The following has been reproduced from 'International', journal of the Australian section of the Fourth International. iid. Note.
News has been received of the death of C. Wright liills as the result of a heart attack. His death at the age of 46, in the midst of wide creative activity, is a heavy blow to the progressive world. oy
Miills' work lay mostly in sociology. His comprehensive studies of the leadership of American trade unions (The New lien of Power) but even more his analyses of the American middle class and ruling groups (‘white Collar, The Power lite), characterised by trenchant, fearless analysis, based upon impeanble scholarship, have become fundamental sources for the student of contemporary society. liills did not regard himself as a llarxist in the strict sense of the word, and his work is not without weak nesses from the liarxist point of view. But as urnest Germain wrote in the concluding part of a long and appreciative (though critical) review of the The Power Blite (Fourth International, No. 2. p.66), the faults of Mills! work
"..2eshould be an additional reason for liarxists to study in a detailed and critical fashion this....excellent work. And they will have no reason to exult until the day when one of them, without committing Wright llills' errors, but imitating and surpassing all his qualities, will succeed in making an equally complete and detailed analysis, say of the British, French, German, or Italian ruling class."
Mills was in revolt against the "safe", the perspectiv cless or even positively apologetic "fact"-grubbing, the creeping empiricism of a huge bulk of contemporary sociology, and subjected the whole approach to brilliant and incisive criticism in The Sociological Imagination.
It is no accidont that, as one of the few sociologists writing today willing and able to face fundamental issues in contemporary society, Mills should have deeply sympathised with one of the great liberating movements of our time, namely the Cuban revolution. His passionate defence of it - Listen, Yankee — sold over 600,000 copies in the U.S.A. alone, and there have been throe printings of the Spanish translation in liexico.
His Last Works The Marxists
While not a Marxist, he maintained that people could not consider themselves properly educated in politics or social science unless they were informed about the essentials of Iiarxism. His last book was in fact The Marxists on which William F. Warde makes the interesting comment in the New York Militant:
"One of the principal contentions in his survey of Marxism is that Lenin and Trotsky together formed the pivot of Bolshevism, the mostheroic and consistent effort to translate Marxist ideas into revolutionary practice. Whatever his criticisms of Trotsky, he esteemed him as one of the finest minds of our century. "No llarxist, including liarx himself and Lenin" he wwote, "filled so many revolutionary roles brilliantly as did Leon Trotsky."
"In The Marxists he brings forward Trotsky's contributions to revolut— ionary thought and action against the Stalinist detractors and slanderers. He not only restores Trotsky to his rightful place in history of liarxist thought and the Russian Revolution, but directly challenges the Soviet Government to publish and circulate all of Trotsky's works. Until and unless the countries in the Soviet bloc do this, he maintained, they cannot be considered to have freedom of thought even in the domain of Marxism. ‘hen Soviet intellectuals chided him for not being a Marxist, liills sometimes replied that he was better acquainted than they with the best liarxist theory of the 20th century, because he had read the writings of Trotsky which up to now they have been forbidden to do."
Many people throughout the world will not regret that Miills' pen has been stilled. That is a measure of his achievement. For Marxists and progressive intellectuals in general, Mills' work will continue to be a quarry and an : inspiration for an unforsecable period in the future.