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MICHAEL HARRINGTON
becomes part of the Moscow conspiracy. In the Leftist version, the
equivalent statement is that Walter Reuther is more dangerous than
Senator Eastland.)
But if the proletariat is part of the Establishment, who is to take
over its traditional role in the making of history?
Toward the end of his life, C. Wright
Mills
fought against an
intellectual despair. He had become disillusioned with the socialist
theory of his youth but not with the socialist goal. The labor movement
had, he believed, become bureaucratized like everything else. But the
youth, he speculated, might be a new dynamic force. This was the
period of government-shaking student demonstrations in Japan and
Turkey, of the sit-ins and the anti-HUAC activities on the coast. Mills
was so impressed with this awakening of the younger generation that
he came close to the idea of a "youth class."
As
a theory, this notion is not taken seriously any more.
It
has
become clear to everyone, as it certainly would have become clear to
Mills had he not died so early, that the younger generation is not a
cohesive social force capable of leading the transformation of an ad–
vanced society (in the developing nations, the situation is, of course,
different). However, some of the confidence engendered by this view
lingers on. There is, among the Leftists of the sixties, a youth van–
guardism that goes beyond the normal and exuberant disrespect for
elders which one expects as a matter of course. In part, this sterns from
the tremendous accomplishments of American youth in the civil rights
movement (SNCC has indeed taken on the government of Mississippi),
in part from the feeling that everyone over thirty participated in sell–
outs, accommodated to McCarthyism, was a sectarian of the thir–
ties, etc.
As
the number of college students grows, particularly as the
graduate student population increases-both trends are functions of
affluence-the campus unquestionably will provide a middle-class
reservoir from which activists and militants can be drawn. For
paradoxically, it is one of the consequences of affluence that larger
numbers of students find it possible to make serious personal commit–
ments in the War against Poverty. For most of them, however, it will
be an important experience rather than a life's career. So students
do not now, and will not, play so great a social role as to threaten the
very social order. This means that the youth can claim a more suO-
