The New Left: a case study in professional-managerial class radicalism - Barbara and John Ehrenreich

Libcom note: Textual notes with asterisks in the original are "inline" linked footnotes here. Numbered footnotes in the original appear at the bottom of the text.

In the first part of this essay (RADICAL AMERICA, March-April 1977) we argued that advanced capitalist society has generated a new class, not found in earlier stages of capitalist development. We defined the Professional-Managerial Class ("PMC") as consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production, and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations. The PMC thus includes such groups as scientists, engineers, teachers, social workers, writers, accountants, lower- and middle-level managers and administrators, etc. — in all some twenty to twenty-five per cent of the U.S. population. The PMC's consciousness, we argued, is shaped by the apparently contradictory aspects of its existence: Both the PMC and the working class are forced to sell their labor power to the capitalist class, to which they share an antagonistic relationship. Members of the PMC, as the rationalizers and managers of capitalist enterprises (corporations, government agencies, universities, etc.), are thrown into direct conflict with capitalist greed, irrationality, and social irresponsibility. But the PMC is also in an objectively antagonistic relationship to the working class: Historically the PMC exists as a mass grouping only by virtue of the expropriation of the skills and culture once indigenous to the working class. And in daily life, its function is the direct or indirect management and manipulation of working-class life—at home, at work, at school. Thus the PMC's objective class interests lie in the overthrow of the capitalist class, but not in the triumph of the working class; and their actual attitudes often mix hostility toward the capitalist class with elitism toward the working class.

The New Left and the PMC

We now attempt to use this analysis to understand some aspects of the development and current difficulties of the left in the U.S., starting with some observations on the New Left of the sixties. We will not try to give a complete and definitive account of the emergence of the New Left. Rather we will focus on the ways in which the PMC origins of the New Left shaped its growth and ideology, on how the originally PMC-based New Left ultimately began to transcend its own class, and on how it sought to deal with the resulting dilemmas.

The rebirth of PMC radicalism in the sixties came at a time when the material position of the class was advancing rapidly. Employment in PMC occupations soared, and salaries rose with them. The growth was so rapid that extensive recruitment from the working class became necessary to fill the job openings. (One early 1960s study indicated that no less than a quarter of the sons of skilled blue-collar workers and close to a fifth of the sons of semi-skilled workers were climbing into the PMC.) (1) It has become fashionable to argue that engineers, teachers, social workers and the like were becoming "proletarianized" — the fate Marx had predicted for the middle class. (2) But what was taken as a symptom of proletarianization, e.g., the expansion and bureaucratization of the university, was in many cases really a token of the rapid expansion of the class. The late fifties and early sixties were a golden age for the PMC, not a time of decreasing opportunities and compression into the proletarian mold.

With Sputnik in 1957 and Kennedy's election in 1960, the prestige and public visibility of the class reached new heights. Government and foundation funding for research, higher education and professional services began to skyrocket. Members of the class appeared in prominent public positions as presidential advisors, scientists, foreign-policy strategists, and social planners. New institutions — think tanks, consulting firms emerged to meet the new demand for PMC skills.

The early student radicalism of the sixties had many sources — the civil-rights movement, the 'Beatniks", the college experience itself, etc. For our present purposes, however, we only want to point out that this new radicalism also reflected the rising confidence of the Professional-Managerial Class. According to the sociologists' studies, the first wave of student activists typically came from secure PMC backgrounds, and were, compared to other students, especially well-imbued with the traditional PMC values of intellectual autonomy and public service. (3) Their initial radicalism represented an attempt to reassert the autonomy which the PMC had long since ceded to the capitalist class. For example, SDS's seminal Port Huron Statement (1962) expresses both elements of traditional PMC class consciousness: scorn for the capitalist class and elitism toward the working class. Too many PMC elders, SDS argued, had capitulated to the demands of "the system":

Many social and physical scientists, neglecting the liberating heritage of higher learning, develop "human relations" or "morale-producing" techniques for the corporate economy, while others exercise their intellectual skills to accelerate the arms race. (4)

But, the statement continued, the working class could not be relied on as the source of social renewal:

Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason. (5)

The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 articulated the problem of the class forcefully: "History has not ended ... a better society is possible, and ...it is worth dying for," proclaimed Mario Savio, the voice of the Free Speech Movement. Yet the university had sold out; it was not training future members of the class for their historic social and moral mission:

Many students here at the university... are wandering aimlessly about. Strangers in their own lives, there is no place for them. They are people who have not learned to compromise, who for example have come to the university to learn to question, to grow, to learn all the standard things that sound like clichés because no one takes them seriously. And they find at one point or another that for them to become part of society, to become lawyers, ministers, businessmen, people in government, that very often they must compromise those principles which were most dear to them ....The futures and careers for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. (6) (emphasis ours) [Libcom note - it is not clear from the scan which bit is emphasised]

The Free Speech Movement made a direct appeal to the class consciousness of the faculty:

We challenge the faculty to be courageous. A university is a community of students and scholars: be equal to the position of dignity you should hold! How long will you submit to the doorkeepers who have usurped your power ? (7)

PMC class consciousness, with its ambiguous mixture of elitism and anti-capitalist militance, continued to be a major theme of "the movement" throughout the sixties. Expressions of it can be found in the "New Left",1 the anti-war movement, the ecology movement, the women's-liberation movement all of which defied "the system", but often with moralistic contempt for the working class. Ultimately, however, a significant part of the New Left decisively broke with this tradition and sought to transcend the imperatives of its own class base. It is to this evolution that we now turn.

As late as 1966, many New Left leaders held to Veblenesque theories of the unique importance of PMC-type occupations or of students themselves. Carl Davidson (then SDS Vice-President), for example, argued in a highly influential article that a student movement to control the university could be the base for the transformation of all of society. (8) But then— somewhere around 1967 or 1968 there was a decisive break which made the sixties totally unlike the earlier (Progressive Era) period of PMC radicalism: Large numbers of young people pushed PMC radicalism to its limits and found themselves, ultimately, at odds with their own class.

There are reasons why this development should have occurred in the sixties rather than in earlier periods of PMC radicalism. One has to do with the evolving role of the university. The university is the historical reproductive apparatus of the PMC and a historic center for the production of new knowledge, disciplines, techniques, heresies, etc.: both functions which have acquired a semblance of autonomy from capital. In the fifties and sixties, however, the university was being called on to play a much more direct role in the functioning of the capitalist state as well as private enterprise. It had become, as University of California President Clark Kerr described it, "a prime instrument of national purpose". As in the Progressive Era (and the New Deal), public-policy makers turned to the university for expert consultation in designing anti-poverty programs, health-care programs, etc., but on a vastly expanded scale. Beyond that, in the sixties, the state also increasingly relied on the university for military assistance, not only from engineers and natural scientists, but from anthropologists, sociologists, etc.

The university's involvement with business or even with the defense establishment was one thing; its complicity in the war in Vietnam was quite another. In the bleak Eisenhower years and in the brief glow of Kennedy's New Frontier, the university, despite its compromises, had seemed to many to be the repository of all that was good in the PMC-liberal tradition. For a while, it had been possible to ignore the conflict between the university's actual functions and its liberal ideology. But the liberal facade could not be maintained in the face of genocide. In the blinding light of the bombs raining on Vietnam, the brutality of American foreign policy was starkly revealed — as was the university's role in maintaining it. As far as the students were concerned, the self-righteous cold-war liberalism of the previous generation simply and abruptly collapsed. The moral legitimacy of the university, the older generation of the PMC, and the entire American system were thrown into question.

Student fury against the war in Vietnam inevitably turned against the government's accomplice, the university itself, and hence against one of the central institutions of the PMC. In response to the student attack on the university, liberal and even some Marxist faculty members began to dissociate themselves from the New Left. The older generation had a stake in the university: their grants, their careers, their image of themselves as being morally "above" the business world were tied to the university.

Furthermore, the older generation were more cautious —they had matured in the Depression and the cringing forties and fifties; the New Left was filled with the ebullience of the New Frontier. The gap in generational experience was just too great to be bridged by abstract class interests.

At the same time that many students of PMC origin and destiny were becoming disenchanted with their own class and its institutions, they began to find themselves challenged by the previously alien working class. For one thing, as the university struggled to keep pace with the booming growth in PMC jobs, the characteristics of students were changing. Unable to meet the demand for engineers, teachers, social workers, etc. with the sons and daughters of the existing PMC alone, the colleges were increasingly filled with the sons and daughters of the working class. As the student rebellion spread from elite PMC training grounds such as Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard to the much less elite Kent State, Penn State, and San Francisco State, the class background of the activists shifted as well. Instead of student activists "well imbued with the traditional PMC values", there were student activists who had always viewed the PMC -- their teachers, social workers and the like — at the very least with some unease and hostility.

But the wedge that finally separated a chunk of the New Left from its own class was the Black liberation movement. White student involvement in the Southern civil-rights struggle had often been tinged with paternalism: something like the settlement-house experience for so many middle-class young people in the early twentieth century. The Northern Black movement was more challenging. Ghetto uprisings — especially the massive 1967 upheavals in Detroit and Newark seemed to raise the possibility of an armed revolution, led by working-class Blacks, in which students would have to take sides. Black students, admitted to even the elite white colleges in response to the civil-rights movement, brought the Black rebellion to the campuses. Black students demanded that the white left support Black working-class demands (e.g., the demands for open admissions and for stopping university expansion into Black neighborhoods). Contacts between the white student left and Black non-student groups (most notably the Black Panther Party) were characterized by arrogance on the latter side, near servility on the former. White PMC youths began to feel that their own radicalism, even their entire life experience, was a pale abstraction compared to this milltance which came from "the streets". There was an acute consciousness of "privilege" — a static and fragmentary prelude to the notion of class.

Even more important to the student radicals' break with the PMC was the content of urban Black militancy. Consider the relationship which had developed between the PMC and the Black community: Lower-stratum PMC occupations, teaching and social work, had been in a close service/social-control relation to the Black community since the northward migration of the fifties. In the sixties, the official concern about poverty, much heightened by the Watts rebellion in 1965, led to a massive federally-sponsored PMC penetration of the ghetto. Job opportunities multiplied for (largely white) planners, community organizers, psychologists, anthropologists, trainers, etc. The Black community came to play the same role with respect to the PMC of the sixties as the white immigrant community had played in the 1900s: It was a nourishing medium for expansion, a bottomless mine of "social pathology". But it was far from a passive medium. By late 1966, Black militants and Black community groups were raising the demand for "community control" of the very agencies and institutions which were providing opportunities for the white PMC.

This demand did not fit into the traditional categories of the Old Left. (In the case of the New York City school struggle, the Progressive Labor Party decided that the community-control demand was a ruling-class plot against the only "workers" in sight —the teachers!) But it was a clear declaration of class warfare: the Black community (largely working-class) against the invading PMC. In many instances, it was Black members of the PMC who won out under the banner of community control; but the radical, class-conscious thrust of the demand was "power to the people" — replace the professional and administrative elite with ordinary citizens.

Most white student radicals identified themselves with the community-control struggle without question. For one thing, it was the direct descendent of the civil-rights struggle which had, in part, given birth to the New Left. It also seemed to be a living link between foreign Third World struggles for self-determination (e.g., Vietnam) and the struggle to change U.S. society. In identifying with the community-control movement, the young PMC radicals were taking a position which ran counter to their own objective class interests. "Let the people decide," said the front page slogan in SDS's newspaper, NEW LEFT NOTES, even if they decided they didn't want you.2

By 1967 or 1968, the New Left was approaching a crisis: It had been born when the war in Vietnam forced thousands of PMC youths to confront the conflict between their class's supposed values and American social reality. It had been bred in the institution where these contradictions appeared most sharply in the elite universities which both taught the old PMC values and abjectly served capitalist interests. But the student rebellion had spread to universities whose students often came from working-class families. Originally committed to the university, the New Left was now locked in battle with the university. And it was increasingly committed to supporting Black working-class-based movements, which, for their part, rejected the traditional PMC attitudes toward the working class. The New Left was forced to examine its own class composition and class attitudes. Could it survive as a primarily PMC-based movement ? How could such a movement change society? What relationship would it (or could it) develop with the traditional agent of social change, the working class (and especially with the militant Black movement)?

The problem of the New Left's relation to the PMC as a whole was partially solved by the reaction of the older generation of the PMC. Many of the latter responded to the growing militance of the students with all the venom at their command. Psychiatrists theorized publicly that America's youth was searching for a father figure (and had found one in Mao, according to Bruno Bettelheim); educators blamed the rise in "anarchy" on Dr. Spock's permissiveness, and seconded Spiro Agnew's call for a collective spanking. College administrators and sometimes faculty cooperated with the police and the FBI during the violent repression which began in 1968. On their part, students radicals often turned on the University, not in order to "free" it from complicity with imperialism, but to destroy it. In the fall of 1967, University of Wisconsin demonstrators handed out a leaflet announcing "We pick this week to demonstrate against DOW (Chemical Corporation), against the university as a corporation and against the war because they are all one." (emphasis ours)

Criticism of the university, by a twisted kind of logic, soon led to criticism of students themselves. Carl Davidson, who only a year before had seen students as the mass base for social change, wrote:

What can students do ? Organizing struggles over dormitory rules seems frivolous when compared to the ghetto rebellions. We organize students against the draft when the Army is made up of young men who are poor, black, Spanish-American, hillbillies or working-class. Everyone except students .... Students are oppressed. Bullshit. We are being trained to be the oppressors and the underlings of oppressors." (9) (emphasis ours)

By the end of the sixties, SDS was so repulsed by its own class that it would have nothing to do with the emerging ecology movement and held back from mass anti-war activities such as the nationwide student "moratorium" and the massive student strike of May 1970. Mark Rudd went so far as to reject SDS itself (of which he was then the National Secretary) as a "weird pile of liberal shit".

It was a serious impasse: Where does a movement go when it comes to feel that the concerns which motivated it were trivial, if not illegitimate ? Or that the people in it are irrelevant, if not objectively enemies? The "Weatherman" tendency in SDS took self-loathing to its logical extreme, resolving, in 1969, that white babies are "pigs" and pledging themselves to a suicidal strategy of direct confrontation with the police. For many women, the emerging feminist movement became the last legitimate refuge from the guilt which was engulfing the New Left at this time. The newly articulated understanding that women were oppressed as a sex allowed many white PMC women to continue to assert the demands for meaningful work, self-fulfillment, etc. at a time when these demands had lost all moral legitimacy to most male leftists.

By 1969, two overall approaches to handling the class problem were emerging for the New Left one which we will call the "radicals in the professions" strategy; the other the strategy represented by what came to be called the "new communist movement". The "radicals in the professions" approach developed quite naturally out of the student life cycle: the undergraduates of 1963 were, by 1969, teachers, social workers, journalists, lawyers, or students in graduate or professional schools. Stated very simply, the idea was to use these positions, or at least whatever skills went with them, to advance the radical cause which was now generally understood to be the cause of poor and working-class people, oppressed minority groups, etc., and only indirectly of the professionals themselves. For example, the Student Health Organization (medical and nursing students) worked on setting up preventive health-care programs in Black ghettos; the New University Conference (college and junior-college teachers and graduate students) worked for open admissions to the colleges; the Social Welfare Workers Movement attached itself to the cause of the National Welfare Rights Organization; and so on. Other "radical professionals" set up alternative law firms, health centers, etc. or dedicated themselves to providing technical resources and support for Black and Puerto Rican community organizations.

Certain streams of the radical professionals' movement could be interpreted as being little more than attempts to salvage PMC interests in the face of the Black working-class challenge. There was a search for more acceptable professional roles, such as "advocacy planning", and even some hopes that community control would bring an expansion of PMC opportunities:

...struggle by communities for control of their own development and services prepares the basis for a decentralized and democratized civil society. It is obvious that all such developments have profound need for the services of professional, intellectual, cultural and scientific workers. (10)

But on the whole, the radicals-in-the-professions took a dramatic step beyond traditional PMC class interests. The great importance of this direction, or strategy, of New Left activism is that it embodied a critical self-consciousness of the PMC itself —a kind of negative class consciousness. The radicals-in-the-professions challenged the PMC not for its lack of autonomy (as the student movement had in the early sixties), but for its very claims to autonomy objectivity, commitment to public service, and expertise itself. 'Demystification" was the catchword. Radical doctors wanted not only to free their profession from the grip of the "medical-industrial complex", but to demystify medicine. Radical lawyers would open up the law books and make elementary legal skills available to the people. Radical psychiatrists would lead the assault on psychiatric mythology and show that any sensitive community person could easily replace them. Radical teachers would expose the capitalist functions of education. And so on. Credentialing barriers would tumble. The rule of the experts would be abolished by the young experts.3

It was, at best, a difficult approach to sustain. Clients, patients, students, etc. often turned out to resent their radical professionals' very lack of professionalism. Black aspirants to the PMC (briefly In demand in the late sixties and early seventies) had little interest in "demystifying" the positions they were for the first time attaining. Furthermore, conditions made it less and less possible to give the radicals-in-the-professions approach a fair test. Repression destroyed the radical elements of the Black movement which had held the radical professionals in some sense accountable. Government grants and money for community programs dried up. Finally, the economic downturn of the seventies placed stiff penalties on radical activity among professionals or anyone else Teachers who defied the administration by giving out all A's, social workers who attempted to organize their clients against the welfare department, etc., found themselves in case after case out of a job. The Student Health Organization, Social Welfare Workers Movement, New University Conference, Medical Committee for Human Rights, all collapsed in the early seventies, and radical caucuses in professional associations became at best centers of radical scholarship, at worst little more than job-placement net-works for the hordes of ex-student-radical professionals.

The "New Communist Movement" arose out of the shambles of SDS in 1969 and picked up recruits with the collapse of the radicals-in-the-professions approach in the early seventies.[FN]By the "New Communist Movement" we mean those 'Marxist-Leninist' organizations which grew out of the New Left, rather than out of prior left organizations such as the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party, plus individuals and study groups which identify with these organizations or their ideologies. National "new communist" organizations at this time include the October League, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the Communist Labor Party. Although not affiliated with any of these groups, the weekly GUARDIAN is the most widely read advocate of New Communist ideas. [/FN] The New Communists explicitly dissociated themselves from the New Left and adopted a political outlook which was superficially not very different from that of the earlier generation of PMC radicals who had been Communists in the 1930s. They advocated the primacy of the working class in revolutionary struggle and the need to build a vanguard party to lead that struggle. But exactly who constituted that working class was not entirely clear. Sometimes (e.g., in describing teachers' strikes and the spread of union-like attitudes in professional organizations of engineers and nurses) the New Communists adhered to the orthodox Marxian two-class model and included all wage earners within the "working class". But most of the time, by "working class" they meant the traditional blue-collar (and in some cases, lower-level white-collar) working class.4 Students and young professionals joining New Communist organizations were urged to "proletarianize" themselves in outlook, life style, and even occupation. Factories replaced universities as the key setting for political activity. Issues which had preoccupied the New Left — personal fulfillment, community, participatory democracy, etc. — were dismissed as "petty bourgeois" or even "decadent". In positing the existence of a Professional/Managerial Class, we do not mean to suggest that society has entered some new, "post-capitalist" phase of development. The central dynamic in our society still lies in the contradiction between the socialized nature of the production process and the private appropriation of the fruits of production. The interests of the capitalist class remain fundamentally antagonistic to the interests of wage earners of all kinds, including those we have defined as members of the PMC. In fact, as we have argued, within the U.S., this antagonism has turned the PMC into an enduring reservoir of radicalism (from Progressivism and the Socialist Party to the New Left).

But as we have said, not only is there an objective antagonism between the working class and the PMC on the one hand and the capitalist class on the other; there is, in addition, an objective antagonism between the working class and the PMC. This latter antagonism has severely undercut the revolutionary chances of the working class (or of a combination of elements of both the PMC and the working class). In the first place, as we have seen, PMC radicalism emerges out of PMC class interests, which include the PMC's interest in extending its cultural and technological hegemony over the working class. Thus the possibility exists in the PMC for the emergence of what may at first sight seem to be a contradiction in terms : anti-working-class radicalism. This possibility finds its fullest expression in the PMC radicals' recurring vision of technocratic socialism, a society in which the bourgeoisie has been replaced by bureaucrats, planners, and experts of various sorts, Nor is this vision restricted to the right-wing socialists and social democrats who come forth from the PMC; it has been advanced with great militancy by many who style their views as the "proletarian line". In fact, in any left ideology which fails to comprehend the PMC and its class interests, there is always a good possibility that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" will turn out to be the dictatorship of the PMC.5

Turning now to the effects of the PMC/working-class polarization on working-class consciousness, we should recall first that the very existence of the PMC is predicated on the atomization of working-class life and culture and the appropriation of skills once vested in the working class.6 The activities which the PMC performs within the capitalist division of labor in themselves serve to undermine positive class consciousness among the working class. The kind of consciousness which remains, the commonly held attitudes of the working class, are as likely to be anti-PMC as they are to be anti-capitalist — if only because people are more likely, in a day-to-day sense, to experience humiliation, harassment, frustration, etc. at the hands of the PMC than from members of the actual capitalist class.

Now, add to the fact of working-class hostility to the PMC two observations we have made already:

(1) the historic association, in the U.S., of socialist radicalism with the PMC; and
(2) the PMC's proclivity for a technocratic vision of socialism in which the PMC would be the dominant class.

The result is that there emerges in the working class another seemingly contradictory ideology, which we might call class-conscious anti-communism. This working-class anti-communism receives continual encouragement from right-wing demagogues who emphasize exactly these points the role of PMC members ("pinko intellectuals", "effete snobs", etc.) in radical movements and social-control activities, and the supposedly totalitarian nature of socialism, But working-class anti-communism is not created by right-wing demagoguery (or bad leadership, or ignorance, though all these help); it grows out of the objective antagonism between the working class and the PMC, Often enough it comes mixed with a wholesale rejection of any thing or thought associated with the PMC — liberalism, intellectualism, etc.

We hardly need to emphasize the dangerous, potentially tragic, nature of this situation. It is reflected with painful clarity in the condition of the U.S. left today : isolated and fragmented, still based largely in the PMC, more a subculture than a "movement." Is there a way out ?

Is there anything in the experience of either PMC or working class which could lead them to transcend their antagonism, to join together in some sort of mass radical alliance for social change ? If so, how can such an alliance be built ?

To answer these questions it seems to us we have to draw on the experience of the New Left. In a sense, the New Left represents a historic breakthrough : a first conscious effort to recognize and confront the conflict between the PMC and the working class. Learning in part from the Cultural Revolution in China, with its emphasis on the gap between mental and manual labor and its populist approach to technology, and in part from their uneasy alliance with (mainly Third World) working-class community movements, the radicals of the sixties began to develop a critique of their own class. The feminist movement extended that critique, exposing the ideological content of even the most apparently "neutral" science and the ideological functions of even the most superficially "rational" experts.

But the New Left was not able to complete its incipient critique of the PMC and its role. With the collapse of the New Left as a mass movement in the seventies, the very effort ceased : Guilt re-placed self-confidence; sterile efforts at remolding the conscious-ness of individual members of the PMC along "proletarian" lines replaced the more fruitful search for ways in which the PMC-based left could help stimulate and unite with a working-class movement.

But the possibility of developing the emergent insights of the sixties and applying them to the development of a truly broadbased anti-capitalist movement is perhaps more alive now than ever. Unlike in the early sixties, there are thousands of PMC leftists who remain aware, in however unsystematic a way, of the tensions at the PMC-working class interface, And, also unlike the early sixties, there is a growing number of young radical working-class intellectuals —people who were given a brief exposure to higher education (and to the New Left) in the period of university expansion in the sixties, and were then thrown back into working-class occupations by the economic crisis of the seventies. Thus, if only in terms of personnel, the opportunity exists for developing a politics which can address and overcome the class stalemate of the contemporary left. What direction might such a politics go ? We can only suggest a few beginning directions:

(a) The way out does not lie in falling back on romantic visions of the historical mission of the working class, manifested in efforts to expunge "petty bourgeois" — i.e., PMC ideology from the left so as to uncover the "pure proletarian line." The relation-ship between the PMC and the working class is complementary; neither class has a "pure" ideology, uninfluenced by the other, or by the capitalist class. It is in the nature of this relationship that "culture" (in the loose sense of knowledge, ideas, history), including the systematic critique of capitalism itself, is dominated by the PMC. In a sense, Lenin's perception in WHAT IS TO BE DONE remains true : the possibility of building a mass movement which seeks to alter society in its totality depends on the coming together of working-class insight and militancy with the tradition of socialist thinking kept alive by "middle-class" intellectuals.

(b) The antagonism between the PMC and the working class can-not be wished away in the name of anti-capitalist unity any more, for example, than the antagonism between men and women, or be-tween black and white can be. The left, which is now predominantly drawn from the PMC, must address itself to the subjective and cultural aspects of class oppression as well as to material inequalities; it must commit itself to uprooting its own ingrained and often subtle attitudes of condescension and elitism. The tensions between PMC leftists and the working class can only be dealt with by starting with a clear analytical perception of their origins and nature. Guilty self-effacement on the part of PMC radicals and/or simplistic glorification of the working class simply perpetuate the class roles forged in capitalist society.

(c) Moreover, in order to forge an alliance between elements of the PMC and the working class, the left must address itself not only to "bread and butter" issues but to all the issues it has too readily shelved as "cultural": the division of labor, the nature (and ideological content) of science and technology, art, psychology, sexuality, education, etc. For it is on these issues that the historic antagonism between the PMC and the working class rests. Both classes confront the capitalist class over the issue of ownership and control of the means of production. They confront each other over the issues of knowledge, skills, culture.

REFERENCES

1. Otis Dudley Duncan, "The Trend of Occupational Mobility in the United States", AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW 30, No.4 (Aug. 1965), pp. 491-495.

2. See, for instance, Stanley Aronowitz, "Does the United States Have a New Working Class?", in G. Fischer (ed.), THE REVIVAL OF AMERICAN SOCIALISM, and James Weinstein, AMBIGUOUS LEGACY : THE LEFT IN AMERICAN POLITICS (Franklin Watts, 1975), pp. 125-128.

3. Richard Flacks, "Who Protests: The Social Bases of the Student Movement", in Julia Foster and Durward Long (eds.), PROTEST! STUDENT ACTIVISM IN AMERICA (Wm. Morrow, 1970), pp. 134-157.

4. "The Port Huron Statement", in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, THE NEW RADICALS: A REPORT WITH DOCUMENTS (Vintage, 1966), p. 159.

5. "The Port Huron Statement", cited in Kirkpatrick Sales, SDS (Random House, 1973), p. 52.

6. Mario Savio, "An End to History", in Jacobs and Landau, THE NEW RADICALS p. 230.

7. Quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset and Sheldon S. Wolin (eds.), THE BERKELEY STUDENT REVOLT : FACTS AND INTERPRETATIONS.

8. Sales, SDS, pp. 289-292.

9. Ibid., pp. 382, 390. 10. Richard Flacks, cited in Ronald Gross and Paul Osterman (eds.), THE NEW PROFESSIONALS (Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 26.

BARBARA and JOHN EHRENRE1CH have written widely on health and other topics. John teaches at the Old Westbury campus of SUNK and Barbara is active in the women's health movement.

• 1By the *New Left* we mean the consciously anti-racist and anti-imperialist (and later, anti-capitalist) white movement, centered initially in the universities but ultimately extending well beyond them (e.g., it came to include underground newspapers; organizations of teachers, social workers, and medical workers; theater groups; community-organizing groups; etc.). Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was its most important organizational expression from 1964 to 1969. The New Left interacted with or was part of most of the other movements of the sixties, but it was not identical to them. To take two examples, the anti-war movement was far broader than the New Left; and the women's-liberation movement emerged in part in opposition to the practices of the New Left.
• 2The conflict between ideals and self-interest felt by some in the PMC is illuminated by the 1969 community and worker takeover of the Lincoln Hospital Mental Health Services in New York City. Only a few days before the administrators were locked out of their offices by 150 demonstrators, led by Black and Puerto Rican non-professional community mental-health workers. Dr. Harris Peck, the designer and director of the center, had written in READER'S DIGEST : "When there's a foot planted in the seat of my trousers to kick me out of here, I'll know we've succeeded. It will mean that the people want to take over the running of their own community. And that's the way it should be.' But after the takeover, Peck commented that, while he still favored the principle of community control, "It's a long-term goal. We don't think it is possible to implement it at this time.' (Health-PAC, THE AMERICAN HEALTH EMPIRE (Random House, 1971), pp. 253-254)
• 3It would be hard to overemphasize how sharp a break this was with the dominant traditions of the Second and Third Internationals. The latter, for instance, following the model of the USSR, believed that technology was neutral: In capitalist societies it served the interests of the capitalists; in socialist societies it would be directed toward popular ends. The New Left, influenced by the Cultural Revolution in China, came to believe that the technology itself embodied bourgeois social relations. The contrast between Old and New Left attitudes toward professionalism and the privileges accompanying it are equally sharp. The New Left position, of course, was in no small measure the descendent of the militantly egalitarian SDS and SNCC tradition of 'participatory democracy'.
• 4In common New Communist Movement parlance, most of the PMC is lumped together with self-employed professionals, shopkeepers, small businessmen, etc. as the "petty bourgeoisie" — a distinctly pejorative description. As we have argued in the first part of this paper (see RADICAL AMERICA, March-April 1977), this is a grossly incorrect class analysis.
• 5At risk of considerable over-simplification, we would suggest that this is in a sense just what happened in the USSR: a 'new class" of technocrats — government and party bureaucrats, industrial managers, professional ideologues, etc. has come to preside over a society in which more or less capitalist relations of production persist, despite the absence of a capitalist class. In this context, Lenin's well-known interest in adopting the methods of Taylorism (see Harry Braverman, LABOR AND MONOPOLY CAPITAL, Monthly Review, 1975, p. 12) and, conversely, the Chinese concern with restricting the privileges of managers and reducing the gap between mental and manual workers in order to avoid the Soviet mistakes (see John Ehrenreich, 'The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in China," MONTHLY REVIEW, October 1975) are worth recalling. Similarly, "Arab socialism", 'African socialism", and "military socialism" (e.g., pre-1975 Peru) can also best be understood not as 'petty bourgeois socialism" but as "PMC socialism", based on the rising class of civilian and military government mental workers.
• 6We do not mean to suggest, of course, that the PMC alone holds the working class in check, or that restraining the development of working-class consciousness is always, or even usually, a conscious goal of the PMC. On the former point, other sources of control over the working class certainly include the direct use or threat of state and private employer power; pre-capitalist authoritarian mechanisms of control such as the Catholic Church; and the many forces leading to the segmentation of the labor market along lines of race, ethnicity, sex, and to the physical dispersion of the working class.