Old Working Class, New Working Class
Harrington, Michael
In recent years the American working class has been called conservative, militant, reactionary, progressive, authoritarian, social democratic and, the unkindest cut of all, nonexistent....
...Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 172...
...First, there are those directly engaged in the development of technology, most of them classed as professional and technical workers...
...106-107...
...OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS holdings of the executive officer of a multibilliondollar corporation...
...Related to them, but not a part of the new strata, are the blue-collar workers in the public sector: policemen, firemen, hospital attendants, sanitation men...
...There was, Bell said, a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of the Welfare State...
...All of this should not be taken as implying extreme optimism about a future in which a still dynamic old working class will join with the organized new working class to make the good society...
...In these pages I will try to do that by way of a broad overview of the organized and organizable working class...
...Perhaps the exigencies of the future will deepen the best impulses within the labor movement, and I am on the side of those within it who are fighting for such a development...
...the kind analyzed in the Inaugural Address has...
...Which one of them prevails will determine much about the shape of the future...
...inBlue-Collar Workers, Sar Levitan, ed...
...Sombart, Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus...
...See also Penn Kemble, "Rediscovering American Labor," Commentary, April 1971...
...Manpower in the Seventies...
...See also John H. Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp...
...For Marx on class "in itself" and "for itself," see Proudhon and Marx, Misere de la Philosophie, Philosophie de 1a Misere (Paris: 10/18, 1964), p. 490...
...But it does not thereby happen that, on the strictly economic plane, the group of workers and the group of capitalists oppose one another in a fight to the death, each one having an essential interest opposed to the other...
...The trade unionists and the "near unionists" in the service sector tend to be employed, or financed, by the public in education, health care, and the like...
...In 1940, 5.8 percent of the 25-29 age group had four years of college or more, in 1970, 16.4 percent (the latter figure underestimates the recent increase in college degrees since it omits those between 21 and 25 in 1970, i.e., the age group with the highest percentage of graduates...
...For workers' income, see Brendan Sexton, "Middle-Class Workers and the New Politics," Dissent, May—June 1969...
...Among the 50 percent not accounted for by those two choices will be found drop-outs, life-style pioneers, artists, workers in communications, etc...
...English data cannot, of course, merely be imported to America and applied to the quite different variant of capitalism that exists here...
...Sources for all references within each section will be grouped in a bibliographical note at the end of this essay...
...Moreover, the corporations tend to favor reactionary Keynesianism, in which the ecoomy is stimulated by incentives to capital rather than through the meeting of human needs, which is social Keynesianism...
...Moreover, the chief factor inhibiting and distorting working-class self-consciousness was not, as is widely thought, the wealth of the society...
...The new stratum on which we focus is not based upon property or employment in the private corporation...
...There is no question that a momentous transformation of the American class structure is taking place...
...With immigration severely restricted after World War I, the expanding economy of the mid-1920s recruited its new workers from the farm and thus tipped the national demographic balance from rural to urban...
...In therevised edition of his famous popularization of Marxism, Anti-Duhring, Engels was even moreemphatic on this count...
...And this stratum, for the most part, is neither poor nor modestly well off, indeed is better off than ever before—yet still quite deprived...
...orig...
...The automobile companies, to take a dramatic recent example, have been fighting auto safety and pollution controls for years...
...Selig Perlman provided part of the answer in his seminal Theory of The Labor Movement: American labor remains the most heterogeneous laboring class in existence—ethnically, religiously and culturally...
...See Leon Samson, Toward a United Front for American Workers (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933), pp...
...An almost equal number of the "near poor" (who include more whites and tend more to live in families headed by a male than do the poor themselves) were largely outside the unions...
...54 55...
...Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Random House Vintage, n.d...
...Today, however, there is a visible change from market to non-market political decision making...
...It is the result, not of instinct or intuition, but of class position...
...It may be that the workers, as Sweezy and Baran argue, want to be "integrated into the society as consumers," but it is surely of greater moment that the structure of injustice will not allow them, as a rule, even a "modest" income...
...30, 36, no...
...Yet when election day came, most of those same workers voted for Hubert Humphrey...
...In both the law and medical schools of the late '60s and early '70s there was a demand for more relevant education, and resistance to such established professional organizations as the American Bar Association and the Ameri can Medical Association...
...There are, as we have seen, status factors that can, and have, kept these groups far apart...
...Finally, there are deep-going changes tak ing place in traditional professions...
...And this was a strength, for articulation often invites trials for force when implicit differences are made manifest...
...At stake here is not simply the annual pay but, in Herman Miller's definition of wealth, "the sum total of equity in a home or business, liquid assets, investment assets, the value of automobiles owned and miscellaneous assets held in trust, loans to individuals, oil royalties, etc...
...It is precisely the characteristic of an opinion poll that it reaches a man or woman as he or she is isolated and poses questions in a kind of political and social vacuum...
...It is therefore admirably suited to reflect the privatized area of a worker's mind but what it omits—as elections do not—is the effect of his participation in a workaday world, his membership in a class...
...I think not...
...158 vi...
...But, as I document at length in my book Socialism, the tactic of the Inaugural was central to the politics of Marx and Engels from the late 'S0s to the time of their respective deaths...
...I disagree with those, from the authoritarian Left to the democratic Center, who think that the American working class does not exist (the Right, which I will not consider here, tends to have a vulgar Marxist, or paranoid, version of the power of organized labor...
...3, p. 60...
...But the mature Marx did not hold this view and defined the class struggle in a far more subtle and complex fashion which can also serve as an excellent guide to the reality of the American 1930s—and '70s...
...The answer, I believe, is embarrassingly oldfashioned...
...Third, there are a number of more nebulous categories...
...But even in looking back, it is wrong to romanticize such working-class neighborhoods or to attribute to them, in Serge Mallet's phrase, a "pseudo-globalness...
...Of these, 48.993 million were "production and nonsupervisory workers on private payrolls," with the 14.647 million in manufacturing the largest single component...
...MICHAEL HARRINGTON 150 11 A preliminary warning: If one looks for a "European"-type class consciousness in the United States—something like the attitude of that Frenchman, who, when T. S. Eliot accidentally jostled him, responded, "Me, I am a proletarian exploited by the capitalist class"—it cannot be found...
...Richard Hofstadter, one of the few scholars to recognize the importance of this fact, wrote, "The demands of a large and powerful labor movement combined with the interests of the unemployed, gave the New Deal a social democratic tinge that had never before been present in American reform movements...
...There was a brief period during and after theParis Commune when responding to Bakuninist critics on their Left and the vilifiers of the Commune on their Right, they seemed to turn backto the language and mood of the Manifesto...
...Given the obvi ous exigencies of the situation, the workers were committed as a class—and, with the elections of 1936, organized as a class—to win full-employment policies requiring that * Those who wish to downgrade this speech usually argue that Marx was making pragmatic political concessions to the British trade unionists who were so important to him in the First International...
...1. On executive bonus, see Wall Street Journal, Sept...
...But once we grant the apparent uniqueness of American capitalism, is it indeed true that class consciousness failed to play an important, much less a decisive, role in the nation's history...
...Precisely because I am concerned and involved, I cannot afford to gloss over tendencies that run counter to my hopes...
...By the end of the '60s, the AFL—CIO, the Auto Workers, and the Teamsters all supported an ongoing political apparatus which, in terms of money, lobbying, campaign workers, and the like, was a major factor in the United States...
...Mr...
...And, as that survey pointed out, absolute numbers can be more revealing than percentages when one deals with the trend had become even more important...
...But the number of operatives and craftsmen will increase, and the unions that were created because of the common interest of this great mass are certain to grow in the foreseeable future into the largest membership organizations in the society...
...That obviously describes a profound shift away from the industrial proletariat of semiskilled workers...
...Nixon's program is based on the infamous "trickle down" theory...
...Its members work, for the most part, in public, or semipublic sectors—education, health, social services, defense and defense-related industries, aerospace—and OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS they are therefore dependent on federal political decisions for their economic wellbeing...
...In 1968, for instance, the polls indicated significant support for George Wallace among young white workers in the North during the early fall...
...To begin with, in the upper reaches of the society property is not quite so passe as the notion of a clear-cut "separation" of ownership and control suggests...
...In this country, as distinct from Europe, bourgeois ideology itself stressed equality, classlessness, and the opportunity to share in wealth...
...Morris Hilquit, theorist of American socialism in the first third of the century, also talked of the "exceptional position" of America with its vast land mass, its prosperous agriculture, its tendency to make wage labor seem only a "temporary condition...
...Those which will lag behind the national average are managers, officials, and proprietors (22 percent...
...These workers derive their livelihoods almost exclusively from the sale of their labor power on an anonymous, and uncertain, labor market and it is quite easy to distinguish them from their "fellow employees" who are corporation presidents or managers...
...For if it is indeed true that economic decisions will be increasingly made by a political rather than a market process...
...1970), Table 1, p. 25...
...in 1970 that percentage had jumped to 75.4 percent...
...But that was only an episode...
...On Wage Statistics in the '20s: U.S...
...and labor was now part of a new urban majority...
...he can work at a control panel rather than on an assembly line without changing his subordinate position in the organization of production...
...OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS see that while some groups, like the building mechanics, had made distinct progress, other groups, like the iron and steel workers, employees in meat packing plants, cotton mills, saw mills, tobacco and clothing factories had not held their own against the rapidly rising cost of living...
...They recognized that, even though the worker insisted upon his loyalty to the American ideal, he was reading it in terms of his own class needs...
...Clark Kerr, Marshall, Marx and Modern Times: The Multi-Dimensional Society (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp...
...craftsmen and foremen (22 percent) ; private household workers (15 percent) ; operatives (10 percent) ; nonfarm laborers (-2 percent) and farm workers (-33 percent) . In part, the new patterns of education in the United States are a reflection of these changes in class...
...MICHAEL HARRINGTON Still, the most sophisticated revision of the idea of the working class is based upon a very real, and momentous, shift in class structure (a shift that is also, as will be seen, the key to the emergence of a "new" working class...
...For Raymond Aron, a seminal theorist of the notion of "industrial society" (i.e., of consensus capitalism), the class struggle only exists where there is a "fight to the death" between workers and capitalists which eventuates in violence...
...Now it is enough to note that this labor market is not anonymous, its salaries are not determined on a class basis, as in the case of workers, and it is less subject to the ups and downs of the business cycle...
...Certainly when Washington's cutbacks coincided, not accidentally, with the Nixon recession of the early '70s, there were extremely high rates of unemployment among the educated, including Ph.D.s with scientific and engineering degrees...
...There was little rhetoric of class war...
...Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), P. 363...
...orig...
...At the crudest this indifference could be rationalized by confusing the relative decline in manufacturing jobs—they accounted for 39.3 percent of nonagricultural employment in 1919 and only for 28.8 percent in 1969—with an absolute decrease in the number of workers and a consequent loss of political and social power...
...The "modest" standard, it must be emphasized, lives up to its name: it allows for a two-year-old used car and a new suit every four years...
...So in the '30s there emerged a mass political movement based upon class institutions (the unions) which demanded, not simply narrow legislation related to the needs of this or that trade or craft, but a mode of planned social organization that would give priority to the value of full employment...
...MEW XII, pp...
...In 1980, according to the projections of the Department of Labor, there will be 15.5 million professional and technical workers and 15.4 million operatives (assemblers, truck drivers, bus drivers...
...For there is a working class "for itself" with a political consciousness that goes far beyond "job consciousness" and expresses itself in social reformism toward the society as a whole...
...Somewhat more subtly, there were those who acknowledged the existence of the traditional working class but argued that it had become co-opted by the society and therefore lost its distinctive character...
...Werner Sombart's famous remark that socialism in America ran aground "on shoals of roast beef and apple pie" was made in 1906 and has survived as a myth until this day...
...It is on the basis of this analysis that Bell has been writing about a "post-industrial" society in which the decisive "new men" are the scientists, the mathematicians, the economists and the engineers of the new computer technology...
...Daniel Bell, "The Corporation and the Society in the 1970s," Public Interest, Summer 1971, p. 9. For Aron's definition of class, see op...
...Consequently, the only acceptable "consciousness" for American labor as a whole is "job consciousness" with a limited objective of "wage and job control" . . . . Perlman was right: heterogeneity made it impossible to organize the great mass of the newly arriving European workers until the '30s and acted, in a thousand different ways, to impede consciousness of membership in a single and united class...
...How is it that such a massive social phenomenon and such obvious trends have been ignored, or declared nonexistent, by many observers...
...orig...
...1909), pp...
...For educational statistics, see U.S...
...A good number of these are, of course, white-collar workers, and not a few of them receive wage increases from anti-union employers whenever organized labor in the industry, or the area, makes a gain...
...But my partisanship does not make me an apologist...
...everyone could end up a winner, though with differential gains...
...The categories exceeding that rate are professional and technical workers (50 percent...
...It concluded that in England this cooptation simply had not taken place: A factory worker can double his living standards and still remain a man who sells his labour to an employer in return for wages...
...the desirability of decentralized power...
...But hardly had the end of ideology been proclaimed than the most tumultuous ideological decade in recent history began— the 1960s...
...Economic conflicts over wages and hours, he said, are quite real...
...That has its positive side, as Herbert Gans discovered in his study of Levittown...
...As Bennet Berger has documented, it is only in the old working-class neighborhoods, usually ethnic in character, that one finds a face-to-face and daily sense of a common class plight...
...In September of 1969 the "average production worker" took home $102.44 for a full week's work and manufacturing workers, most of whom were organized, only received $106.75...
...The suburbanized worker, he learned, was not homogenized by the experience as much as critics of the '50s had thought...
...Most of the new strata members occupy subordinate positions in large production units, and this is the basis for the unionism and "near unionism" which has already developed among them...
...They helped promote the organization of industrial workers in the CIO and were a major reason why a vast political movement based on class became a crucial feature of politics in the '30s...
...For Bell on new men, see "Notes on the Post-Industrial Society," Public Interest, Winter 1967...
...Herbert Marcuse, who had a notable influence on the New Left youth of the 1960s, writes that "'the people,' previously the ferment of so cial change, have `moved up' to become the ferment of social cohesion...
...That party alliance did not come about...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., an activist liberal, says that the lines of division in our politics have fundamentally altered...
...Even in the area of race, where so many observers tend to pit blacks against the unions, labor is the most integrated single institution in U.S...
...It did not, however, stop social class from becoming the most important single determinant in our political life...
...The organized workers are, in short, no one thing...
...Department of Commerce, Characteristics of American Youth, series P-23, #34 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971) . 162 MICHAEL HARRINGTON...
...The middle levels of management, particularly in the modern corporations, are not so easy to define and will be discussed at greater length in the section on the "new" working class...
...These groups engage in collective bargaining and political action but refuse, often for reasons of status, to affiliate with the AFL–CIO...
...2. U.S...
...Yet there are important parallels between the new strata and the traditional working class...
...The largest and most effective force in the society with a commitment to that kind of progressive Keynesianism is the trade union movement...
...3ff, 21...
...Insofar as I deal with history, it will be in order to understand the current position of the unions and the various futures it could make possible...
...The labor movement—I sharpen the focus on the organized section of the working class —contains more blacks than any other institution in American society, as well as more young whites 'attracted by the populist racism of George Wallace...
...The total nonagricultural labor force in 1969 numbered 77.902 million men and women...
...Beyond that, as Leon Samson has argued in a fascinating book, Americanism had become a kind of "substitutive socialism...
...These trends are likely to continue, and deepen, in the future...
...For Irving Bernstein on the 1920s, see The Lean Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp...
...Some of the halcyon notions of the security of these strata were rudely dispelled by the recent Nixon recession, yet no one should have any trouble in distinguishing it from the lot of the wage workers...
...These theories are usually developed with the comment that Marx, fixated as he was upon a primitive model of capitalism, was unaware of such changes...
...clerical workers (35 percent) and sales workers (30 percent...
...But there also is at least the possibility that the progressive tendencies in these two working classes, old and new, could provide the basis for a new political coalition in America dedicated to social and democratic—eventually perhaps social democratic— planning...
...He concludes that in the advanced economies authority, not ownership, is central to the formation of social class...
...Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1906), p. 126...
...36, 83...
...But as early as 1856, Marx, whomDahrendorf charges with not having understoodthe importance of the joint stock company, wrote, "It cannot be denied that the application of thejoint stock company to industry characterizes anew epoch in the economic life of modern nations...
...But that, as we have just seen, is a misleading simplification...
...In recent years most of the liberal arts students have looked toward teaching as a career...
...Their family backgrounds, education, and income make them a part of the traditional working class...
...So there is a distinct and identifiable universe of the working class even after one has taken into account the tremendous changes in class structure since Marx...
...In 1980, then, the "old" working class will be larger than ever before in American history...
...Daniel Bell transposed Aron's thesis for America...
...But the elections reveal the much more sig 156 nificant fact that by and large those same workers vote massively in national elections for the Democratic candidates endorsed by their union...
...Marx-Engels, Werke [hereafter MEW], Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1953, XII, p. 33...
...For all the dramatic struggles of the 1930s, it is clear in retrospect that the working class was not in a revolutionary mood...
...It is pure hypocrisy to think that they are always resolved in an equitable fashion, 154 pure hypocrisy to deny a struggle over the division of the national income...
...but on a five-class scale, on which the working class is in between the poor and the middle class, many more will identify themselves as working class...
...When Irving Louis Horowitz asks skeptically why the "interest-determined demands of the working class are somehow instinctively and intuitively more progressive than those of other sectors," he overlooks the union's stand on such an issue...
...As we pass from societies of accumulation to programmed societies, relationships of power become increasingly more important than opposition between social groups...
...Economic life could be a non zero-sum game...
...the careful delineation of a new social reality is...
...cit., pp...
...J. David Greenstone, Labor in American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1969), passim and pp...
...New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971...
...It is no longer the common men against the boss as much as it is the rational against the indignant, the planner against the spoiler, the humanist against the uneducated, the young against the old...
...Therefore—and in this they are typical of most of the people in the new strata—they offer a political base for a narrow, corporatist kind of lobbying, designed to protect particular jobs without reference to social cost or utility...
...There was a veritable explosion of ideology in the institutions of MICHAEL HARRINGTON mass higher education in the advanced econ omies...
...106-107, 119-20...
...A 1967 Fortune survey revealed that 30 percent of the 500 largest industrial concerns "are clearly controlled by identifiable individuals or by family groups...
...There were 20.210 million union members, mainly concentrated in machinery, transportation equipment, contract construction, and transportation services...
...So I speak of a new working class...
...And by 1980 they will number in the millions...
...Much of what Dahrendorf, and others, present as a critique of Marx is thus only Marxian common sense...
...31-32...
...They point out that, as recorded in the opinion polls, the workers have been giving decreasing support to union political action, and that their unions have become more and more political...
...Moreover, since these figures were computed, the cost of living has gone up by almost 20 percent and the real wage of the workers has slightly decreased...
...This project subjected the thesis of the embourgeoisement of the working class in that country to a careful empirical examination...
...It was not simply that the historic factors identified by Perlman were at work...
...So a more comprehensiveMarxian development of the formulation in the Inaugural would emphasize that the "intelligenceand foresight" would have to be exercised by and for the workers, not by and for Bonapartists, Bismarckians, fascists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc...
...He holds that "the working class not only tends to disappear as a class-conscious and recognizable element in society...
...In his famous Inaugural Address to the Inter national Workingmen's Association, Marx spoke of a campaign to restrict the working day to ten hours in England as "a struggle between the blind rule of supply and demand, which is the political economy of the middle class, and the social control of production through intelligence and foresight, which is the political economy of the working class...
...It is, however, important to note that there is one basic oversimplification in the Inaugural...
...have unwittingly adopted, not simply a Marxian definition of the concept, but a "romantic" Marxian definition...
...168-69...
...Paul Sweezy and the late Paul Baran, sympathizers first with Russian, then with Chinese Communism, argued that the organized workers in the United States have been "integrated into the system as consumers and ideologically conditioned members of the society...
...These developments did not, for the reasons Perlman described among others, take place in the guise of a socialist class consciousness...
...if the question is how to manage the economy rather than whether to do so, then what mass force is there in society to fight for social values...
...1955), p. 308...
...For class income, see S. M. Miller, "Can Workers Transform Society...
...Louis Blanc, Organization du Travail, 5th ed...
...It is sobering to realize that Bell's "new men" and Galbraith's "educational and scientific estate" may have loomed somewhat larger than life because of the impact of such federal policies...
...Even if one upgrades all of these numbers because of the enormous increase in the number of working wives-1 8 million of them in 1969, double the figure for 1950—who add an average of 25 percent to their family income, the total still falls short of the government's modest budget...
...Iv...
...If the question is posed in this way, so reminiscent of both the early Marx and the early Lukacs, then there was no class struggle in America...
...The board chairman of General Motors at that time "only" owned 0.017 percent of the enterprise over which he presided—but that little fraction was worth $3.917 million...
...There is a tendency toward corporatism in the new strata and in the old working class as well, with an emphasis on a very narrow and self-interested job protection...
...But which values will determine the priorities of these new men...
...It is argued that economic classes defined by property relationships—entrepreneurs owning factories, shopkeepers their little businesses, farmers and peasants their plots of land, and workers possessing only their labor power to sell—have become obsolete...
...And since, as Brendan and Patricia Sexton have pointed out, the average trade unionist of today is getting younger, these percentages can be expected to go up as the children of those now youthful workers reach college age...
...It is now apparent, even to its sophisticated devotees, that the free market is utterly incapable of allocating the resources of a technological society in a rational fashion...
...The theory that America has always been immune from the class struggle is the gen eralization of a profound half-truth...
...Department of Labor, Manpower Projections: U.S...
...These figures mean, among other things, that many children of the working class are now going to college...
...15, p. 11...
...Second, almost all of them are in jobs directly dependent upon the political process, and this means that their notion of collective bargaining includes political action from the very outset (indeed, the NEA lobbied long before it beBibliographical Notes 1. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 256...
...5. See Raymond Aron, op...
...Table 40, p. 83...
...He would do this at the expense of the poor, the state and local governments and their employees and wage and salary earners...
...There are already 2 million of them, including school teachers in the National Education Association, nurses who belong to associations carrying out "job actions," people who belong to what Bok and Dunlop call "near unions...
...Lenin wrote of America (and Britain) that there were "exceptionally favorable conditions, in comparison with other countries, for the deepgoing and widespread development of capi talism...
...One of the most important subcategories of this group includes engineers and scientific technicians...
...For they had adopted, 152 even when they were antisocialist, the criteria of the left wing of the Socialist party: that class consciousness must necessarily and exclusively take the form of allegiance to a socialist or worker's party...
...The theorists of industrial, or post-industrial, society might even grant this historical case...
...In the present context my focus will be upon those factors which drive such professionals, technicians, and others in a trade union direction—toward collective bargaining on the job and political pressure for full-employment policies outside the job...
...The railroad men were for the nationalization of their industry, and the Chicago Federation of Labor was in favor of a labor party...
...In afamous letter to Engels in 1858 in which he outlined Das Kapital, he indicated that the culmination of his analysis—which was never written— would deal with "stock capital as the most developed form [of capitalism] with all its contradictions...
...4. Raymond Aron, La Lutte des Classes (Paris: Galimard, 1964), pp...
...But the service category also includes the members of the American Federation of 160 Teachers (which, with more than 200,000 dues payers, is becoming an important union within the AFL–CIO) and the staff members of the Museum of Modem Art who, in September 1971, won a strike as members of a union local...
...Strangely enough, many scholars failed to take note of this significant phenomenon...
...As David Greenstone documents in his book Labor in American Politics, "the emergence of organized labor as a major, nationwide electoral organization of the national Democratic Party was the most important change in the structure of the American party system during the last quarter of a century...
...Yet, when one turns to families with incomes in the general AFL—CIO range, the magnitude of the present social change becomes even more evident...
...He became less localistic and suspicious, more inclined to participate in civic and political life...
...Yet Perlman was wrong: even in the '20s when he wrote, and much more so later on, the workers were constantly forced by the exigencies of their class situation to go beyond "wage and job control" and raise class issues about the organization of the entire society...
...They are paid not as individuals but as members of a class: after the age of 25, the worker's income does not normally vary with increasing experience, as does that of professional and managerial employees, but usually rises as part of a negotiated group settlement...
...Such action on the latter issue would have meant the successful culmination of a trade union campaign of more than two decades' duration...
...Bell and John Kenneth Galbraith, whose "educational-scientific estate" is another name for the "new men," assume that these educated and generally liberal administrators of power will be able to pursue their own goals...
...High technology, he continues, requires consensus and cooperation and therefore cannot tolerate class conflict over basic principles...
...Notwithstanding its tendencies toward ethnocentrism and antiintellectualism, the labor movement has provided a decisive political impetus for whatever democratic planning there is in America...
...This class consciousness is not revolutionary but, in practical and programmatic terms, it is remarkably similar to that found among the social democrats of Europe—even when it is sometimes couched in an antisocialist rhetoric...
...In a much more recent statement of this theme Bell wrote that the secret of Western society was "productivity...
...And Alain Touraine writes, "it is anachronistic to depict social armies confronting each other...
...Bureau of the Census, Current Population Report, series P-60, no...
...24, 27, 33...
...This error was sometimes abetted by a failure to explore the fine print in the governmental definitions in which, to take one pertinent example, laundry workers, garage repairmen, and dishwashers in the service industries are not classified as blue collar...
...In 1940, only 37.8 percent of Americans between 25 and 29 years of age had completed four years of high school or more...
...Yet labor maximized its long-range political program by standing fast on one man/one vote rather than giving priority to its short-range organizational goals...
...What predisposes them toward a certain political point of view...
...Ordinarily, one would have expected the unions to have grown and bettered their wages and working conditions during prosMICHAEL HARRINGTON perity, but the influx of farmers, who could be satisfied by cheap wages and were suspi cious of group action, depressed the labor market...
...They stand to gain from redistributionist federal policies favoring those either subaffluent or poor...
...The analytic problem arises when one tries to make statements about the political and social behavior of the new strata...
...indeed, they permit one to speak of a "new working class" so long as it is understood that the phrase cannot be taken as a precise definition...
...More generally, the nonowning managers at the top of the society accumulate wealth...
...But of the rest only 8 percent were thinking about going into business...
...See Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Viking, 1933...
...When William English Walling popularized Kautsky's views in 1912, he spoke of the possibility of winning the professional classes, the salaried corporation employees, and a large part of the office workers to socialism...
...Still, it seems obvious today, in contrast to a generation or two ago, that the worker does not enter a class community when he leaves the factory but rather participates more and more in the nonclass world of consumption...
...Of these, about 40 percent are technicians who will not have been to college but will have received post-high school training or have acquired sophisticated skills on the job...
...The joint stock company, Ralf Dahrendorf holds, separated ownership and control and thereby obviated a theory of class determined by property or the lack of it...
...First of all, consider the "old" working classes: the primarily blue-collar workers who do physical labor in the industrial economy...
...The pay is better now, the boom-and-bust rhythm has been attenuated, the famous built-in stabilizers, such as unemployment insurance, are at work...
...New York: Crowell, 1970), P. 157, Table IX-3...
...137-39...
...I will deal with this historical error in a footnote, since it is not central to the main line of this analy * In The Communist Manifesto Marx unquestionably thought society was polarizing into a giantworking class and a tiny bourgeoisie and held toa rather simplistic, property-determined theory ofsocial class...
...This kind of collectivism is far from the romantic Marxian consciousness as defined by Aron, but it is distinctive and clearly goes beyond narrow organizational interests...
...In the decade of the '70s government statisticians expect the labor force to grow by about 25 percent...
...Once the discrepancy between low wages and high productivity in the '20s helped bring about the Great Depression, these developments were of enormous importance...
...The American working class was no longer a port of entry for millions of the foreign-born and was becoming, for the first time in its history, homogeneous...
...Let me be more specific...
...So even though there are obvious differences between industrialists and file clerks, there are not "any clear class lines to divide them—only infinite gradations...
...MEW, XXIX, p. 312...
...It might be more accurately described, to use a term employed by the British students of the affluent worker, as an "instrumental collectivism...
...1. Bell, "The Corporation and the Society in the 1970s," op...
...Moreover in the posthumously published Theories of Surplus Value, Marx not only discussed theappearance of new middle strata linked to thephenomenon of the corporation but saw them asan inevitable outcome of the capitalist dynamic itself...
...Part of the confusion over this momentous trend stems from a reliance on polling data in most academic accounts of the labor movement...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1960), D626-34...
...Perhaps the most emphatic statement of the theme comes from Clark Kerr, a brilliant, pragmatic technocrat...
...At the top of the income scale, particularly among the scientists and the engineers, the new strata shade off into the upper reaches of management...
...In the past there was an unspoken consensus and the public philosophy did not need to be articulated...
...And] the workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with the society than the intellectuals...
...In any case, college spending per student will not continue to increase faster than the Gross National Product, as it did in 1950-70...
...In Fortune magazine's 1968 survey of the college campus, 40 percent of the "forerunners"—the two-fifths of the student body who had rejected the vocational school notion of the college—said that they were interested in teaching...
...Manpower in the Seventies, op...
...Yet there were some specific circumstances in the '60s that might have made these trends seem even more vigorous than they actually are...
...I am not in search of a rhetoric but want to describe how workers behave politically in order to maximize goals which go beyond their immediate self-interest, or even the narrow advantage of their craft and skill, and which have to do with the needs of the entire class and through it of the nation itself...
...But at other points it announced a controversial trend: the disappearance from Western political life of debate and conflict over fundamental questions, a fading away of the very notion that there should or could be alternative forms of social organization...
...See also Wall Street Journal, March 17, 1969...
...As the aero-space layoffs in 1970 and 1971 demonstrated, many of these workers are exceptionally vulnerable to policy shifts in Washington...
...There is every reason to expect that they will continue their present tendencies toward job organization and political involvement...
...There are two major lines of argument, sometimes convergent, which hold that, even though there may be objective determinants of class in America, there has either never been or cannot now be any significant mass consciousness of that fact, moving workers to political or social action...
...Yet the objective indices show that in the United States as in England the worker is not an integrated participant in affluence but a member of a quite distinct stratum...
...As early as the mid-1850s, in his analysis of the "imperial socialism" of Napoleon III, Marx had understood that the conservatives and reactionaries could use collectivist methods to serve their own purposes...
...V. Raymond Aron was an early advocate of this view...
...Another 12.591 million were employed by federal, state, and local government, and many of them held down such blue-collar and organizable jobs as sanitation man or postman...
...But before that can be attempted, I must define a vexing term: the working class...
...1928), pp...
...The war and postwar militancy had driven the average weekly wage in manufac ture up to $26.30 in 1920, but in 1921 wages dropped to $22.18 and in 1929 they had only reached $25.03, more than a dollar below the level of 1920...
...MEW XX, p. 617...
...Since it involved significant modifications of capitalist society as it had existed until then in the United States, this idea met with violent resistance, both physical and ideolological, from most employers...
...he can live in his own house in a "middle class" estate or suburb and still remain little involved in white collar social worlds...
...In Toward a Democratic Left I spoke of these people as a "new class" rather than a "new working class" because I wanted to stress the discontinuities signaled by their appearance...
...they are opposed to a management of the economy that maximizes the interests of corporations...
...I believe that the American workers have been a crucial force behind every social gain of the past two generations, and in domestic politics their unions constitute an American kind of de facto social democracy...
...In addition to this deficiency in income, most of the union members are employed in manufacturing, construction, and transportation, i.e., in jobs with little intrinsic interest and, in the case of an assembly line in an auto plant, a dehumanizing routine...
...3. V. I. Lenin, Lenin on the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 24...
...And the workers, most dramatically in France and Italy, but in America too, kept challenging the differential distribution of gains in strike after strike...
...There are serious scholars who argue that it no longer exists in America...
...Don Lescohier, History of Labor in the United States, 1886-1932 (New York: Macmillan, 1935), vol...
...On the one hand, it is said that the exceptional historical character of the national experience prevented the development of such a consciousness...
...Yet there are crucial elements of workingclass life—relative deprivation, the impersonality of the work process, greater susceptibility to layoffs than experienced by other groups in the society, group wages— which remain and are the objective determinants of the class itself...
...The initial impact of this progressive turn of events was conservative...
...For even granting that there have been profound transformations in the structure of the advanced economies, some of them unforeseen by even so perspicacious a thinker as Marx, what is it that makes the workers I have just described more likely to join unions than any group in society...
...The answer is found onthe last page of Volume III of Dos Kapital...
...This notion was deepened, particularly by Engels, in response to Bismarckian "socialism" and led to the theory of "state socialism" in which government intervenes on behalf of the bourgeoisie...
...Second, there are the educated workers in the service industry, a category that will expand at much better than the average rate (45 percent as against 25 percent) for the decade...
...Every governmental projection indicates a substantial increase during the next decade in the number of Americans who live under such conditions...
...Manpower in OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS the Seventies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970...
...On the other hand, it is claimed that the recent evolution of the American economy has produced a consenus in which interest groups compete over the details of the distribution of wealth but classes no longer contest more basic questions of the very mode of allocation itself...
...Among the unorganized one would find the working poor, who numbered close to 4 million in 1969 according to the government's optimistic definition of poverty...
...If the AFL—CIO had agreed to let Everett Dirksen's Congressional override of the Supreme Court's one man/one vote rule go through, Dirksen would have permitted the OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS repeal of the federal enabling clause for state "right to work" laws...
...Yet it can be demonstrated that American labor was by now more than a mere interest group...
...162-63...
...There is, for instance, no question that the intrapersonal culture of the working class has been largely subverted by such changes in class structure as the movement of workers to the suburbs or the achievement of limited access to the consumption-oriented (and rigged) society...
...By that standard, the "nonowning" managers own quite a bit...
...The chairman of Chrysler, with a mere 0.117 percent of his company's stock, had a $2.380 million interest in the business...
...Yet the very appearance of national health insurance as a political issue is primarily the result of a campaign waged for years by George Meany and Walter Reuther...
...ed., 1961), pp...
...Moreover, there are a good many indications that the unions will be forced to be even more political in the coming period...
...OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS the government manage the economy...
...Rudolph Oswald, "The City Workers Budget," Federationist, February 1968...
...And it is obvious that in many aspects of their life, above all in their education and income, most of these people more clearly resemble the salaried middle class than the working class...
...They also tend to be employed by large organizations and often, for all their educational attainments, they are subordinate participants in a hierarchical system...
...See Herbert Gans, The Levittowners (New York: Pantheon, 1967), p. 195...
...The unions thus became a class political force, even if in a fairly undramatic way...
...It is an extraordinary thing that those who argue there is no working class in the United States can be found at the most disparate points of the political spectrum...
...It is a failure to confront this complex reality that makes Derek Bok and John T. Dunlop miss the significance of trade union political action in their study of Labor and the American Community...
...In recent years the American working class has been called conservative, militant, reactionary, progressive, authoritarian, social democratic and, the unkindest cut of all, nonexistent...
...The rich were, to be sure, disproportionately represented in higher education: 66 percent of the families with incomes of over $15,000 a year had a child in college in 1969, but only 16.4 percent of those with incomes under $3,000...
...or they could respond to a movement for democratic and social planning...
...At certain points in his writing that phrase referred to the disappearance of grandiose simplifications about society, a happy event from any point of view...
...xii—xiv...
...See also, "24 Million Americans, Poverty in the United States, 1969," in Working Poor: U.S...
...The issues are no longer social or economic so much as they are cultural and moral...
...In 1980, according to federal projections, there will be 1.4 million of them, an increase of 50 percent over the 1966 total, and a percentage that will be rising twice as fast as the national labor-force average...
...The social critics of the 1960s and early '70s are relatively affluent compared to the marginality and even joblessness they had experienced during the Depression...
...But if it was not prosperity that prevented the development of a socialist class consciousness in America, what was...
...1, 1971...
...Why, then, did Marx fail to include this material in his own theory of class...
...The kind of class struggle envisioned in The Manifesto did not emerge in the America of the 1930s or since...
...The AFL, as Phillip Taft has written of the period, "found itself, against its wishes, propelled into more active political participation...
...service workers (45 percent...
...In 1969, only 23.7 percent of the family heads of students in college had themselves received a degree, which means they lacked a crucial precondition for middleMICHAEL HARRINGTON class status...
...II...
...The leadership of the new society will rest, not with business or corporations as we have known them (for a good deal of production will be routinized) but with the research corporation, the industrial laboratories, the experimental stations and the universities...
...The conditions we describe as "American exceptionalism" slowed the emergence of that consciousness and even made its anticapitalism seem formally procapitalist...
...It has renewed itself in the last quarter of a century and become a greater force in American politics than at any time in the nation's history...
...Perhaps one of the best statements of this reality was made in the study of the English affluent worker carried out under the direction of John H. Goldthorpe and David Lockwood...
...But the reason for this reversal involved a trend that was to prepare the way for the great explosion of working-class militancy in the '30s...
...The trade unionists, most of whom are among the betteroff members of the "old" working class, do not achieve this standard: they are neither poor nor affluent but in-between and distinctly deprived...
...There was, he said in the 1950s, an end of ideology...
...Table 38, p. 80...
...This marks, Bell concludes, "a movement away from governance by political economy MICHAEL HARRINGTON to governance by political philosophy...
...As a significant number of such students, or graduates, realized that their education had no functional relationship to the society they were supposed to enter, they dropped out or sought alternative life-styles...
...So by the early 1920s the majority of the AFL rebelled against Gompers's hostility to social legislation, adopted an approach very much like the one embodied in the socialist proposals that had been rejected during the 1890s, and embarked upon a course that led to an alliance with the Socialist party in the Conference for Progressive Political Action and support for the La Follette campaign in 1924...
...But if the American workers thus committed themselves to "the social control of production through intelligence and foresight, which is the political economy of the working class," they did not call this policy "socialist...
...And they would add that in the period after World War II changes in capitalist society led to the virtual disappearance of that class struggle...
...Most of them had not changed their personal prejudices in the process, but they had understood that the exigencies of their class situation demanded they vote for a full-employment economy rather than against blacks—i.e., for Humphrey, not Wallace...
...It is at this point that the politics of the American working class become crucial...
...The old middle class was composed of men and women of property and income on a small scale...
...This change in their own class position may have made them less sensitive to the daily struggles of less favored people...
...The difference between these two versions of Keynesianism is, I would suggest, both profound and systematic...
...Such an idea can indeed be found in The Communist Manifesto, for it is a corollary of Marx's youthful error of supposing that society was fast polarizing into only two classes...
...Morris Hilquit, History of Socialism in the United States, rev...
...Yet, even as there were trends making the impact of classlessness pervasive in the daily life of the individual worker, the labor movement was moving into politics in a much more profound way than in the 1930s...
...This working class, both organized and unorganized, has a "common situation and common interests," experienced first and foremost in the reality that it does not have enough money...
...In 1969 the Bureau of Labor Statistics computed a "modest" budget for an urban family of four at $9,076, an amount in excess of the income of well over half the OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS families in the United States...
...Big corporations, which tend to be Republican, usually maintain a "Democratic" vice-president to insure access to the White House no matter what...
...As Greenstone points out, they could have made a classic interest-group deal in the '60s...
...New York: Russell & Russell, 1965...
...They are not as easy to identify as the other groupings, yet they often have served as a cultural vanguard, and their presence should be noted...
...On Wealth, see Herman P. Miller, Rich Man, Poor Man, rev...
...Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), pp...
...This response is rooted in the class position of the members of the labor OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS 157 movement...
...Paris: Societe de l'Industrie Fraternelle, 1848), passim...
...The new strata are not the old middle class, nor the "new middle class" as it was recognized around the turn of the century...
...It would give huge sums of money belonging to the people of the United States to big corporations...
...cit., p. 120...
...See Bennet Berger, Working-Class Suburb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960...
...Selig Perlman, The Theory of the Labor Movement (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1949...
...This signified the organization of a class, not merely an interest group...
...it needs to disappear if modern industrial society is to operate with full effectiveness...
...To use Marx's famous distinction, the working class in this country is not simply a class "in itself"—a mass sharing "a common situation and common interests"— but it is a class "for itself" and the "interests which it defends...
...They often enjoy special stock deals and other arrangements: in 1971 the Wall Street Journal reported that the biggest part of executive pay in the auto industry was a bonus based on the size of profits...
...they are a varied, dynamic, contradictory mass whose position in society can drive its members toward a practical social idealism, an antisocial corporatism, or any one of the complicated variants between those extremes...
...The 1967 Fortune study is quoted in Ralph Miliband, The State and Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), pp...
...The "new middle class" was an educated salariat, and it was noted by Karl Kautsky as early as the 1890s...
...The liberal arts component of this surge was unplanned and, in some ways, irrational...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...Government Printing Office, 1970), Table 11, pp...
...It is not even necessary for my purposes that a majority of the workers use the term, working class, to describe their position in society...
...See John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 282ff...
...31, 92-93...
...In the third volume of Das Kapital, Marx did refer briefly to the separation of ownership andcontrol, and Engels added a note when he publishedthe volume after Marx's death saying that this sis...
...Except for the last, all the labels fit...
...class consciousness did...
...at the bottom, among the scientific technicians without college degrees, they merge with the more skilled members of the traditional working class...
...Indeed, if one compares Germany and the United States between 1890 and 1914, the workers experienced steadily a relative rise in their living standards in the country that produced a mass social democratic movement rather than in the one that did not...
...Philip Taft, The AF of L in the Time of Gompers (New York: Harper & Bros., 1957), p. 476...
...But, like the professional and educated personnel in this area, they also are highly motivated to become active in politics...
...it is growth whose necessary conditions correspond simultaneously to the interests of the managers and the employees...
...On manufacturing jobs, see Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings, U.S., 1909-1970, Bulletin 1312-7 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), Chart I. See Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class-Consciousness in Industrial Society, rev...
...So it is that these managers must be counted among the golden elite, the 6' percent of the American consumer units which, in December 1962 (there has been no downward redistribution since), had incomes of $50,000 a year or more and owned 57 percent of the wealth of the society...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "The New Liberal Coalition," the Progressive, April 1967, p. 16...
...Thus I would argue that, for all of its truly exceptional characteristics, American capitalism eventually forced its working class to become conscious of itself and to act as a major factor in political life...
...In August 1971, when Richard Nixon tacitly admitted the bankruptcy of laissez-faire ideas which had created an ingenious recessioninflation, labor reacted in characteristic fashion...
...One suspects that their plight was a consequence of America's refusal to face up to the revolutionary character of its technology, and disguising what would have been middleclass unemployment as middle-class education...
...Almost a third of the units in the $5,000—$7,499 group had a child in college, 41.8 percent of those in the $7,499—$9,999 group, and 49.0 percent of those with a $10,000—$15,000 annual income...
...The AFL-CIO was here articulating what Marx called "the political economy of the working class" as it applies in a post-Keynesian society...
...Or, to take Aron's criterion of the most crucial precondition for the existence of a social class, was there a consciousness on the part of those American workers that "their class has a unique destiny and that it cannot fulfill its vocation except by transforming the totality [ensemble] of the social organization...
...An interest group, as Greenstone points out, has very specific demands and avoids committing itself to a single party or a broad social program out of fear that it will compromise its narrow goals...
...a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism...
...But, I would add, in becoming more of a "citizen" he became less of a worker...
...But, in a history of American labor (edited by that patriarch of the nonclass in terpretation, J. R. Commons), Don Lescohier described as follows the two decades prior to World War I: Undergoing the vicissitudes of repeated periods of unemployment, experiencing in many occupations a less rapid rise of wages than living costs, [the wage earners] could in my Socialism (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972...
...That hope has been around for years and was brilliantly formulated by Thorstein Veblen in his essay collection The Engineers and the Price System, which dates back to 1919...
...But even though death prevented Marx from formally and systematicallyrevising the simplifications and errors of the Manifesto, it is clear that he understood that the class structure of his own time was being profoundly modified by the separation of ownership and control...
...Still, two momentous events had taken place in the '20s...
...The class-conscious movement of the '20s did not succeed and in the latter half of the decade there was a reversion to Gompers's "voluntarist" philosophy...
...397-99...
...are] class interests...
...The tremendous growth in professional and technical employment was, in part at least, caused by federal outlays in space, defense, and education, all of which were cut back in the late '60s...
...In part, as Penn Kemble has argued, the vantage point of intellectual perception has changed radically during the past 30 years...
...Mallet, La Nouvelle Classe Ouvriere (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 49...
...Indeed, the very fact of being paid a wage by the hour emphasizes another determinant of workingclass existence, the vulnerability of the job to the vagaries of the business cycle, the ever-present possibility of being laid off...
...There is a social chasm between these groups, not the infinite gradations postulated by Clark Kerr...
...1, p. 190...
...The common interest of both, within the framework of the system [cadre du regime] is the prosperity of the enterprise and of the economy...
...But that stratum does not concern us here...
...It constitutes only the second page of Marx's discussion of classes and it concludes: "Here the manuscript breaks off...
...For the Employment Act of 1946, see Stephen Kemp Bailey, Congress Makes A Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950...
...Those neither poor nor union members are most numerous in wholesale and retail trade, in finance, insurance, real estate, and the service industries...
...The only category of industrial workers that will be in both absolute and relative decline over that period is that of the nonfarm laborers, which is supposed 148 to fall from 3.6 million to 3.5 million...
...The polls, I would suggest, do capture some private elements of workers' responses which in recent years have become more marked...
...Was this merely a case of groups struggling bitterly over the terms of a consensus...
...On the future of occupational categories, see Manpower Projections: U.S...
...For Marx's Inaugural to IWMA, see MEW (Marx and Engels, Works), vol...
...76 (Washington, D.C.: U.S...
...For instance, the Italian workers who were jammed together in New York before and after World War I were more loyal to their village in the old country, and to the padroni who exploited them here, than to their class...
...It is not based on that "world apart" of intrapersonal class values which existed at an earlier stage of capitalism...
...cit., pp...
...This working class, very different from the one studied by Marx, is at the moment going through a new mutation—one that has given rise to theories about a "new" working class...
...I must try to understand the past and present of the working class with as much candor as possible if I am to help those struggling to create its future...
...The choice of terms is not crucial...
...With a working class of such composition, to make socialism or communism the official "ism" of the movement would mean, even if other conditions permitted it, deliberately driving the Catholics, who are perhaps a majority in the American Federation of Labor, out of the labor movement, since with them an irreconcilable opposition to socialism is a matter of religious principle...
...6. See Manpower Projections: U.S...
...In 1920 the AFL was in favor of public ownership of the utilities, organization of cooperatives, and workmen's compensation...
...One has to come to the second part of Marx's famous distinction: Is the "old" working class a class "for itself," does it act collectively from a consciousness of its position in society...
...These trends are MICHAEL HARRINGTON much too recent to survey in any but the most superficial of fashions, yet it is likely that the possibilities for legal and medical practice among the poor and the minorities, so important to these students and the young graduates, will depend upon federal decisions with regard to the fight against poverty and national health care...
...But the unions increasingly have become an organized component of the Democratic party...
...We are dealing then with social categories in change, particularly when one talks of the liberal arts students and the radicals in the traditional professions...
...What Bok and Dunlop miss, then, is the class political attitude of the workers which is not at all the same as, and sometimes even contradicts, the sum totals of their private views...
...The workers have not achieved utopia but their expectations were less than those of the intellectuals and their gains correspondingly larger...
...society and has done more to raise the living standards of black Americans than any force, except the federal government...
...But these statistics are of little political and intellectual significance if they simply describe unrelated facts about an inert mass...
...He further proposed an investment tax credit on machinery produced by American companies, a measure that might give business a $5 billion benefit (which would have to be added to the better than $3 billion a year earlier offered by the President in the form of accelerated depreciation for the corporations) . The AFL-CIO Executive Council responded: Instead of extending the helping hand of the federal government to the poor, the unemployed, the financially strapped states and cities, and to the inflation-plagued consumer, the President decided to further enrich big corporations and banks...
...Its class consciousness lies somewhere between the polar extremes of revolutionary transformation and interest politics...
...When asked to locate themselves on a three-class scale of upper, middle, and lower, the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the members of the AFL-CIO, will say that they are middle-class...
...Derek C. Bok and John Dunlop, Labor and the American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 43...
...MEW XXVI: Pt...
...See Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Collier Books, rev...
...A * What follows is a summary of a much more detailed, and documented, analysis to be found country without a feudal past, possessing a vast continent to be settled once genocide had been committed against the Indians, and populated by successive waves of immigrants from the most varied European backgrounds, must differ in a number of crucial ways from the nation-states of the Old World where capitalism first emerged...
...The problem is that, from Veblen's day to this, the corporations have been profit-maximizers—more and more sophisticated in their definition of profit, to be sure—and have placed their own interests above those of the society or of the engineers who work for them...
...But in between those limits there is a large new grouping, numbered in the millions, which, for all its middle-class education and income, is impelled by virtue of its position in society toward collective bargaining and politics...
...For instrumental collectivism, see Goldthorpe, Lockwood, et al., op...
...Nixon had proposed a federal job cut and a retreat from welfare reform, strict wage controls, vague price controls, and no limit on profits, dividends, and other forms of upper-class compensation...
...cit., p. 190...
...But even with these qualifications, it is clear that the new technology is calling into life a new class structure...
...But they were a clear indication that workers were being driven to consider not simply their jobs but the society as a whole...
...Some "new men" might join a progressive political coalition in their off-duty hours but, under present conditions, their working lives will be dominated by corporate values that oppose, or at least would severely limit, any restrictions on the company's freedom of action...
...The old coal-mining towns of Appalachia would be the most obvious example of the vanishing conditions under which social class pervades all aspects of life...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics: Handbook of Labor Statistics, 1970 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, gan to bargain...
...See Derek C. Bok and John T. Dunlop, Labor and the American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), chap...
...This point must be stressed because many scholarly critics of the notion of a class struggle in the U.S...
...In 1971 Daniel Bell, who only a decade earlier had talked of the end of ideology, wrote, It seems clear to me that, today, we in America are moving away from a society based on a private enterprise market system toward one in which the most important economic decisions will be made at the political level, in terms of consciously defined "goals" and "priorities...
...My conclusion, however, will be that there is not simply one working class in America but two—an old working class still quite vital and a new working class being created by political and economic evolution...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
