PARTISAN REVIEW
economy. The labor unions, if confined to guerrilla economic action, be–
come increasingly unable to cope with the vast institutional force of
state-and-corporation. In this main drift towards the end desired by the
sophisticated conservatives, the "labor leader is walking backward into
the future."
The above-listed political publics will contend for the support of
the presently passive general public in the coming power struggle which
Mills foresees. The labor leaders, though now formally committed to the
inept liberal center, will then be a strategic elite, for they will be "the
only people who lead mass organizations which ... could organize the
people ... (for) a society more in line with the image of freedom and
security common to left tradition." In a crisis, the liberal center and
practical conservatives will be edged out, and power will tend to fall
to the sophisticated conservatives. Only the anti-Stalinist left will have
a program of counter-attraction, but before it can even come to grips
with the sophisticated conservatives it will have to learn to handle the
Stalinists, attract at least a fraction of the labor leadership and regain
some energy and cohesion. "The only possible link beween power and the
ideas of the politically alert of the left" is the more militant variety of
labor leader, presumably of the Reuther type. To achieve this union of
power and intellect, Mills proposes that such labor leaders organize a
labor party. But Mills is not too sanguine about the possibilities of such
a reformation: the labor leaders are too deeply involved in the status quo
("never has so much depended upon men who are so ill-prepared")
and the intellectuals are too tempted by "new and fascinating career
chances."
If
I were to express any reservations about the programmatic section
of Mills' book, it would be with its insufficient attention to some of the
complicating problems that attend it. Let me mention a few of these
problems.
Mills knows that what is needed is time, a "political interval" be–
fore another war during which a labor party might arise and the anti–
Stalinist left might come to life. A war in the immediate future would
make his analysis largely irrelevant. In the event of an economic slump,
however, the "fight against the main drift" could assume large propor–
tions because then the American workers might "modify basically the
outlook and alertness of our present labor leadership." But if there is no
slump in the 1932 sense, and if instead we have an economy geared to
eventual
war, punitively inflationary, inflicting hidden economic hunger
on lower income groups while yet able to provide sufficient employment
to forestall acute crisis; if, in short, there is neither war nor slump
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