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Among neighbours
'A uniform stratum of employees is in the process of formation. The
grouping of the population according to class viewpoint has made big
advances since the pre-war period.' What Emil Lederer and Jakob
Marschak maintain in their excellent study 'The New Middle Class'
( Grundriss der Sozialiikonomik, Section IX, Part 1), which in 1926 directed
attention for the first time to the altered condition of salaried employees,
Lederer himself has just recently had to quality anew. 'Even if the
capitalist intermediate strata today already share the destiny of the
proletariat', he writes in his study 'The Restructuring of the Proletariat'
(included in the August 1929 issue of the Neue Rundschau) , 'the majority
of them have nevertheless not yet abandoned their bourgeois ideology.'
His judgement is shared by Richard Woldt, who in a treatise on German
trade unions in the post-war period (incorporated in the collective work
Strukturwandlungen der Deutschen VolkswirtschaJt ['Structural changes ill
the German national economy']) characterizes as follows the attitlld('
of the middle strata in decline: 'A certain professional ideology still
stands in a relationship of tension with the actual facts. Large sectiolls
of the population today do indeed base their bourgeois t'xistell(,(',
which is no longer bourgeois at all, on monthly salarit'o 'ailed
intellectual labour and a few other similarly trivial characterist.ic III
total harmony with the experience articulated by Marx: that the
superstructure adapts itself only slowly to the development of the base
provoked by the forces of production. The position of these strata in
the economic process has changed, their middle-class conception of life
has remained. They nurture a false consciousness. They would like to
defend differences, the acknowledgement of which obscures their
situation; they devote themselves to an individualism that would be
justified only if they could still shape their fate as individuals. Even
where they struggle as wage-earners in and with the unions for better
�onditions of existence, their real existence is often conditioned by the