social management, that is, be in the hands of as few persons as possible (the centralization of wealth). It is of comparatively little importance how the surplus-value produced by the working class, the income of the capitalist class, is distributed. The question of this distribution is of any importance only in two aspects: 1st, in so far as it reacts on the centralization of wealth by permitting greater or less numbers to maintain their position as property-owners; and, 2d, in so far as it may affect the ideology of the different classes of society.
In the first aspect, as we have already seen, the "new" middle-class is harmless. Its existence does not retard the process of the centralization of wealth, but, on the contrary, is its direct result. It is, therefore, only in the second aspect that any significance whatever could be attached to it. Let us see what it amounts to?
But before proceeding any further we must state that the possession of capital, property, being of the essence of a capitalistic class, the introduction of this so-called "new" property-less middle-class has created no end of confusion. A very great proportion of what is termed new middle class, and appears as such in the income statistics, is really a part of the regular proletariat, and the new middle class, whatever it may be, is a good deal smaller than might be supposed from the tables of incomes. This confusion is due, on the one hand, to the old and firmly-rooted prejudice, according to which Marx is supposed to ascribe value creating properties only to manual labor, and on the other to the severance of the function of superintendence from the possession of property—effected by the corporation as noted before. Owing to these circumstances large sections of the proletariat are counted as belonging to the middle class, that is, the lower strata of the capitalist class. This is the case with almost all those numerous and growing occupations in which the remuneration is termed "salary" instead of "wages." All these salaried persons, no matter what their salaries may be, who make up perhaps the bulk,
