In principle, there are now, as before, only two classes to be distinguished: one a ruling class, which acquires more of the total product of the labor of the people--the economic means--than it has contributed, and a subject class, which obtains less of the resultant wealth than it has contributed. Each of these classes, in turn, depending on the degree of economic development, is divided into more or fewer sub-classes or strata, which grade of according to the fortune or misfortune of their economic standards.
Among highly developed states there is found introduced between the two principal classes a transitional class, which also may be subdivided into various strata. Its members are bound to render service to the upper class, while they are entitled to receive service from the classes below them. To illustrate with an example, we find in the ruling class in modern Germany at least three strata. First come the great landed magnates, who at the same time are the principal shareholders in the larger industrial undertakings and mining companies: next stand the captains of industry and the “bankocrats,” who also in many cases have become owners of great estates. In consequence of this they quickly amalgamate with the first layer. Such, for example, are the Princes Fugger, who were formerly bankers of Augsburg, and the Counts of Donnersmarck, owners of extensive mines in Silesia. And finally there are the petty country nobles, whom we shall hereafter term _junker_ or “squires.” The subject class, at all events, consists of petty peasants, agricultural laborers, factory and mine hands, with small artisans and subordinate officials. The “middle classes” are the classes of the transition: composed of the owners of large and medium-sized farms, the small manufacturers, and the best paid mechanics, besides those rich “bourgeois,” such as Jews, who have not become rich enough to overcome certain traditional difficulties which oppose their arrival at the stage of intermarriage with the upper class. All these render unrequited service to the upper class, and receive unrequited service from the lower classes. This determines the result which occurs either to the stratum as a whole or to the individuals in it; that is to say, either a complete acceptance into the upper class, or an absolute sinking into the lower class. Of the (German) transitional classes, the large farmers and the manufacturers of average wealth have risen, while the majority of artisans have descended to the lower classes. We have thus arrived at the kinetics of classes.