Explore "White Collar" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Official proclamations of the competitive ways of small entrepreneurs now labor under an enormous burden of fact which demonstrates in detail the accuracy of Thorstein Veblen's analysis. Competition, he held, is by no means dead, but it is chiefly ‘competition between the business concerns that control production, on the one side, and the consuming public on the other side; the chief expedients in this businesslike competition being salesmanship and sabotage. ' Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has also been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of the big competition and have revealed the mask-like character of liberalism's rhetoric of small business and family farm.
The character and ideology of the small entrepreneurs and the facts of the market are selling the idea of competition short. These liberal heroes, the small businessmen and the farmers, do not want to develop their characters by free and open competition; they do not believe in competition, and they have been doing their best to get away from it.