The results of an investigation based upon such a postulate are contained in advance in the chosen definition. The “new working class" is thus “educated labor," better paid, somewhat privileged, etc. Manual labor, according to this definition, is “old working class," regardless of the actual movement of occupations and the increase of various categories of labor of this sort. So far have these writers been governed by their definition that it has escaped their notice, for example, that the occupations of engineer on the one side and janitor-porter on the other have followed similar growth curves since the start of the century, each beginning at a level between 50,000 and 100,000 (in the United States in 1900), and expanding to about 1.25 million by 1970. Both now rank among the largest occupations in the United States, and both have developed in response to the forces of industrial and commercial growth and urbanization. Why is one to be considered “new working class" and the other not? That this single example is not at all fortuitous will be clear to anyone who makes a study of the long-term occupational trends in the capitalist countries. These trends from their beginnings, which, if one must choose a starting point for something that is more realistically a continuous process, date back to the last decades of the nineteenth century—indicate that it is the class as a whole that must be studied, rather than an arbitrarily chosen part of it.
what is needed first of all is a picture of the working class as it exists, as the shape given to the working population by the capital accumulation process.\*
This self-imposed limitation to the “objective” content of class and the omission of the “subjective" will, I fear, hopelessly compromise this study in the eyes of some of those who float in the conventional stream of social science. For them, by long habit and insistent theory, class does not really exist outside its subjective manifestations. Class, “status,"“stratification," and even that favorite hobby horse of recent years which has been taken from Marx without the least understanding of its significance, “alienation"\*\*—all of these are for bourgeois social science artifacts of consciousness and can be studied only as they manifest themselves in the minds of the subject population. At least two generations of academic sociology have so elevated this approach into a dogma that only rarely is the need felt to substantiate it. This dogma calls for the delineation of various layers of stratification by means of questionnaires which enable the respondents to choose their own class, thereby relieving sociologists of the obligation. The results have been extraordinarily variable. For example, in the many polls conducted according to the conceptions of W. Lloyd Warner—by Gallup, by Fortune in 1940, etc.—in which the population is classified into “"upper," “middle," and "lower" classes, and into subgroups of these, vast majorities of up to 90 percent predictably volunteered themselves as the “middle class." But when Richard Centers varied the questionnaire only to the extent of including the choice “working class," this suddenly became the majority category by choice of the respondents." Here we see sociologists measuring not popular consciousness but their own. Yet the superiority of the questionnaire as the means for measuring social phenomena remains an article of faith. Michel Crozier, the French sociologist, says in criticism ofC. Wright Mills' White Collar:
18 Labor and Monopoly Capital
Introduction
19
Having so broadened the scope of the investigation, let me hasten to limit it sharply in another way. No attempt will be made to deal with the modern working class on the level of its consciousness, organization, or activities. This is a book about the working class as a class in itself, not as a class for itself. I realize that to many readers it will appear that I have omitted the most urgent part of the subject matter. There are those who hope to discover, in some quick and simple manner, a replacement for the “blue-collar workers” as an “agency for social change," to use the popular phrases. It is my feeling, to put it bluntly, that this constitutes an attempt to derive the “science before the science," and I have tried to dismiss such preoccupations from my mind on the theory that
\* These criticisms of both “new working class" theory and of the search for an “agency of social change” are not intended to disparage the useful materials that have been assembled by some of those, Europeans and Americans, who have worked along these lines, and whose work has been helpful to me in the present study. In particular thése writers have drawn attention to the importance of, and to the discontent among, various “professional" strata, and to the special features of ghetto populations, young workers, and women. While my own approach does not proceed by way of such sectoral considerations, the manner in which they fit into the analysis as a whole will, I think be apparent.
\*\* Alfred Schmidt notes that “Marx gave up using such terms as ‘estrangement, alienation,' return of man to himself,’ as soon as he noticed that they had turned into ideological prattle in the mouths of petty-bourgeois authors, instead of a lever for the empirical study of the world and its transformation." He adds to this the observation that “Marx's general abandonment of such terms does not mean that he did not continue