ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on various approaches to class structure and the position of middle-class labour has outlined significant weaknesses in both orthodox Marxism and the responses to it in Germany and Britain. By utilising ownership and non-ownership of the means of production as the primary determinant of class membership, the orthodox Marxist approach encourages a passive, formalistic definition of class. The growth of British sociology has been a largely post-Second World War phenomenon, coinciding with a period of rising living standards and free from major social conflict. The first radicalisation and then reaction took sections of white-collar workers first one way and then the other, competing theories attempted to explain these movements. The model of the class structure of capitalist societies embodied within orthodox Marxism either has been taken directly from, or at least coheres with, the picture of society sketched by Marx and Engels in Manifesto of the Communist Party.
