BOOKS
295
been abandoned and was therefore forced to make do with a few
jerry-built, endlessly reiterated, notions like that of the "power elite,"
and with sweeping, angry judgments that amounted
to
no more than
rhetorical statements of problems rather than suggestions for their
political solution.
As a substitute for the classical Marxist perspective of crisis and
collapse, Mills postulated the imminence of World War
III
and nuclear
holocaust. Even if we overlook the role of the Soviet Union, it is hard
to see how on Mills's own reasoning the growing probability of war
follows from the "structural trend" of capitalism. For he attributes
to
the American power elite a desire for a permanent war economy rather
than for war itself, which under nuclear conditions could hardly be
conceived of as in the elite's interests however these are defined. Here
Mills fell back on pacifist assumptions a:bout armaments and arms races
inevitably leading to war, although he stated rather than argued them.
For the cohesive capitalist ruling class of Marxism-"Big Business"
or "Wall Street" in its popular American versions- Mills substituted, of
course, his concept of the power elite. But he never came to terms
with the decline of propertied interests in the old sense as a result of
the corporate revolution and, like other rear-guard socialists, was always
looking for traditional owning groups standing behind the corporate
managers.
Mills was clear-eyed enough
to
see that the working class could no
longer be expected to fulfill its Marxist role as the agency of revolutionary
change. He hoped that revolutions in the underdeveloped countries
would react back on the West in the context of cold war competition
and the rise of new power centers. But for the most part he simply
reasserted the will to change as the distinctive mission of Western
intellectuals.
Change to what? Mills does not say. Except for a few brief
remarks in favor of guild socialism in his first, rarely consulted book,
The N ew M en of Power,
Mills never tells us even in general terms
what a socialist society might look like. He occasionally speaks of the
need to judge the present in the light of such "utopian ideas" as
"freedom" and "rationality," and he speaks often of re-creating the
"classic democracy" of early nineteenth-century America in the larger
technological world of the present. Mills frequently contrasts the empti–
ness and vulgarity of "mass society" with the vigorous and alert "publics"
of an earlier age, but one hesitates to attribute Paul Goodman's opinions
to him and he never suggests how the "classic" ideals of the Enlighten–
ment might be embodied in institutions today.
