The New Middle Classes
White Collar.
by C. Wright Mills.
Oxford University Press. 378 pp. $5.00.
Professor Mills had fun writing this book about the ever-increasing proportion of us who wear suit jackets and neckties at our work and who are paid salaries rather than hourly base rates plus production bonuses. It is rather cruel fun, but the reader won’t suffer too much for himself, for it is not quite a book for those who would find it most bitterly applicable to their own persons and fates (although he does take a crack at professors: they’re not very bright). The land of fellow who will read the book will enjoy the quick, vivid sketches of the new entrepreneur, the live-wire, the old veteran, and of other kinds of white collar people. The lively retelling of the stories of Kitty Foyle and Alice Adams to make his points (a practice all too rare in these days when a “scientific” social scientist is allowed to use only those fictions which well up from his unexplored unconscious) and Mills’s own bursts of imagination and original aphorisms make it a book one can enjoyably, even profitably, open and read at will.
But maybe a book which is supposed to present a portentous trend and portray a great change in the constitution of society—hence of men—should not be one that can be opened and read here and there at will. Stephen Spender, in his autobiographical World Within World, tells of Auden’s habit of taking out a good line from a poem at the slightest criticism from a friend. But he always saves the line for future use. I fear Mills either saved up a lot of lines for this book or that he thinks up altogether too many lines (although I suppose that is a better fault than the current endless thinking up of words by people who can’t make sentences, let alone lines). Mills really ought to write a poem or something to work off some of his literary exuberance, so that he could produce a work cleaner of line when he reports interesting research. At any rate, I would advise the reader, who will very likely get lost in the maze of the text now and again, to refer frequently to the table of contents; for the said table does present the main course of the argument in a sort of “Off Again, On Again, Gone Again” progression, but with more metaphor than Finnegan used in his telegram.
Mills starts with a section on the Old Middle Classes—people who owned the property with which they worked—and on its dissipation through a transformation in the nature and distribution of property rights. The New Middle Class, about which the book is written, consists, in the business and industrial world, of the people in the managerial bureaucracies. The “new entrepreneur,” key figure of the new middle class, does not build up and own his own business, but “makes a zigzag pattern upward within and between established bureaucracies”; he “services the powers that be, in the hopes of getting his cut.” To use my own version, the new entrepreneur exploits himself; he is his own capital. He assesses his potentialities (especially his personality) and puts himself on the market. He decides whether to invest himself in Consolidated Customized Clothing or in Synthetic Drugs. If he buys a house, it is not really that he may live in it or own it, but that he and the wife in it may help him and his boss realize these potentialities.
Below the new entrepreneur and following in order in the book are the bureaucratized professional people, the technicians, the sales people, and, last and lowest, the girls who keep the “enormous file” of modern business papers.
The aim of all this is to prepare for the kill. All these white-collar people have lost all sense of joy in their work. They work only that they may live. In itself, this work is a meaningless thing that keeps one away from home and whose demands alienate the person from himself. All he gets from it is money, illusions, and compensation. The illusion may be that of prestige (but is not prestige one of the realest illusions?), the compensation may be the masochistic pleasure of submitting one’s self to the authority and prestige of others. Life is centered about leisure, as is shown by the constant effort to reduce the hours of work. Social estrangement, self-alienation—these are Mills’s key words about all these people. In politics, they apathetically go with the crowd. “They are irritable, but without passion,” “too afraid to grumble, too hysterical in their applause.” And, the book’s last word: “The new middle classes are up for sale.”
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No doubt these things are true in some, indeed in great, measure. But they are not the only things that are true. There are, in the files of students of society, plenty of cases of people who live at work rather than at home, and who regard work as a pleasant and sociable escape. A recent study of individuals who are close to retirement indicates that in most occupations people do not look forward to giving up work and spending their days at leisure. Steel workers hate to give up; they like the roaring, gleaming mill. Coal miners, on the other hand, at least claim they will quit as soon as they can. As for self-alienation and social meaninglessness, is there evidence that more than some very small proportion of people in any epoch were fortunate enough to have work that was also their hobby? Or that, even for those few, a good deal of the satisfaction did not lie in their social life at work rather than in contemplation of the beauty of the product of labor?
These remarks are not evidence that Mills is wrong. Even if I backed them up with a lot of statistical proof and contrary cases it would not prove him wrong in his estimate of the trend he describes. They are meant merely to indicate that he might be right in the main and in the mass, and yet very much off the beam as to what the psychological and social implications of the trend are and will be.
In an odd sort of way, Mills appears to share the values of those against whom he is most bitter. He, too, complains (like a boss or a personnel man) that people don’t love their work. He, too, implies that the world would be better if everyone did consider his work the full realization of himself as he would like to be. He, too, thinks work-life and leisure-life must be a unity, or else the one will be real and the other phony. Probably all of us share such values. But now and again I contemplate with horror the thought of a world which would really insist that a man could not escape from some domestic den of vipers to an office where he did something entirely routine and meaningless in pleasant company; which would not allow a man to earn his living at some work that he hates without having a lot of people worried about him and wondering whether he can be trusted. What makes us think that all parts of life should be so closely knit, should infuse each other, or that if they remain separate, one is more “real” than another?
I am not certain that I reviewed or could “review” Mills’s book as one abstracts and criticizes some neat piece of research. The book is such a combination of facts, brilliant lines and paragraphs, metaphors, tendentious reasoning, and sardonic contempt, that it defies that kind of review. But he has found out a lot about the new middle classes. What he has found out he has put before the reader in a mess of strong Mills curry. The flavor might be quite different if the same facts were dished out with the sauce of other emotions and other ideological preoccupations than his.
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