ABSTRACT
At the heart of the recent resurgence of Marxist theorizing on the problem of class has been what might be termed the “embarrassment” of the middle class. For all of their disagreements, all Marxists share a basic commitment to a polarized abstract concept of class relations. Yet, at least at first glance, the concrete class structures of contemporary advanced capitalist societies look anything but polarized. This empirical evidence of a large middle class has provided critics of Marxism with one of their principal arguments against Marxist class theory. In response, a variety of 150solutions to the problem of the middle class have been proposed in the recent Marxist debates.
