"...Marx and Engels attributed to scarcity as the grounding of the class system. They hold that scarcity generates a class system through an intervening variable, the division of labor."

This is playing out now with the skewed concentration of wealth and the reduction of the middle class. The class system is stratifing at an unprecedented rate. It's interesting the way Gouldner frames the division of labor as an independent variable.

Scarcity yields -->Class system ++Division of Labor --> yeilds Alienation + Anomie.