation, since income and property was (he argued) more or less evenly distributed between the capitalist, middle and working classes. In the second place, there was no tendency towards polarisation between capitalists and proletarians (or, if there was any such tendency in the economy, it was wholly displaced by counter-tendencies), since, as fast as the old peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie declined, the ‘new middle class’ grew faster.⁷

The passage extracted here follows Kautsky’s critique of Bernstein’s empirical claim about the distribution of income and property, and focuses on the ‘new middle class’. His argument starts with the interesting theoretical claim that the ‘new middle class’ emerges because “the ruling and exploiting classes increasingly transfer their functions to paid intellectual labourers”. The point is interesting, because it in a sense anticipates the Ehrenreichs’ argument that the “professional-managerial class” is distinguished from skilled workers by its function in reproducing the social order or managing those below.

Like the Ehrenreichs - and Evans - Kautsky sees the ‘new middle class’ as privileged by (formal) education. This, then, leads to the result in Kautsky’s argument that the expansion of education in itself - demanded both by capital, to increase the supply of intellectual workers, and by labour, to overcome privilege - tends towards the proletarianisation of the ‘new middle class’. Hence, Bernstein’s argument - that the growth of the ‘new middle class’ disproves both the dominance of exploitation and the tendency of capitalism towards collapse - is false.

Collapse

The connection with the SPD’s ‘orthodox’ theory of the inevitable collapse of capitalism, the Zusammenbruch or Kladderadatsch, is clear. In my opinion this theory was an oversimplified approach to the logic of the decline of capitalism, and in particular one that left out the role of the state other than as a repressive apparatus. Nonetheless, Bernstein’s argument was also a critique of the claim in the 1880 Programme of the French Parti Ouvrier:

That the producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production (land, factories, ships, banks, credit);

That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them:

(1) The individual form which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress;

(2) The collective form, the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society.

That is, that Bernstein claimed that the “individual form” of possession of the means of production was not “increasingly eliminated by industrial progress” - witness the persistence and growth of the middle classes. There was not, contrary to the 1891 Erfurt programme,⁸ a tendency for the middle classes to be proletarianised. Kautsky’s argument was (if true) an effective response to this claim.

126 years later, it is plain, on the one hand, that Bernstein’s Fabianism leads nowhere except to ‘Labour’ and such-like governments that cravenly do the bidding of US financial capital, to demoralisation and to more rightwing rightist governments. But it is also plain, on the other hand, that the story of the place of the middle classes is a lot more complex than the one Kautsky tells. It is for this reason that it will be useful to review Evans’s book.

I should remark, however, on two points. The first is that present in Kautsky’s story, but omitted from his theoretical explanation, is the action of the capitalist state in actively promoting the middle classes as a bulwark against the proletariat. Legislation to protect family farms was already a feature of western Germany in Kautsky’s time; since then, there has been more extensive protection of Mittelstand firms. And so on, with the particulars varying from country to country.

The second is that Kautsky’s critique of Bernstein is weakened, relative to those of Bax, Parvus and Luxemburg, by Kautsky’s methodological nationalism. The result is a story that tells us something about Germany (as Bernstein’s story also told us things about Germany) but does not locate the issues in the effects of the world market and of imperialism.

This text, then, tells us that the issue of the middle class - and specifically of the ‘new middle class’ - is not a novel problem for the left. But we should engage with Kautsky’s arguments, especially on the proletarianisation of the new middle class, critically.

Karl Kautsky’s Anti-Bernstein (extract)

Before we turn from the subject of the increase in property ownership, let us briefly examine something else. Bernstein thinks that this increase is not in the number of capitalists, but in those strata of the population that, in terms of income, made up the middle class. This would, however, explain why he attaches so much importance to income tax statistics, which say nothing at all about the distribution of property. Some of his statements also point to such a view, even though in other places he speaks unambiguously of the increase in the number of capitalists.

If Bernstein had wanted to say nothing more than the middle class is not dying out, but that a new one is taking the place of the old one, that the ‘intelligentsia’ is replacing the independent craftsmen and small merchants, we would have readily agreed with him. I should point out here that I recognised the emergence of this middle class as early as 1895 in a series of articles in Die Neue Zeit entitled ‘The intelligentsia and social democracy’. I claimed that one of our party’s most important tasks was to study the conditions for winning over this section of the population. As I put it, “A new middle class is forming. It is very strong in number and continuously increasing. Its growth is capable of concealing the demise of the entire middle class caused by the decline of small business” (Die Neue Zeit XIII, 2, p16).

The main cause of the growth of this middle class is that the ruling and exploiting classes increasingly transfer their functions to paid intellectual labourers, who sell their services either by the piece - doctors, lawyers, artists - or for a fixed salary, such as civil servants of all kinds. In the Middle Ages, the clergy provided the scholars, doctors, artists and some of the administrative officials, while the nobility also took care of public administration, the courts, the police and, above all, military service. With the advent of the modern state and modern science, the clergy and nobility were deprived of their functions, but they continued to exist as classes. They merely lost their social significance and, for the most part, their independence.

Since then, however, the functions assigned to them have been expanded upon more and more, and the number of workers performing them is growing from year to year, as the tasks that social development presents to the state, the community and science increase.

But early on the capitalist class also began to dispose of its functions in trade and industry and to transfer them to paid workers, merchants and technicians. At first, these were merely auxiliary workers of the capitalist, to whom he transferred those parts of his functions of supervising, goading on and organising labour, purchasing the means of production and selling products, which he could not manage with the growing demands for special training in each of the individual functions. But eventually the system of shares rendered the capitalist completely superfluous. This system even hands over the management of the enterprise to a hireling. There can be no doubt that the share system helps to increase the number of well-paid employees and that it thus promotes the formation of the middle class. If Bernstein equates middle incomes with the propertied classes, then he can certainly say that joint-stock companies contribute to their increase - but not through the fragmentation of the capital that they facilitate.

The intelligentsia is the fastest growing segment of the population. According to the German industrial census, the number of wage labourers grew by 62.6% between 1882 and 1895, whereas the number of white-collar workers increased by 118.9%. However, this rapid growth was not sufficient to paralyse the relative decline of entrepreneurship, which only grew by 1.3% in absolute terms. Of all company personnel in the German empire, the following percentages were:

So even if we wanted to count both white-collar workers and entrepreneurs as ‘owners’, their combined percentage of the total workforce fell from 42.4% to 33.1% between 1882 and 1895. So even this would not lead us to Bernstein’s conclusions.

The same is true if we also take agriculture into account, as outlined in the statistics. We find the following percentages for those in work in the German empire:

The increase in the number of civil servants in the state, municipal and church services and those employed in the liberal professions - 579,322 to 794,983, an increase of 37.2% - was slower than the increase in the number of white-collar workers in industry, but still faster than the growth in the population as a whole (14.5%).

These elements are therefore growing quickly. But we would be making a huge mistake if we simply assigned them to the propertied classes. The new middle class is growing on completely different foundations to the old one, which formed the solid bulwark of private ownership of the means of production, because its existence was based on it.

The new middle class rests on a completely different foundation. Private ownership of the means of production usually plays no role for this class. Wherever the middle class carries out the functions of independent labourers, it is almost always of minimal value - eg, painters, doctors, writers. Wherever the means of production function as capital, the mass of ‘brain workers’ appear as wage labourers, not as capitalists. That said, it would be equally incorrect to simply categorise the new middle class as proletarian.

This new middle class has emerged from the bourgeoisie, is linked to it by the most diverse conditions of society and kinship, and is equal to it in its standard of living. And a whole series of professions among the intelligentsia are still more closely connected with it: namely, those which render the capitalist superfluous by taking over his functions as directors and sub-officials of his enterprises. But the functions of the capitalist also come with his attitude: ie, his hostility to the proletariat. In other professions among the intelligentsia, the professional activity involves displaying a certain political or religious sentiment. This is the case with political journalists, some court officials: eg, public prosecutors, policemen, clergymen, etc. The state, the church, capitalist publishers, etc only employ people in these professions who either share the views of their ‘employers’ or who are prepared to represent someone else’s views in return for payment. This also results in a divide between various people in the ‘intelligentsia’ and the proletariat.

Privileged

But the most far-reaching difference between the intelligentsia and the proletariat comes from the fact that the former makes up a privileged class. Its favoured position is based on the privilege of education. It has every interest in ensuring that the masses are educated enough to understand the importance of science and to bow down to it and its representatives, but its interests require it to oppose all endeavours that extend the circle of those with a higher professional education.

It is true that the capitalist mode of production requires large numbers in the intelligentsia. The feudal state’s school facilities were not sufficient to produce them. The bourgeois regime therefore pushed everywhere for an improvement and expansion not only of comprehensive education, but higher education too. It was believed that this would not only promote the development of production, but also mitigate class antagonisms. Why? Well, since higher education elevated people to a bourgeois position, it seemed self-evident that the spread of higher education would generally entail generally elevating the proletariat to bourgeois living conditions.

But the bourgeois standard of life [written in English in the original - BL] is only the necessary correlate of higher education when it is a privilege. When education becomes universal, it does not raise the proletarian up into the class ranks of the bourgeoisie, but degrades the ‘brain worker’ to a proletarian. This, too, is a partial phenomenon of the process of impoverishment of the masses.

In countries where popular educational institutions are sufficiently developed to deprive education of its previous privileged position, hostility to education begins to take root among the intelligentsia. These classes, who are opposed to education, thus come into conflict with the needs of the modern mode of production, they become more hostile to progress than the capitalists themselves, and join forces with the most reactionary of the reactionaries - with guildsmen and agrarians. It is the blossom of modern science, the university professors and students, who are most zealously opposed to women entering university, who would like to see the Jewish intelligentsia excluded from all competition for positions and functions, and who endeavour to make higher education as expensive as possible and to exclude the poor from it.

In doing so, they face the most energetic opposition from the proletariat, which, like every other privilege, also fights in the most resolute terms against education as a privilege.

Despite all obstacles, the spread of popular education is progressing, but one layer of the intelligentsia after another is falling into proletarianisation. Consider the vast number of merchants that our commercial schools, of musicians that our music schools, of sculptors and draughtsmen that our art schools, of mechanics and chemists that our trade schools produce year in, year out. And the process of capitalist concentration is also beginning in the fields of commerce, art and applied science; the amount of capital required to establish an independent, viable enterprise in these fields is constantly growing. Thus, to the same extent that the number of skilled workers in these fields is expanding, the prospect of them becoming independent entrepreneurs is diminishing, and their lot is increasingly becoming that of life-long wage labour.

At the same time, however, due to the rapid increase in the number of skilled labourers, things become hopeless for one stratum of the intelligentsia after another when they try to make ends meet by artificially restricting the number of their competitors. Here, too, the process of social impoverishment sets in, which is felt all the more painfully, because one’s own misery is measured directly against the rising standard of living of the bourgeoisie. Maintaining this standard of living, or at least the appearance of it, is a vital concern for brain workers. If, for manual labourers, physical impoverishment manifests itself above all in the deterioration of their housing, then their clothing, and only lastly in their food, then the reverse is true for brain workers. Money is saved on food first.

But, however much one clings to bourgeois appearances, for each of these proletarianised strata of the intelligentsia the time comes when they discover their proletarian heart, acquire an interest in the proletarian class struggle and eventually take an active part in it. So it was with the journeymen, the sculptors and the musicians. Others will follow.

When liberal economics points to the rapid growth of the ‘intelligentsia’ as a sign of the capitalist mode of production creating its own middle class, it forgets that, the faster this growth occurs, the faster the process of proletarianisation within the new middle class takes place.

Between the decidedly anti-proletarian, capitalist-minded strata of the intelligentsia and those who feel decidedly proletarian, however, there remains a broad stratum that feels neither proletarian nor capitalist, but sees itself as standing above class antagonisms.

This middle layer of the new middle class shares the ambiguity of its social position with the old petty bourgeoisie. It is therefore just as unreliable and fickle towards the proletariat as the latter. Today it might rage at capital’s greed; tomorrow it will be indignant at the proletariat’s bad manners. If today it calls on the proletariat to protect its human dignity, tomorrow it will stab it in the back to preserve social peace.

But two factors distinguish it from the old petty bourgeoisie. One is favourable, the other is not. Firstly, it differs from it in its broad intellectual horizons and its trained capacity for abstract thought. It is the stratum of the population that most easily rises above class and social standing, feels idealistically elevated above momentary and special interests, and considers and represents the permanent needs of society as a whole.

But, on the other hand, it differs from the old petty bourgeoisie in its lack of combativeness. Before capital broke its back, the petty bourgeoisie was a highly combative and pugnacious class. The strata of the intelligentsia standing between the proletariat and capitalism lack all means of waging a persistent struggle against the ruling classes. Weak in numbers, without unified class interests and therefore also without a united organisation, without major possessions, but with the need to live a way of life like that of the capitalist, they can only fight in association with other classes that are themselves wealthy enough to provide them with the means of struggle and existence. The middle class of the intelligentsia, the ‘intellectual aristocracy’, could therefore be oppositional en masse, as long as the bourgeoisie itself was in opposition; it loses its oppositional combativeness and fighting ability when the latter settles down politically. It becomes squeamish and timid, declares all means of progress, apart from winning the favour of those in power, through persuasion, to be immoral. It becomes cowardly and Byzantine.

It hates the class struggle, preaches that it be abolished or at least toned down. Class struggle, to them, is revolt, rebellion, revolution; social reform must render it superfluous.

Making the break

When I wrote the following, I did so without aiming a polemical shot at Bernstein, because back then his transformation [away from Marxism to revisionism - BL] was only just beginning:

… among those who are not directly interested in capitalist exploitation, there is hardly a single independently thinking and honest educated person left who does not represent the ‘socio-political’ point of view, which states that something must be done for the workers. This ‘something’, however, can mean the most diverse things.

[Carl Ferdinand von] Stumm[-Halberg] and Eugen Richter, the patriarchal-absolutist entrepreneur and the Manchester man, no longer have a significant following among the intelligentsia. Indictments of capital and sympathy with the proletariat - at least with the exploited, if not with the fighting proletariat - have become fashionable, and [William] Harcourt’s words, “We are all socialists now”, are beginning to come true for these circles. However, it is not proletarian, revolutionary socialism to which our poets and painters, our scholars and journalists, etc pay homage in their salons and cafés, their studios and lecture theatres, but a kind of socialism that bears a desperate resemblance to that characterised as ‘true socialism’ by the Communist manifesto in 1847.

These elements often proclaim that nothing separates them from social democracy aside from proletarian brutality, but what really repels them is not outward appearances, but their own lack of insight or character. Even if they far surpass the narrow-minded capitalists in insight, they still do not realise that it is impossible to rescue existing society and prevent the victory of the proletariat; they do not understand their powerlessness in the face of social development, or they lack the necessary selflessness, courage and strength to admit this to themselves and break with bourgeois society (Die Neue Zeit XIII, 2, pp76, 77).

Only a few dare, and can dare, to make this break. The proletariat certainly has loyal friends among these knights of the intellect. But they are silent supporters who desire proletarian victory, but can only openly come forward when this victory has been achieved. The proletariat cannot count on a strong influx of fighters from the ranks of these knights of the intellect, but at the same time it must only fear a few stubborn opponents from their ranks.

These few short points show how the growing intelligentsia is a class that raises important and interesting problems for the struggling proletariat. It would be an exaggeration to claim it entirely for the proletariat, but it would be even more erroneous simply to call it “the propertied” [as Bernstein does - BL]. In this stratum we find united within a narrow framework all the social antagonisms that characterise capitalist society in its entirety, but we also find the progress of the proletarian element in this microcosm, as well as in the social body as a whole.

This also settles Bernstein’s last objection to what he calls Marx’s ‘theory of collapse’.

The increase in the new middle class of the intelligentsia is just as undeniable as the increase in the physical prosperity of individual working classes. But neither phenomenon contradicts Marx’s teachings on the concentration of capital, the increase in the exploitation of the proletariat or the intensification of social antagonisms. The increase in the number of the propertied would certainly contradict the theory of collapse. But Bernstein did not demonstrate that this increase has taken place. Theoretical considerations and the statistical figures themselves both speak against it.

1. Also important is a point made by Moshé Machover: that the transition from capitalism to a planned economy will be a complex and difficult process of trial and error.↩︎

2. Particularly in section 4: communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme/4-character-of-the-revolution.↩︎

3. Compare the debate in M Macnair, ‘American “Blue Labour”?’ Weekly Worker April 15 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1343/american-blue-labour), F de Haan, ‘Appeals of class society’, May 20 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1348/appeals-of-class-society), M Macnair, ‘Centrality of class’ June 3 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1350/centrality-of-class-mike-macnair-replies-to-foppe-), P Demarty, ‘Manufacturing consensus’, September 2 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1361/manufacturing-consensus), F de Haan, ‘Addressing the central issues’, September 30 2021 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1365/addressing-the-central-issues), F de Haan, ‘On capitalism and class rule: moving beyond the “PMC debate”‘ Cosmonaut February 9 2024 (cosmonautmag.com/2024/02/on-capitalism-and-class-rule-moving-beyond-the-pmc-debate).↩︎

4. www.patreon.com/marxismtranslated.↩︎

5. Edited and translated by H Tudor (Cambridge 1993). The 1909 ‘translation’ by EC Harvey under the title Evolutionary socialism (repeatedly reprinted) is, in fact, an abridged version.↩︎

6. H Tudor and JM Tudor (ed and trans) Marxism and social democracy: the revisionist debate 1896-1898 Cambridge 1988.↩︎

7. See pp56-79.↩︎

8. www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm; the introductory paragraphs.↩︎