NEW RADICALISM
201
First of all, there is the problem of numbers. In the Administra–
tion's calculation, twenty percent of the people are impoverished; and
in
Keyserling's definition of poverty and deprivation
(it
includes
everyone who does not have the "modest, but adequate," budget
worked out by the Government), the total is forty percent. And of the
poor, the two largest groups-the young and the old-are most
dif–
ficult to organize. Even a full mobilization of all the impoverished
would thus fall numerically short of a majority.
But
it
would be a mistake to pitch the argument on the level of
head-counting. The quality of life among the poor has thus far made
it impossible for them to assert the political power of their actual
numbers.
If
anything, they have been less dynamic than the statistics
might lead one to believe. Obviously, this is not the result of any
innate deficiency on the part of poor people.
It
is related, however, to
a most important proposition: misery provokes people to rage and to
indifference;
it
can lead to the organization of protest or to the
disorganization of life.
The CIO was not formed in 1932 when there was no hope; the
Polish October and the Hungarian Revolution did not take place in
the darkest hours of Stalin's rule but under conditions of the Thaw.
And
one of the conditions for resistance is that there
be
some hope of
success. The lives of many of the poor today have been deprived
of
even a glimmer of optimism. Where this poverty is compounded by
racial
discrimination, as among the Negro poor, there has been some
organization. But even there, the misery is still so great, so disintegrat–
ing,
that it still has not been possible to organize the black masses of
the northern cities.
Anything that can be done to change this situation is to the good,
even when the War on Poverty is bureaucratized and linked with a
patronage machine. But for all the value of community organizing,
there
is
no evidence that slum dwellers will do what factory workers
did
not do. They are indeed outside of society, a fact which drives
the
best of them to want to change that society but demoralizes many
to
the point of passivity.
In short, I would argue that there is no new proletariat, at least
in
the radical political sense of a decisive group whose living conditions
force it to rebel. It is of course true that the objective needs of the
United States-and of all the world-demand thoroughgoing trans-
