If we are to call this a "new middle class," however, as many have done, we must do so with certain reservations.  The old middle class occupied the position by virtue of its place outside the polar class structure; it possessed the attributes of neither capitalist nor worker; it played no direct role in the capital accumulation process, whether on one side or the other.  This "new middle class," by contrast, occupies its intermediate position not because it is outside the process of increasing capital, but because, as part of this process, it takes its characteristics from both sides.  Not only does it receive its petty share in the prerogatives and rewards of capital, but it also bears the mark of the proletarian condition.  For these employees the social form taken by their work, their true place in the relations of production, their fundamental condition of subordination as so much hired labor, increasingly makes itself felt, especially in the mass occupations that are part of this stratum.  We may cite here particularly the mass employments of draftsmen and technicians, engineers and accountants, nurses and teachers, and the multiplying ranks of supervisors, foremen, and petty managers.  First, these become part of a mass labor market that assumes the characteristics of all labor markets, including the necessary existence of a reserve army of unemployed exercising a downward pressure on pay levels.  And second, capital, as soon as it disposes of a mass of labor in any specialty--a mass adequate in size to repay the application of its principles of the technical division of labor and the hierarchical control over execution by means of a firm grasp on the links of conception--subjects that specialty to some of the forms of "rationalization" characteristic of the capitalist mode of production (281-282).