ABSTRACT
In recent years C. Wright Mills has become a kind of faculty adviser to the “young angries” and “would-be-angries” of the Western world. In a recent issue of the New Left Review, Mills has written a Manifesto for the “New Left.” This statement, in the form of a letter, is regarded by the editors as “throwing us a number of challenging lines of inquiry.” This chapter helps the reader to understand what Mills is saying. He states that there have been no “essential” changes in America in the last half-century (“The recent social history of America does not reveal any distinct break in the continuity of the higher capitalist class”); and then, in bland contradiction, that in recent years the new feature of American life is that the three “structures” of power—government, military, and business—are now meshed into a “power elite.” Vulgar Marxism has become vulgar sociology.
