This paper examines Marx's claim in the Manifesto that capitalist society would polarize into two classes in light of the current evidence on growing inequality in American society. It argues that the middle class of industrial society is not an anomaly but a product of the incomplete development of capitalism and this middle class is presently being threatened with extinction through technological innovations in the forces of production.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Arrighi, Giovanni (1978). The Geometry of Imperialism. Translated by Patrick Camiller. London: NLB.
2.
Bell, Daniel (1973). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
3.
Bell, Trudy (1993). “Jobs At Risk.” IEEESpectrum. 30, 8, August, p. 18.
4.
Bernstein, Jared and Lawrence Mishel (1997). “State of the Union: Have Wages Turned the Corner?” Challenge. July—August, 40, 4, p. 6.
5.
Bradbury, Katherine, L. (1996). “The Growing Inequality of Family Incomes: Changing Families and Changing Wages.” New England Economic Review. July-August, 55—82.
6.
Brauer, David A. and Susan Hickok (1995). “Explaining the Growing Inequality of Wages Across Skill Levels.” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review. January. 1, 1, p. 61.
7.
Braverman, Harry (1974). Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.
8.
Chandler Jr., Alfred D. (1977). The Visible Hand . Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press .
9.
Ehrle, Lynn (1996). “The Myth of the Middle Class.” The Humanist. Nov.—Dec., 56, 6, pp. 17—20.
10.
Galbraith, John Kenneth (1979). The New Industrial State. 3rd Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
11.
Gartman, David (1986). Auto Slavery. New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press.
12.
Green, Francis, Andrew Henley and Euclid Tsakalotos (1994). “Income Inequality in Corporatist and Liberal Economies: A Comparison of Trends within OECD Countries .” International Review of Applied Economics. 8, 3, pp. 303—331.
13.
Grubb, W. Norton and Robert H. Wilson (1992). “Trends in Wage and Salary Inequality.”Monthly Labor Review. June, 115, 6, p. 23.
14.
Harris, Abram, L. (1939). “Pure Capitalism and the Disappearance of the Middle Class.” Journal of Political Economy. 328—356.
15.
Hounshell, David A. (1984). From the American System to Mass Production, 1800—1932. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
16.
Ide, Thomas R. and Arthur J. Cordell (1994). “Automating Work.”Society.31, 6, Sept.— Oct., p. 65.
17.
Johnson, David and Stephanie Shipp (1997). “Trends in Inequality Using Consumption-Expenditures: The US from 1960 to 1993.”Review of Income and Wealth, 43, 3, pp. 133—152.
18.
Kacapyr, Elia (1996). “Middle Class Income: Rising Income in the Future.”Current, n388, p. 3.
19.
Kenney, Martin and Richard Florida .1993. Beyond Mass Production: The Japanese System and its Transfer to the U.S. New York : Oxford University Press.
20.
Lawrence, Robert Z. (1995). “US Wage Trends in the 1980s: The Role of International Factors.” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Economic Policy Review. January. 1, 1, p. 18.
21.
Lukacs, Georg (1971). “What is Orthodox Marxism” Pp. 1—26 in Lukacs, Georg History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
22.
Marx, Karl (1973). Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage Books.
23.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1972). “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Pp. 331—362 in Tucker, Robert. Editor. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.
24.
Mishel, Lawrence and Jared Bernstein (1992). “Job Destruction: Worse Than We Thought.”Challenge. 35, 5, Sept.—Oct., p. 4
25.
Oshima, Harry T. (1994). “The Impact of Technological Transformation on Historical trends in Income Distribution of Asia and the West.” The Developing Economies. XXXII, 3, September. 237—255.
26.
Ossowski, Stanislaw (1963). Class Structure in the Social Consciousness. Translated by Sheila Patterson. New York: The Free Press.
27.
Rifkin, Jeremy (1995). “The End of Work?” New Statesman & Society. 8, 36, June. p. 18.
28.
Simmie, James and Ray Brady (1989). “Middle Class Decline in Post-Industrial Society.” Long Range Planning. 22, 4, 52—62.
29.
Wacquant, Löic J.D. (1991). “Making Class: The Middle Class in Social Theory and Social Structure.” Pp. 39—64 in McNall, Scott, Rhonda Levine and Rick Fantasia, Editors. Bringing Class Back In. Boulder: Westview Press.
30.
Wright, Erik Olin (1985). Classes. London: Verso.
31.
——— (1997). Class Counts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
