ABSTRACT
C. Wright Mills’s comments laid the foundations of a general new left (NL) scepticism of the working class – or at least of the white, American working class – as an agency of change. Fairly typical of NL approaches was Mark Rudd's eclectic view of agency: any revolutionary programme must fight in the interests of the most oppressed – the blacks and the Vietnamese — as well as in the interests of the working class. One theoretical problem that classical revolutionary theory, whether Marxist or Syndicalist, had had no difficulty in facing was that of ‘agency’; who would make the revolution. The ‘new working class’ is a term which sometimes comprehends, and sometimes overlaps with, these two concepts of agency: ‘youth as a class’ and ‘students as a class’. As in America, the student revolts everywhere reflected the standardization and formalism of the mass higher-education, geared to late industrial society’s hunger for specialized personnel.
