ABSTRACT
The emergence and expansion of the ruling relations was the basis for the emergence of an educationally specialized class of professionals, managers, and white-collar workers who both staffed these new forms of organization and were and are active in their expansion. At the turn of the twentieth century, a new middle class emerges, distinct from the middle class of family-based enterprise characteristic of earlier North America. The new middle class is defined occupationally, that is, as earning a living through participation in the ruling relations, whether as independent professionals or, typically, as earning a salary rather than a wage, a form of employment in which pay is not related to the part played in the production of commodities.1 Mills describes this change as follows:
In the early nineteenth century, although there are no exact figures, probably four-fifths of the occupied population were selfemployed enterprisers; by 1870, only about one third, and in 1940, only about one fifth, were still in this old middle class. Many of the remaining four fifths of the people who now earn a living do so by working for the 2 percent or 3 percent of the population who now own 40 percent or 50 percent of the private property in the United States. Among these workers are the members of the new middle class, white-collar people on salary. For them, as for wage workers, America has become a nation of employees for whom independent property is out of range. Labor markets, not control of property, determine their chances to receive income, exercise power, enjoy prestige, learn and use skills. (Mills, 1951, p. 63)
Mills (1951) includes a simple table noting changes in the percentage of the labor force of the old and new middle classes from 1870 to 1940. In 1870, the old middle class were 33% and the new middle class only 6%. By 1940 a substantial shift is visible. The old middle class are only 20% whereas the new middle class are 25% of the labor force (p. 63).
