The small fish swallowed is transformed into part of the shark, and the petit-bourgeois losing his economic identity is absorbed in the Nirvana of the greater capitalism.
With respect to the beaten small bourgeois, he does not count. There is no revolutionary effectiveness in a beaten class, and the defeated small tradesman either sinks into oblivion, buried in the slums, the cemeteries of the unfit, or perambulates the earth an uneasy ghost entirely out of place in society and tampering with reactionary politics, in the ranks of the Roosevelt pseudo-progressives or playing with the Socialist Party.
Really, this new middle class did not enter into the calculation of Marx. It could not have done so, for the economic facts of his time did not allow of such an anticipation.
He wrote in a milieu of which the dominant note was the petite-bourgeoisie, the philistines of the early Victorian era.
The great concerns were only just beginning to raise their heads above the welter of the competitive chaos. The mass of the workers, denominated proletarians, had no political representation, and had not even learned to organize trade unions on any effective scale, indeed, they were only just beginning to develop rudimentary forms of these organizations. Marx could see—and surely that is credit enough for one man—that the greater capitalism was the next order of the day, and that the proletarian class must remain as the only effective class with which a revolution could be made.
As a generalization the conclusion is correct. It remains practically unassailable in spite of the vehemence of the attacks made by the Revisionists, but it ignores a whole intermediary period through which we are passing at the present time. It leaves out of consideration the work of the petite-bourgeoisie in the political and social world; it does not take into consideration the tremendous efforts put forth by that class in antagonism to the
