nomic relations within our society, have changed, are changing. The private ownership of the means of production is the basis of capitalistic society, and therefore of all capitalistic ideology. And by ownership is not meant merely the derivation of revenue, but real ownership, that is, control. A capitalistic class not owning any capital, as the so-called "new" middle class, is a contradiction in terms, an anomaly. But no less anomalous is the position of a capitalist who owns but does not control his property. That wonderful artist, Gorky, with the true insight of genius, has divined this truth and has expressed it when he made one of his characters say that the true importance of wealth is the power of control that it gives one over other people. But this power of control does not lie in the revenue which one derives from wealth, but in the control of this wealth itself, which in our society is synonymous with means of production.
The truth is that the "new" property-less middle class is not a capitalistic class. It is no middle class at all. It is true that it stands in the middle between the capitalist class and the working class, and in this sense it is more of a "middle" than the old middle class which was nothing but the lower strata of the capitalist class. But it is no class. A class is not merely an aggregation of individuals having a more or less similar income obtained in a more or less similar way. In order that any aggregation of individuals should really form a social class they must perform some social-economic function. The existence of the "new middle class" is entirely too aërial to give it position as a social class. They are either merely "hangers on" of some other class, or hang in the air entirely, where they obtain their income from "wind." This "class" has none of the characteristics and none of the ideas of the bourgeoisie which we have described. It not only has no love for property as such, because it does not possess any, but it has not even that love of economic independence and individual enterprise which is the characteristic of the true bourgeois.
