The Working Class and the Middle Classes: Allies or Foes? with John Milios

A video of this August 20, 2022, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.

The classical political economists defined three social classes on the basis of their forms of income: capitalists (profits), workers (wages), and landowners (rents). Marx, in his critique of political economy, developed a new, non-economistic and non-mechanistic “relational” class theory. On the basis of Marx’s approach, we can tackle complex problems concerning the class structure of contemporary societies and the gray area between the working and middle classes. Certain intermediary middle-class sub-collectivities can be identified between the capitalist and the working class: the middle bourgeoisie, the traditional petty bourgeoisie, and the new petty bourgeoisie. Depending not only on their structural characteristics but also on the specific conjuncture, as in an economic crisis for example, the middle classes tend to polarize in class struggle between the two main classes of capitalist society.

JOHN MILIOS is Professor of Political Economy and the History of Economic Thought at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. He has authored more than two hundred papers published or forthcoming in refereed journals (in Greek, English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese and Turkish) including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, History of Political Economy, History of Economics Review, Review of Political Economy, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Science & Society, Rethinking Marxism, and the Review of Radical Political Economics, and has participated as invited speaker in numerous international conferences. He has also authored or co-authored some eighteen scholarly books. His most recent books in English are A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and Its Crisis: Demystifying Finance (Routledge 2013, Paperback Edition 2014, co-authored with D. P. Sotiropoulos and S. Lapatsioras) and The Origins of Capitalism as a Social System: The Prevalence of an Aleatory Encounter (Routledge 2018). He is director of the quarterly journal of economic theory Thesseis (published in Greek since 1982) and serves on the editorial boards of four other scholarly journals.

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