Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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Intellectual Influences on the New Left in America: C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse / James Panton
Abstract: The commonalities between C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse – both social theorists who enjoyed a considerable public audience – are charted in this essay. Despite apparent fundamental differences over Marxism and "Big Theory", their parallel theoretical engagements with the linked questions of post-war political agency and the impact of U.S. mass media, are mapped out. A specific limitation of their "New Left" philosophies and politics is each thinker's problematic tendency to locate potential "freedom" in an increasingly narrow "private" sphere.
<1> In the intellectual history of the American New Left, two figures loom large: the Texan sociologist C. Wright Mills and the German émigré philosopher Herbert Marcuse. A comparison between these individuals reveals a great many differences. However, in what follows I want to focus upon some of their similarities: their search for a new source of political agency, their concerns about the spread of mass media and consumerism, and their appeal to the burgeoning New Left in the early-to-mid-1960s. By way of situating the discussion, let me begin with some of the most obvious similarities and differences, many of which will be known to any reader who is familiar with their work.
<2> Both Mills and Marcuse, of course, were academics based for much of their time at Columbia University in New York. Marcuse first from 1934-1942 at the relocated Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) and from 1952-1953 at the Russian Institute; Mills as a researcher in the Labour Research Division of the Bureau of Applied Social Research from 1945-1948, as an assistant professor in sociology 1946-1956 and full professor from 1956 until his death in 1961.
<3> Both were radical critics of post-war American society, and both were critics of the dominant social and political thinking of the period, both in its liberal and its radical variants. But they were thinkers who, whilst both of the left, took an apparently very different view of the history of left theorising, and Marxism in particular. Marcuse understood his project as that of revolutionary social criticism: he was a dialectician imbedded in the tradition of European Hegelian-Marxism. Mills, by contrast, like many of the early American New Leftists he would inspire, was very firmly anti-Marxist in his theoretical framework, more prone to citing Weber than Marx with approval. Marcuse, of course, was a German émigré, a participant in the short lived revolutionary soldiers" councils in Berlin that formed in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. By contrast Mills was a Texan, on many levels an individualist, a celebrator of the great frontier spirit of self-made Americans. And he was a sociologist who would ground his writing in empirical research rather than grand sweeps on the history of philosophy. Against Marcuse's philosophical dialectics Mills was also suspicious of any claims to Grand Theory (see for example: Mills 1959: 33-59).
<4> There is an important difference in intellectual style that can perhaps partly be explained in terms of their different backgrounds and intellectual orbits. Mills was already a best-selling author of popular renown in the 1950s: his White Collar (2002 [1952]) and The Power Elite (1956) had the distinction of quickly becoming best-sellers at their time of publication, while his controversial polemic on the Cuban revolution, Listen Yankee! (1960b) was featured in the front cover of Harpers Magazine. Mills was influenced politically by the tradition of American left populism, and philosophically, by the pragmatism of Dewey; his writing, both popular and academic, stands out for its lucidity and clarity: it is clear that Mills placed great emphasis upon the importance of communicating his argument to as wide an audience as possible. By contrast, much of Marcuse's writing is complex and opaque; much, even after his move to the United States, was written in German and remained un-translated throughout much of his celebrity status in America. His books that were available in English - from the recovery of Hegelian dialectics in Reason and Revolution (c.1942) to the bringing together of Freud with Marx in Eros and Civilisation (1956) – are complex philosophical works written mostly in the favoured language of dialecticians: "Hegelese".
<5> Both theorists moved from relative pessimism to sober optimism about the possibility of social transformation as the political apathy of the 1950s gave rise to the new radicalism of the 1960s. The most obvious similarity, and the reason that Mills and Marcuse would both be so influential upon the New Left, was of course that both were engaged in a project of critiquing mid-twentieth century American society: a critique that challenged the on-going process of commodification and bureaucratisation, that analysed the industries of media and communication as key determinants of a diminished historical imagination, and a pacified political subjectivity. Marcuse was most concerned with the integration of the working-class into "the system", an integration he found evident in the United States; while Mills was troubled by the degradation of aspirant and independent individuals whom he believed had been the substance of previous progressive politics. The implications of both their critiques was to pose a challenge to the limited definition of politics in post-war liberal capitalism, challenging the boundaries between public and private life and calling for an expansion of "the political".
<6> I will suggest that uniting their many differences, and underpinning their similarities, was a concern with the integration and pacification of political agency, and an assertion of the individual as the site of moral consciousness and political engagement. This may seem an unsurprising claim to make of Mills, who throughout his sociology bemoaned the diminished individual, but rather more controversial a claim to make of Marcuse, a neo-Marxist concerned with the integration of the working-class into a consumer-capitalist hegemony and, apparently, keen to find a new source of transformative historical agency, whether in a working-class revival, the "new social movements" of student activism and civil rights, or the dispossessed and down-trodden of the developing world. Nonetheless, I suggest it is ultimately with the individual as political agent that Marcuse's theory is most concerned.
I. The Influence of Mills and Marcuse
<7> Whatever their similarities, the differences of temperament, style and approach between these two thinkers remains great, and it is therefore no great surprise to discover that their most vocal supporters fall into two quite distinct groups: the left-liberal leadership of the early 1960s, and the later, more "revolutionary" movementeers of the second half of the decade. Much of the explanation for this is of course temporal: all of Mills" significant works were published before the end of 1961, by which time he was already well known; by comparison, Marcuse was little known until the publication of One Dimensional Man in 1964. The temporal vicissitudes of the new left movement itself are also important: Mills" call for an intellectual leadership which could articulate a new political language appealed to the aspirations of young leftists who had grown up in the apathy of the 1950s and were in the process of working out a new means of doing politics; by contrast, Marcuse's apparently more revolutionary call for a fundamental rejection of the status quo appealed to the radical sentiments of the mid-to-late 1960s as the ranks of the New Left were swelling, political reform seemed too long in coming, opposition to the war in Vietnam and draft resistance was growing, and the scent of revolution was in the air.
<8> It is to the founding leaders of the New Left, whose politics were developing in distinction to the relative apathy and conservatism of the 1950s, that we look to find most vocal celebration of C. Wright Mills. According to Todd Gitlin, an early activist and former president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS): "C. Wright Mills was the most inspiring sociologist of the second half of the twentieth century ... For the political generation trying to find its bearings in the early Sixties, Mills was a guiding knight of radicalism" (Gitlin 2006: 27). And it is from other members of the early leadership that we find Mills" most striking influence. For Dick Flacks: "practically alone among the established Left intellectuals, Mills articulated and legitimated much of the sensibility that was embedded in the early SDS group" (Flacks 2006: 3). The foremost SDS leader, its first president Tom Hayden, had written his 1964 MA thesis on Mills (published in 2006 as Radical Nomad). Hayden himself notes the influence of Mills upon the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the SDS of which Hayden was principle author:
None of us in SDS knew [Mills], though many were followers. After Albert Camus and Bob Dylan, Mills ranked as the most pervasive influence on the first generation of SDS. He was the mentor, perhaps the father figure. (2006 [1964])
For Gitlin, the contradictory nature of Mills himself seemed to express the contradictions of the political period which he and his colleagues were attempting to engage with:
He was a radical disabused of radical traditions, a sociologist disgruntled with the course of sociology, an intellectual frequently sceptical of intellectuals, a defender of popular action as well as a craftsman, a despairing optimist, a vigorous pessimist, and all in all, one of the few contemporaries whose intelligence, verve, passion, scope – and contradictions – seemed alive to most of the main moral and political traps of his time. (Gitlin 2006: 27) [1]
<9> Although Mills had the distinction of being a best-selling sociologist who wrote popular and accessible works, his real celebrity came towards the end of his life, just as this new generational cohort were crying out for a new politics, looking for justification for their dissatisfactions, and inspiration for their sense of moral revolution. Though White Collar and The Power Elite had sold well, it was his critique of imperialism and celebration of anti-imperialist uprisings, The Causes of Word War Three (1958) and Listen Yankee! (1960b) which brought him to the height of his popular renown. His The Sociological Imagination (1959) seemed to point towards a theoretical framework for a new politics, and his polemical call for a new political movement in the "Letter to the New Left" (Mills 1960a), an open letter published simultaneously in the radical new left journals New Left Review (UK) and Studies on the Left (USA) in 1960, further transformed him into a authoritative voice of the new left in America. It was whilst preparing for a television debate that Mills suffered a fateful heart attack. He would die 15 months later aged 45.
<10> It is to a slightly different group that we must turn to find the influence of Marcuse. For example, writing in 1968, Paul Breines, at the time a graduate student working on the philosophy of European Marxists Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch, would write that Marcuse "is the most widely discussed thinker within the American Left today" (Breines 1968: 137). This comment comes from a collection of essays published in Frankfurt, edited by the rising star of the second generation of critical theorists, Jürgen Habermas, and composed mostly of essays by German leftists. By 1970, in a work published in New York, Breines would explain that Marcuse had "leapt overnight from the hinterlands of heretical and avant-garde Marxian theory to celebrity status as the primal father of the global revolt of students and youth" (Breines 1970: ix). From Douglas Kellner, a leading commentator on and communicator of critical theory, we find the claim that "Herbert Marcuse was more widely discussed than any other living philosopher" (Kellner 1984: 1). And Martin Jay, author of the essential guide to the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination, claimed in an essay of 1970 that:
No article on the New Left is complete without the ritual mention of his name; no discussion of the "counter-culture" dares ignore his message of liberation . . . Through what the French, in a delightful phrase, call "la drug-storisation de Marcuse", he has himself become something of a commodity. (Jay 1970: 342)
It is from the modern day inheritors of critical theory, in other words, the dialecticians and students of the European tradition of radical thought, that we find most comment on Marcuse's influence.
<11> But it is true that by the end of the 1960s Marcuse was developing such a celebrity status among the student radicals of Europe and America that both mainstream media and government had begun to take note. An article in the Californian Saturday Evening Post warned of the relationship between Marcuse's theory and all that seemed degenerate in the youth culture of the 1960s:
Like Rock "n" Roll and some of the mind-expanding drugs and those movies in which beginning-middle-end come in reverse or spiral or other or no patterns, Marcuse is a stimulant to fantasy and action, not the architect of a system. He is a writer of articles and manifestos, not an organiser of reality. (Gold 1968; cited in Kellner 1984: 1)
While a 1968 report drawn up for the British Cabinet by the "anti-communism (home) official working group" warned that "the militant [students] look for revolution as an aim in itself . . . If they have an ideological bible it consists of the work of Professor Herbert Marcuse," whose work "has a simple theme: the complete rejection of the existing order" (see: Travis 2000).
<12> Marcuse inherited his celebrity status amongst young American radicals rather suddenly. And this status is somewhat surprising if we consider that, in contrast to the best selling sociologist, polemicist and media commentator Mills, Marcuse spent most of his time in America as an unknown individual, even within the ranks of professional academia. According to the historian and later critic of the New Left, Christopher Lasch, the work of the Frankfurt School theorists, even after their re-location to Columbia University, made very little impact upon American sociology or political science. [2] Although radical new leftists 'seized upon the works of Herbert Marcuse in order to justify their own ideas of cultural revolution" in the mid-1960s, it was often with little understanding of Marcuse's Frankfurt School background or the philosophical tradition from which his work had emerged (Lasch 1975: xiv). Kellner asserts that even amongst the radicals who Marcuse seemed to inspire directly, "it is unlikely that many ... actually studied his writings seriously" (Kellner 1984: 3), while Breines complained at the end of the 1960s that "only a very small percentage" of New Left activists "cares to have more than the vaguest comprehension of his works or of the philosophical tradition in which they stand" (Breines 1970: 137).
<12> Given that Marcuse was barely known inside or outside of the academy, and given that a great many of those he inspired were little acquainted with his substantive body of work, the obvious question must be why this aging and obscure continental theorists was propelled to the status of father figure of the American new left? Answering this question requires that we consider the social, political and intellectual context out of which the New Left itself emerged.
II. Post-War Disillusionment and the Origins of New Left Radicalism
<13> In the early 1940s philosopher Sydney Hook accused the American political and cultural elites of a "new failure of nerve" which was manifest in a flight from intellectual responsibility and "prophecies of doom for western culture, no matter who wins the peace, dressed up as laws of social dynamics". It was a failure of belief in the possibility of human freedom and progress from which, he predicted, "will grow a disillusion in the possibility of intelligent human effort so profound that even if Hitler is defeated, the blight of totalitarianism may rot the culture of his enemies" (see: Hook 1991). At a superficial level the post-war years seemed to prove Hook wrong. Fascism was defeated and relative peace was achieved, the American economy, enlivened by the war and fuelled by the expansion of the service sector, was leading a worldwide economic boom; employment was at an all-time high and standards of living seemed to be continuously improving. Superficially, the decade and a half following the end of the Second World War was the best of all possible times.
<14> It was at a more profound level that something very important was amiss. In the 1950s, "American thinkers of virtually all shades of political opinion" notes Furedi, "were deeply concerned about the absence of any positive vision of the future" (Furedi 1992: 88). The political theorist Judith Shklar noted the prevalence of social commentaries and other publications with apparently apocalyptic titles: "whither modern man?", "goodbye to the West" or "the destiny of European Culture" (Shklar 1957: vii). For all its underlying economic and technological dynamism, 1950s society was profoundly insecure and lacking direction. Historian Russell Jacoby notes the inherently contradictory character of a period in which even the most sober of liberals "pondered the possibilities of a completely transformed society" which seemed "just around the corner", while they were at the same time beset by an air of caution and pessimism and an absence of vision in terms of "how to organise it" (Jacoby 1999: 159).
<15> The combination of rapid economic development, which had lead to very real improvements in living standards, combined with a sense of broader social drift and uncertainty, found its expression in a quite profound degree of social and political conservatism, and political apathy. Marwick notes that from the mid-forties to the early sixties "conservative forces were strong, reinforced by the frigid influences of the Cold War, and hysteria in the US about "un-American activities" (1998). On the international scene the Cold War threatened nuclear annihilation as a definite possibility; domestically McCarthyism expressed the insecurity of a political system which held the reins of power but which had difficulty justifying itself, even to itself; little wonder, perhaps, that the American citizenry, with conscious memories of economic depression followed by world war, seemed content to focus on its family lives and private affairs. As Hayden notes in his autobiography:
After the trauma of two decades – Depression and Holocaust, two wars, the atom bomb – came a dawn of stability and peace, along with rising living standards, low inflation and unemployment rates, and an explosion of single-family housing in the newly expanding suburbs . . . .. For Americans who had come through the embattled thirties and forties, it was a time of respite, when one could finally sit back and enjoy the good things in life, and raise one's children well. (Hayden 1988: 4)
Nowhere were these contradictions expressed more clearly than at the level of sexual relations. On the one hand, rapid economic expansion was opening up the economy to women, particularly middle class women, who were entering the labour force at a faster rate than any other social group: by 1956 "70 percent of all families in the $7000 to $15 000 annual income range had at least two workers in the family, and the second was most often a woman" (Evans 1980: 9). Technological innovation and the spread of consumer goods of course also meant that the traditionally demanding role of housewife and mother was no longer nearly as demanding: from the spread of automobiles, washing machines and dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and household appliances, keeping house was no longer a full time job. At the same time as society made greater sexual equality technically possible, Betty Friedan (1992 [1963]) pointed out that "the feminine mystique" had become the dominant model to which women were expected to aspire in the post-war period: a model of womanhood that posited the highest realisation of women's potential must be achieved in the domestic sphere.
<16> The mood of cultural conservatism can perhaps best be understood as an attempt to cling on to, perhaps to reinvent, a model of social stability as a counterweight to the rapid pace of social development which was, at a profound level, politically directionless and morally unanchored. Mills most significant sociological investigations into the changing dynamics of American society were published in this decade. His White Collar (Mills 2002 [1952]) lamented the decline of an older independent American middle class of strong, self-reliant individuals and entrepreneurs, and its replacement by a new middle class, beset by a consumerist and conformist mentality. But Mills was note alone: a remarkably large number of works in sociology and social-economics that captured popular attention during the 1950s hinted towards a crisis at the level of social relationships and organisation – from individuation and alienation to the decline of class identities and the superficiality of the consumer experience in an age of "mass consumption". Four years after White Collar, William H Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) bemoaned the replacement of dynamic entrepreneurialism with bureaucratic manipulation; while Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957), a work which had significant impact upon the British New Leftists E P Thompson and Stuart Hall, was an attempt to expose and critique the manipulative inauthenticity of consumer society. Mills' more explicitly radical polemic, The Power Elite (1956), accused corporate, political and military elites of "organised irresponsibility" in the face of history, and noted the extent to which, in direct contradiction to the American Dream, economic development had occurred hand-in-hand with ever-decreasing levels of social mobility. Mills also saw the transition from World War Two, the context in which Hook had first accused the elites of a failure of nerve, to the Cold War, as expressing very clearly a "paralysis of will" at the level of the political elite: a paralysis that was apparent in their engagement in a war which, unlike previous historical conflicts, they had neither a plan for victory, nor indeed any hope of winning (Mills 1956). Beginning the trend in fifties critical sociology, two years before the publication of White Collar, David Riesman, in his The Lonely Crowd (1950), had developed the thesis that the culture of an "inner-directed" protestant individualism, tied to an economy and culture of autonomy and self-reliance, had been replaced by a new "other-directed" social character that, at least in part, was a result of the ever expanding realm of individual and mass consumption. Riesman noted that such consumption, rather than resulting in liberation from drudgery, had in reality lead to a culture of shallow conformism. The title of an article published eight years later would express the core problem that underpinned the rapid development of post-war affluences. Abundance for what? (1958) Riesman asked. With Michael Maccoby he would return to the theme in the early 1960s, noting that the key question which "plagued" post-war American society was "the problem of national purpose" (Riesman and Maccoby 1962).
<17> While insightful intellectuals, sociologists and cultural commentators of the 1950s were coalescing around a certain sense of banality and an absence of purpose at the heart of post-war American capitalist society, a significant challenge to the status quo was developing at a structural level of society with the rather sudden appearance of an historically novel cohort: youth. The combination of post-war baby boom with the rapidly expanding consumer economy meant that by the end of the 1950s this new generational cohort had emerged, the product of middle class society, the expansion of high-school and higher education. And it was precisely this new cohort, the adolescent middle-class, who would compose a newly radicalised constituency from which the New Left emerged as the late 1950s gave way to the early 1960s. It is this peculiar social basis that made the New Left so politically new: the movement was composed of individuals who, in the words of two of their number, "weren't underpaid or unemployed workers" but "ordinary middle class kids" who were "fresh out of comfortable homes and seemed well on their way to respectable, well-paying professions" (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1969: 17-18).
<18> If an older generation of insightful intellectuals could only diagnose the limitations of post-war society in terms of the decline of pre-war social order, this younger generation presented a very practical challenge to conformism, and a rejection of the contradictions post-war capitalist liberal democracy. It was a society founded on liberty which nonetheless encouraged conformity, especially in the ranks of the newly affluent suburban middle class, and whatever its claims to liberty and justice, it showed few signs of transforming either its economic or racial segregation. It was a society which promised development and yet, to a generation who had not been politically conscious in the depression or during the austerity of the war years, the play of commodities through which such development was most clearly manifest seemed, at best, superficial. It was a society that claimed an interest in peace and prosperity yet engaged militarily throughout the world. Overall, it was a society whose overarching system of organisation, "the system" as Marcuse would call it, seemed limiting and hypocritical. And it was to a sense of moral hypocrisy, to a bankruptcy of the values of consumer society, and to an alienation manifest in political apathy that the writings of C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse spoke loudest.
<19> Marcuse's scepticism towards the working-class as an historical agent in the post-war era, of which more below, had lead him to search out alternative agents of protest amongst representatives of the newly emergent malcontent who were not yet integrated into the system of consumer society. For two early New Left activists, Marcuse's emphasis upon seeking out new sources of agency "was a justification and theoretical basis for organizing students into radical struggle" (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1969: 35). According to Lucien Goldmann, although Marcuse neither predicted nor directly inspired the youth revolt of the 1960s, they found "in his works and ultimately in his works alone the theoretical formulation of their problems and aspirations" (Gold-mann 1969: 56). [3]
<20> Although any call to political arms must be founded in a certain individual moral discontentment with the status quo, the New Left was particularly explicit in its moralism. As Goldmann notes, the concerns of the movement were "primarily cultural and moral" (ibid). And these concerns were manifest a struggle to find a sense of identity which was not bounded by the traditional liberal polity. For two early participants, the concerns of "the Movement" extended "far beyond politics":
To be in the Movement is to search for a psychic community in which one's own identity can be defined, social and personal relationships based on love can be established and grow, unfettered by the cramping pressures of the careers and lifestyles so characteristic of America today. (Jacobs and Landau 1967: 14)
<21> Although many may not have read or studied Marcuse in any detail, Marcuse's critique of advanced capitalism chimed with a mood of social and cultural alienation, a yearning for a new moral sensibility and authentic identity, among radicalised American youth – the sentiment of his critique chimed with the aspirations of this movement, and were interpreted, however vaguely, as a justification for and theoretical elaboration of their own forms of social and political protest.
<22> This cultural and moral critique at the heart of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, was also central to the arguments developed by Hayden and the leaders of SDS who would call for an assertion of the personal and for authenticity in politics as in personal relations. In a speech given at the University of Michigan in March, 1962, Hayden summarised his agenda for a new political movement:
The essential challenge . . . is to quit the acquiescence to political fate, cut the confidence in business-as-usual futures, and realize that the time of mass organisation, government by expertise, success through technical specialisation, manipulation through the balancing of official secrecy with the soft sell technique, incomprehensible destructiveness of two wars and a third which seems imminent, and a Cold War which has challenged man's relation to man: the time has come for a reassertion of the personal. (Hayden n.d.)
<23> A couple of months later Hayden delivered the Port Huron statement which called for the establishment of a New Left political movement which could give form and expression to the "feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles and organise to change society" (Hayden 1987, 1994: 374). As already noted, the echo of Mills is striking. The Sociological Imagination begins with a contrast between the experience of private life as a trap in which individuals "cannot overcome their troubles", and transformations at the level of social structure which are impersonal and beyond their control:
Seldom aware of the intricate connexion between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do no usually know what this connexion means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history making in which they might take part. (Mills 1959: 9-10)
Pessimistic that "ordinary men" possess the quality of mind to understand the interplay of "self and world", and unable as they seem "to cope with their personal troubles in such a way as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them", Mills calls for leadership from "journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors" – in short, the intellectual class - founded in a sociological imagination that can understand historical and structural transformations "in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career" of individuals. Thus Mills called for a recognition of the proper subject of sociology in the intersection of personal biography and social history. This call for a sociology which might "transform the personal uneasiness of individuals" into an "involvement with public issues" (Mills 1959: 10-12) had been central to the argument in White Collar where he called, against both liberalism and Marxism, for a characterisation of society in terms of psychology:
For now the problems that concern us most border on the psychiatric. It is the one great task of social studies today to describe the larger economic and political structure in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career of the individuals, and in doing this to take account of how the individual often becomes falsely conscious and blinded. In the welter of the individual's daily experience the framework of modern society must be sought; within that framework the psychology of the little man must be formulated. (Mills 2002 [1952]: xx)
In his 1960 "Letter to the New Left" Mills claimed that "it is with [the] problem of agency in mind that I have been studying, for several years now, the cultural apparatus, the intellectuals – as a possible, immediate, radical agency for change" (Mills 1960a). It seems to be precisely this immediate, radical agency for change that the leadership of the SDS sought to emulate.
<24>
Two distinct but related moods characterised the Movement. The first
is a call for a leadership which could cohere political engagement,
which could recognise the intersection between personal problems and
structural transformations, a new and radical intelligentsia, to whom
Mills was a guiding light. The second is one of alienation and a
search for psychic community founded in the solidarity of a
collective rejection of the values, culture and aspirations of
consumer society, a mood to which Marcuse's call for a "Great
Refusal" spoke volumes. Central to the concerns of both
thinkers
was the question of who might constitute a new radical agency for
social change; and central to both of these moods among the
movementeers was the attempt to establish this agency.
III. The Search for Agency
<25> Uniting the arguments of Mills and Marcuse is a concern with a generalised political apathy, and an absence of any transformative political agency, which absences are understood to be the result of an increasingly consumerist society, the growth of commodification and bureaucratisation, and the expansion of media and entertainment industries.
<26> In order to understand Marcuse's critique of advanced industrial society we must briefly consider its development out of the "critical theory" of society originating in the Institut für Sozialforschung, more commonly known as the Frankfurt School, of which Marcuse became a member in 1932 shortly before its relocation to the United States. Established in 1923 and affiliated to the University of Frankfurt, the Institut was but one expression of the reappraisal of Marxist theory by a number of radical European intellectuals in response to the "crisis of Marxism" in the early 1920s. Despite the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union in 1917, the following years were a time of defeat for the revolutionary working class movement. By 1923, uprisings and attempted revolutions had been suppressed throughout much of Central Europe. The defeat of working-class agency, the relative stabilisation of bourgeois society in the post-war period, and the emergence of fascism, all seemed to question a Marxism which predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism as a social system, and the spontaneous radicalism of the working-class as the historic agents who would lead the transformation of society.
<27> The Institut members themselves understood their role to be that of social theorists rather than radical activists. According to Jay: the "original intention of the founding members [was to] keep it free of any party affiliation" (Jay 1996: 13). Max Horkheimer, director of the Institut from 1931, had been a student during the Munich uprisings in 1919 but had rejected political engagement, considering the revolts "premature and inevitably doomed by the lack of objective conditions favouring true social change" (Jay 1996: 14). Although Marcuse was engaged in the establishment of the revolutionary soldiers' councils during the uprisings of 1918, and was for a short time a member of the German SDP, "it seems that after the turmoil of the war and the German Revolution, Marcuse was unable to make any political commitments." According to Kellner, Marcuse liked to retrospectively tell that his first serious disillusionment with the working class came with his experience as a soldier in the revolution of 1918, when, after the rank and file soldiers had established a revolutionary council, the soldiers then proceeded to elect their officers to positions of authority within the revolutionary council, "suggesting to him that the change might not be so radical after all" (Kellner 1984: 15-17).
<28> This practical rejection of political engagement was theoretically justified in a rejection of the mediate unity of theory and practice often associated with the idea of "praxis". In his 1942 exposition of negative dialectics Marcuse drew a distinction between theory and practice thus: "Theory will preserve truth even if revolutionary practice deviates from its proper path", because "practice follows truth, not vice versa" (Marcuse c.1942: 322). By 1947, Horkheimer had moved further, rejecting not only "deviant" revolutionary practice, but the assumption that practice might be the means towards the realisation of radical politics at all: "Is activism then, especially political activism, the sole means of fulfilment, as just defined?" he asked: "I hesitate to say so. The age needs no added stimulus to action. Philosophy must not be turned into propaganda, even for the best purpose" (Horkheimer 1947: 184). This distinction between theory and practice was also a rejection of the idea the proletariat is the source of correct knowledge (see, for example, Horkheimer's essay "Tra-ditional and Critical Theory", discussed by Bottomore 1984: 16). Indeed, it was not merely that the working class could not be relied upon unquestioningly, but rather, that its own interests had become united with the interests of capitalism itself. In an argument that would become central to Marcuse's thesis in One Dimensional Man, Theodore Adorno, Horkheimer's closest collaborator, presented a simple explanation of the falsity of the revisionist Marxist theory that the impoverishment of the proletariat would lead it inevitable to revolutionary consciousness. "Against this argument all the statistics can be marshalled. The proletariat does have more to lose than its chains":
Measured against conditions in England a century ago as were evident to the authors of The Communist Manifesto, their standard of living has not deteriorated but improved. Shorter working hours, better nutrition, housing and clothing, protection of family members and for the worked in his old age, and an average increase in life expectancy – all of these things have come to the worked along with the forces of production. There can be no question of their being driven by hunger to join forces and make a revolution. This puts the possibility of organisation and mass revolution in doubt . . . The traditional argument about pauperisation collapses. (Adorno 2003 [1942])
In One-Dimensional Man Marcuse made the argument even more clearly:
If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television programs and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population. (Marcuse 1999 [1964]: 8)
Capitalist society had altered both the structure and function of class relations in such a way that although bourgeois and proletariat were 'still the basic classes" they are "no longer agents of historical transformation" because they are now united by "and overriding interest in the preservation and improvement of the status quo" (Marcuse 1999 [1964] xlv).
<29> Thirteen years before the publication of One-Dimensional Man, Mills was already liberated from the apparent constraints of Marxian class theory. White Collar begins with a characterisation of the newly dominant social class, the white-collar middle-class, who had "slipped gently into modern society" almost without being noticed, and who, it seemed, lacked both a history and any potential to make history:
Whatever history they have had is a history without events; whatever common interests they have do not lead to unity; whatever future they have will not be of their own making. Internally, they are split, fragmented; externally they are dependent on larger forces. Even if they gained the will to act, their actions, being unorganised, would be less a movement than a tangle of unconnected contests. As a group they do not threaten anyone; as individuals they do not practice an independent way of life. (Mills 2002 [1952]: 235)
Uneventful as their lives may be, lacking a collective influence upon the future of society, lacking even the individual possibility independence from conformity, the mode of existence of this new class was for Mills the chief "characteristic of twentieth century existence" (Mills 2002 [1952]). The characteristics which for Marcuse signified the integration of a once radically minded proletariat, for Mills signified the degeneration of an older order of an independent and history making middle-class. Despite differences in nomenclature the object of investigation seems to be the same, the newly emergent middle-class in America.
<30> Following Marx, Mills recognises the historic agency of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but it is an agency which in the advanced capitalist world "has either collapsed or become most ambiguous: so far as structural change is concerned, these don't seem to be at once available as our agency anymore" (Mills 1960a: 21). By 1960, four years before Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man, Mills had already theorised the collapse of all hitherto existing historical agency, and very clearly asserted that the New Left must understand this collapse "as the political problem, which we must turn into an issue and a trouble" (Mills 1960a: 22).
<31> For Marcuse, the integration of the working-class occurred through the spread and systematisation of false needs, the result of manipulation of wants and desires by vested interests who control the technical power structure of society, interests representing the needs of ever expanding commodification and translated to the population through the control of the industries of media and communication. These needs were false in the sense that their imposition demanded the repression of autonomous individuality, a denial of the possibility that individuals might be able to reflect upon their interests, and thus, in Marcuse's view, to form a truly critical consciousness. Key to the imposition of these needs is the control of desire itself, which meant that the satisfaction of false need could be experienced as "most gratifying to the individual" while at the same time further deadening any individual autonomy, agency and consciousness.
<32> A critique of the industries of media and communication had been begun by Adorno and Horkheimer in their 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment. In "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", they argued that "culture now imposes the same stamp on everything . . . Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system" of the "cultural industry" (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997 [1947]). In Eros and Civilisation Marcuse asserted that the key function of "the experts of mass communication" was to "transmit the required rules" of conformity to the system, and thus to mitigate against the development of any critical or oppositional consciousness:
With the decline of consciousness, with the control of information, with the absorption of individuals into mass communication, knowledge is administered and confined. The individual does not really know what is going on; the overpowering mundane of education and entertainment unites him with all the others in a state of anaesthesia from which all detrimental ideas tend to be excluded. (Marcuse 1956: 104)
<33> For Mills, "the most decisive comment that can be made about the state of US politics" in the middle of the twentieth century was the fact of widespread political indifference. The vast majority of the population are "strangers to politics", and their estrangement has occurred through a process of the "privatisation" of individuals with the structural transformation of a society away from a structure of self-reliance, self-employment and entrepreneurialism, in which "sales" was only one moment, to a society in which selling seems to be the dominant determinant (Mills 2002 [1952]). [4] As for Marcuse, this process of commodification, the dominance of the sales mentality, is fuelled by the rise of the industries of media and communication. In a pastiche of Marx's argument in Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [5] Mills writes:
To believe that "the ideology wherein men become conscious of class conflict and fight it out" is determined solely by "material contradictions" is to overlook the positive role of the mass media of communications. If the consciousness of men does not determine their existence, neither does their material existence determine their consciousness. Between consciousness and existence stand communication, which influence such consciousness as men have of their existence. Men do "enter into definite, necessary relations which are independent of their will," but communications enter to slant the meaning of these relations for those variously invoked in them. The forms of political consciousness may, in the end, be relative to the means of production, but in the beginning they are relative to the contents of the communication media. (Mills 2002 [1952])
For Mills, in an echo of Adorno and Horkheimer, the mass media – from commercial jazz and soap operas through movies and comic strips to news and current affairs – sets a kind of common standard, a common image, and a "kind of common denominator" or "scheme for pre-scheduled emotion". These images are so prevalent that individuals are not longer even able to see them for what they are, as representations, with the result that "the media, as now organised, expropriate our vision." The impact of this mass media is thus a deadening of the individual impulse to autonomy through the imposition of a common framework of meaning and emotion through which reality is interpreted. Media impose a form of mediation between actuality and the individual's response to actuality, in such a way that the selection of reality presented through media is the only reality the individual can know. In so far as people live in a world beyond that of their most immediate experience it is the world constructed by media representation. The symbolisation of political meaning through which individuals make sense of the world politically is presented in bite sized pieces, politics itself is presented only through a play for dominant (rather than critical) symbols, and through a constant process of standardization and reinforcing these images, they become banal: "men are attached to them only as to a brand of clothes, by conventionalised reaction" (Mills 2002 [1952]: 333-5).
<34> For Marcuse:
All liberation depends upon the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own. The process [of liberation] always replaces one system of pre-conditioning by another; the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction. (Marcuse 1999 [1964]: 7)
Since the construction of false needs occurs through the heteronomous domination of consciousness by vested interests via the media and cultural industries, then "the mere absence of advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance to wonder and think, to know himself (or rather, the negative of himself) and his society" (Marcuse 1999 [1964]). This idea that in the absence of indoctrinating media individuals might come to a position of autonomous self-reflection was pre-empted by Mills, for whom the content of the mass media is understood to have entered the collective and individual consciousness unconsciously, and to such an extent that to drastically modify it even "over a generation or two would be to change profoundly modern man's experience and character" (Mills 2002 [1952]). The dominant images of the moment are "the images of success and its individuated psychology" which reinforce a culture of individuation and commercialism, and which are "the greatest diversion from politics" (Mills 2002 [1952]).
<35> Both Mills and Marcuse then are concerned with the extent to which mass media and the spread of consumer culture has deadened the individual and diminished his capacity for a critical or political consciousness, encouraging a retreat into the self and a disengagement from politics. This leads Mills to a tragic-comic proclamation on the state of the American citizenry:
They are not radical, not liberal, not conservative, not reactionary; they are inactionary; they are out of it. If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as a privatised man, then we must conclude that the U.S. citizenry in now largely composed of idiots. (Mills 2002 [1952]: 328)
Here, and elsewhere, Mills hints at an understanding of the relationship between public and private such that a self-reliant individualism and autonomy stands in direct contradiction to a privatised individual, an individual concerned with his own immediate existence and unable to engage in any boarder social project. For Marxists such engagement may once have taken the form of the movement of the revolutionary proletariat, but it stands equally for liberal theory (and indeed, society), in which social agency and individual autonomy were united through an engagement in the kinds of voluntary associations which culminated in the parliamentary system (see for exam-ple: Mills 1960a: 21). This seems to be the substance of Mills bemoaning the decline of an older and independent middle class, and the theoretical underpinnings to his call for a sociological imagination which might unite individual biography with structural transformation in such a way that the problems of the individual are understood in terms of the broader problems of social organisation.
<36> Given the integration and flattening out of any such imagination in the majority of the population, Mills makes a call for those more able, an intellectual class, who presumably have the capacity to stand back from their immediate absorption in contemporary society, and who might thus be able to instigate a more critical and political consciousness in the population at large. Marcuse's plea for a new socio-historical agency similarly depends upon the activities of a few, but it is a far more individuated understanding of what such agency might involve than that espoused by Mills. This is remarkable given the apparent distinctions in their politics, with Mills an anti-Marxist leftist expounding a defence of individual self-reliance, and Marcuse, the revolutionary neo-Marxist, seeking a constituency for agency that might play the role that the working class have reneged.
<37> Since for Marcuse it is the domination of the industries of media and communications which have lead to a degradation of culture and consciousness, the possibility of developing a new critical consciousness depends upon the opening up of spaces of autonomy free from the domination of wants and desires through the play of commodities:
Beyond the personal realm, self-determination presupposes free available energy which is not expended in superimposed material and intellectual labour. It must be free energy also in the sense that it is not channelled into the handling of goods and services which satisfy the individual, while rendering him incapable of achieving an existence of his own, unable to grasp the possibilities which are repelled by his satisfaction.
The establishment of such a realm of freedom is what Marcuse calls the "Great Refusal".
<38> Whereas Mills proposed that a transformation of content in the mass media would lead to a transformation of human experience and character, Marcuse seems to suggest that since the forces of domination permeate all areas of social life, the only viable radical act, the act embodied in "the Great Refusal", must involve a withdrawal from society as such – from the handling of its goods and services, from the espousal of its values of individualism and success, and from the hypocrisy of its morality. Because of this, the Great Refusal is necessarily a primarily intellectual and individuated act: a "personal withdrawal" of "mental and physical energy from socially required activities and attitudes". As such, Marcuse is aware, it involves a peculiarly "escapist attitude" (Marcuse 1999 [1964]). It is an also a voluntary act, not the result of any internal contradiction within the capitalist system, but the result of an individual decision. There is a certain ambiguity as to the object of critique throughout One-Dimensional Man, which is expressed in an oscillation between the terms "advanced capitalism" and "the system". For example, Marcuse asserts that through enacting the "Great Refusal": "the non-functioning of television and the allied media might thus begin to achieve what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not achieve – the disintegration of the system" (Marcuse 1999 [1964]). The idea of "the system" seems to represent more than simply the mode of production of material existence, but rather, the entirety of forms of social and cultural life, with their associated norms and values. We can see why the idea of a rejection of "the system" might have more appeal to the largely middle-class student radicals of the New Left. Since the very possibility of transcending the contemporary status quo requires us first to develop a consciousness of its negation through a rejection of its norms, values, and modes of consumption, clearly this is an act which would be possible "only for a few", primarily those outsiders who are not yet integrated into the systemic hegemony of false needs (Marcuse 1999 [1964]).
<39> In a letter of 1957 Mills lamented somewhat his outsider and individualist status – never being a member of "any compact and recognizable intellectual community" nor knowing the solidarity of political comradeship that might have come from membership of political parties or campaigns:
I have been intellectually, politically, morally alone. I have never known what others called "fraternity" with any group, however small, neither academic nor political. With a few individuals, yes, I have known it, but with groups however small, no . . . I have never had it; I've never joined any groups much less identified fraternally with any. And the plain truth, so far as I know, is that I do not cry out for it. (Mills 2001: 250)
In both personal and political life, as well as in theory, Mills was an individual who saw the degradation of autonomous individuality as the greatest social problem. Marcuse has a similar, though more explicitly political, rejection of fraternity, which appears not in private correspondence but in his exposition of the nature of the Great Refusal as a private or personal act: it is an act which, on one level, has a peculiarly anti-social character: it involves not only a classically liberal "disobedience to the tyranny of the majority" but also "the refusal of all togetherness, toughness and brutality", and "a commitment to the feeble and individual actions of protest and refusal." Such refusal is "the sole condition that . . . can give meaning to freedom and independence of thought" (Marcuse 1999 [1964]). It is in this sense that the individual's private sphere becomes central to the refusal of contemporary social life: the refusal of society which occurs first and primarily as an intellectual act can occur only on the basis of "freedom and independence of thought". Further, the very aspects of society to be refused, the "false" needs imposed upon the individual from outside which have "become his own", impact upon the individual in his private realm of consciousness and consumption.
<40> But there is a problem here. To the extent that Marcuse's theory understands the construction of individual consciousness through consumerist ideology, and to the extent that "the possibility of that isolation in which the individual . . . can think and question" has been eradicated, there seems to be no site of individual freedom left upon which any refusal can be built. The consumerist ideology constructs individuals as consumers first and foremost, for their identity, their wants and the possibility of satisfaction and even "happiness", are united with "the system" itself. Marcuse seems as aware as Mills of the problem of ordinary men and women extracting themselves from the needs of ordinary everyday life, and thus both theorists understand their calls to agency to be directed first and foremost towards a select social group. But the problem for Marcuse is more serious that just this. The means of oppression in consumer society is the construction of false needs, which needs are the needs of consumption – whether this consumption be material commodities or the mores and values associated with the consumerist ideology. Yet since the only possibility of opposition to this systemic hegemony is an act of refusing these needs, the refusal of society can be enacted only to the extent to which the individual is taken to be thinking and (refusing to) consume. But this means that the site of resistance is the individual as a private and atomised consumer – for it is only as private individuals that we are consumers, and it is precisely the construction of individuals as atomised consumers that Marcuse opposes. It is only by establishing a private sphere of freedom, free from the consumerist ideology, that we can resist, and yet it is precisely as privately consuming individuals that this ideology constructs us as passive individuals whose identities and interests are united with those of the system. The peculiarity here is that the locus of refusal and resistance is the individual in the private realm as a consumer of commodities and of the norms, values and consciousness associated with consumer capitalism. Yet as private individuals, there seems to be no space in which we can be freed from the needs of such consumption, and therefore, in which we might be able to refuse.
<41> This oddity is expressed clearly in Marcuse's attempt to defend a sphere of privacy. The very sphere in which Marcuse seeks the possibility of resistance is the sphere in which the source of our oppression and domination lies. As private individuals in consumer society we are but atomised consumers. At the same time, however, Marcuse seeks to politicise this sphere of privacy through the Great Refusal. The sphere of privacy, which is the sole condition of resistance, is denied, precisely because it is as private individuals that we are oppressed. Marcuse's arguments seem logically to result not in a defence of the autonomous individual within the private sphere, but in a colonisation of that sphere itself – either by the oppressive force of consumerist ideology, or the political resistance of the Great Refusal.
<42> Mills does not encounter such a problem. Although he levels a great responsibility upon the media, and he admits to the possibility that since the media constructs the only known reality in which ordinary men and women live to such an extent that changing the content of the media would result in both their experience and their character, the argument remains at the level of the representation of man and society, not its ontological construction. For example, he suggests the media may often contain not only an a-political, but at times a false content, because it is "owned and directed by a small group of people to whose interest it is to present individual success stories and other divertissement rather than the facts of collective success and tragedies." If it is the case that people fail to boycott this false and limited presentation of reality, an act which would surely force a change in the content, then this is explained by the fact that "people put up with the present content and live it because they are not aware of any other possibility; people are strongly predisposed to see, hear and read what they have been trained to see, hear and read" (Mills 2002 [1952]). Thus the space is clear for individuals with more critical sensibilities and a more privileged position in relation to the everyday mundane to question, to challenge and to encourage a more critical consciousness among the rest of the population.
<43> We saw above that by the end of the 1950s Mills sociological investigations had lead him away from the traditional sources of historical agency towards the idea of a newly radicalised intellectual and cultural elite who might take society forward. As Gitlin (2006) puts it: "Labor was not up to the challenge of structural reform, white collar employees were confused and rearguard, and the power elite were irresponsible. Mills concluded – partly by elimination – that intellectuals and only intellectuals had a fighting chance to deploy reason." By the early 1960s Mills recognised that a new breed of aspirant intellectuals seemed to be doing just that: "Who is it that is getting fed up? Who is getting disgusted with what Marx called 'all the old crap'? Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways? All over the world – in the bloc, outside the bloc and in between – the answer is the same: it is the young intelligentsia" (Mills 1960a: 22).
IV. Conclusions
<44> At heart, both Mills' and Marcuse's critiques of advanced capitalism and consumer society cohere around a number of very similar themes. Both theorists are concerned with the diminishment of individual autonomy and push towards conformity in the culture of the 1950s and early 1960s; both theorists are concerned by a retreat from political engagement, and an absence of viable political subjectivity. Both direct much of the force of their argument towards the huge expansion of consumer society, and the role played by the industries of media and communication in this expansion. Both theorists are similarly concerned with a certain moral rejuvenation of the radical leftist's consciousness.
<45> Undoubtedly, Mills' sober analysis, a little less revolutionary and a little more programmatic, appealed to a certain section of an emerging New Left intelligentsia who saw for themselves a significant role as leaders. Gitlin points out that the élan and language of the SDS movement was "utterly American. It did not speak in Marxist dialectics. If anything – mixed blessing! – the SDS Old Guard were steeped in a most traditional American individualism" (Gitlin 1989: 107) – precisely the kind of old individualism which Mills celebrated, and whose passing he bemoaned – and which was celebrated in Tom Hayden's claim that "The goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image or popularity but with finding a meaning to life that is personally authentic" Even the third world nationalism and anti-colonial struggles on which Mills pamphleteered were understood in the 1962 Port Huron statement as revolutions embodying "individual initiative and aspiration" [6] – precisely the kind of frontier spirit which the new middle class seemed to lack.
<46> Yet this call for an autonomous individualism was somewhat at odds with a call for an authentic personalism – a call for individuals to rid themselves of layers and pretensions and to be submerged in the immediate. This tension is present in both authors who, while theoretically recognising the need for a solidarity, collectivity or political engagement, at the same time fear their possible absorption into it. But it is Marcuse who spoke loudest to this call for authenticity. His peculiarly individuated and moralistic rejection of the status quo spoke to a generation of alienated radicals and activists for whom "the Movement" was about a search for a psychic community and an assertion of individual autonomy and identity against "the pressures of the careers and lifestyles so characteristic of America today" (Jacobs and Landau 1967: 14). As Breines explained, "the movement" was about a "rejection of the "American Way of Life" and an adoption of "the lifestyle and mental universe of the outsider, the naysayer" (Breines 1968: 144) precisely the attitude of refusal which Marcuse called for. Yet, however strong the call for autonomous individualism, it was at the same "the refusal of all togetherness, toughness and brutality", and "a commitment to the feeble and individual actions of protest and refusal" (Marcuse, 1999 #42: 242-3). It was this sentiment that was to become dominant as the organised New Left gave way to a more counter-cultural sensibility, organised around "the political of subjectivity" a politics premised upon the immediacy of inter-personal relationships in which a truly critical political subjectivity seems to have been the victim. This ambiguity between subjective an objective, personal and political, is at the centre of the work of Mills and Marcuse, and its ambiguous relationship to the formation of a political consciousness are expressed most clearly in Marcuse's problematic attempt to grapple with the reassertion of radical agency in the face of "the system" of advanced capitalism.
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Notes
[1] Interestingly, while Hayden cites Marcuse in his thesis as one of the "other authors, besides Mills, that deeply influenced my own angle of vision" (2006 [1964]), and Gitlin admits that like many young radicals he was drawn to the Marcuse's call for an "apparently impossible but deeply necessary" radical break in the status quo, the older and apparently wiser Gitlin is dismissive of Marcuse's One Dimensional Man with its "stark Hegelian dirge for the Marxist dream of an insurgent proletariat"; a book he thinks would have been more suited to the 1950s when the remnants of the old labour Left were still alive than to the new politics of the 1960s (Gitlin 1989: 246). This attitude fails to capture the ambivalence that Marcuse displayed towards the role of the working-class: below I will discuss the extent to which Marcuse, and his colleagues at the Frankfurt School, were already questioning the possibilities of proletarian revolution by the middle of the 20th century, and in One-Dimensional Man Marcuse displays a deep pessimism towards the possibility of historical agency, and it is far from clear that he holds out any hope for the working class, although he is at a loss for what any other such agency might look like. [^]
[2] There is certainly no evidence that Mills had any interest in Marcuse (although Marcuse cites Mills in towards the beginning of One Dimensional Man). [^]
[3] I am using Paul Breines' translation of Goldmann. See "Editors Notes" in Breines (1970). [^]
[4] Mills tells us that in the early 19th century approximately 4/5ths of the citizenry was self-employed; by 1870 this had reduced to 1/3; and by 1940 to 1/5. The self-employed represent the old middle-class, while the corporate-employed, those engaged primarily in sales, represent the new middle-class. (Mills 2002 [1952]: 326-8). [^]
[5] Marx had claimed that "In the social production of their existence men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production in material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Marx 1970: 20-21). [^]
[6] See Gitlin: 122. [^]
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