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APPENDIX 4
The New Middle Classes
In the course of the last hundred years, no political doctrine has proved more fatal than Marx's prophecy, which he formulated in a simplified way in the Communist Manifesto:
'Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie to-day the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry: the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class — the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant — all these fight against the bourgeoisie 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. If they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat (our italics) ; they thus, defend not their present, but their future, interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.'
Marx was clearly convinced that the final struggle over the political and social organisation of modern society would be between two classes only — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The non-proletarian group between these two classes would be absorbed into the great mass of the proletariat inevitably, as it were.
In this form the Marxist doctrine gained a hold over the European, or at least the continental proletariat1 and, in an increasingly irreligious age, held them with almost the force of religion. If, however, we examine the actual course of social development, we see that the prophecy has been completely disproved. To take the
1 For the sake of historical objectivity it should be made clear that Marx in some of his later writings openly revised his earlier teaching, for example by 1 860 he had formed quite a different opinion from the one he held in 1850 as to the power of resistance of French peasants to their impending transfer into the proletariat. Gf. my edition of Mar x* s Eighteenth Brwnaire, Berlin, 1932.
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