Understanding the location of a social stratum in the class structure
is a necessary part of understanding the relationship among social
reality, ideology, and political behavior. Regarding the middle
class, the debate over the relationship is extensive: Are new
middle-class knowledge controllers reform-oriented, concerned
about the welfare of those less fortunate than them? Or are they
passively indifferent to the social problems of the day, preferring
instead to fill their time and their minds with the latest luxuries of
middle-class life?

Figure 4.1 identifies the basic nature of the contrasting politi-
cal-ideological positions claimed by each theory in reference to
the stance of knowledge controllers on issues that theoretically
should polarize capitalists and workers.

New class theorists, for example, generally argue that knowl-
edge controllers are anticapitalist but are not proworker or progres-
sive. Members of the new class are seen as having a set of distinct
interests stemming from their location in a new class that has
emerged in late capitalism. New working-class theorists, on the
other hand, see knowledge controllers as a vanguard stratum within

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