ABSTRACT
The new industries create employment for the middle class and for numerous types of unproductive laborers. The contemporary importance of the middle class in the politics of democratic no less than Fascist states serves to call up for reexamination the famous Marxian thesis concerning its disappearance. When Karl Marx's thesis is stated in the exceedingly broad way, devoid of his qualifications or any statement of the dialectics of economic movement as conceived by him, it is too simple and quite unrealistic. Marx's analysis of the capitalist process of production rests on two spheres of production: large-scale manufacturing and agriculture. Wholesale merchants, middlemen, brokers, speculators, commercial laborers and other functionaries engaged in marketing and trade, are also provisionally ex-eluded from the basic analysis of the capitalist process. The justification for using the term "pure capitalism" is to be found in numerous passages in which are hidden Marx's statements of his assumptions and methodology.
