America's State of Being
HODGSON, GODFREY
the shadows of the north woods, he has flip-flopped from an excessive confidence in the short-term efficacy of political action into what may be an excessive and is certainly a wholehearted...
...He shows little skepticism about the prospects for infinitely continued economic growth, which he calls "the miracle of the loaves and fishes transformed into economic process...
...He is far too certain, to my mind, that the managerial revolution and the dispersal of ownership have made ownership irrelevant in the analysis of social power in America...
...All these shortcomings I forgive because Goodwin has had the courage to confront, and the analytical ingenuity to redefine, what for me is the central puzzle of American politics: the problem of class...
...Mr...
...and non-unionized workers, who make up the rest, and who are even more dominant in the non-industrial, service, and transaction sectors of the economy, which have grown and are likely to grow much faster than mining and manufacturing...
...They are made reluctant to join any struggle to recapture their alienated existence and to halt the manifold devastations of social life . . . How very powerful is an oppressive structure which can enlist the devotion of those whose freedom it divests...
...There are such people, and they make up a majority of the population...
...The terms he proposes, and they seem to be both arbitrary and a trifle confusing, have at least the merit of freedom from stale associations: he speaks of "socialized," i.e...
...Men are alienated because their consciousness allows them to be manipulated: "the instruments of coercion are designed to make us perceive shackles as the objects of desire...
...The proposition seems to me either dubious or tautological, depending on how "community" is defined, and it is a serious weakness of The American Condition that Goodwin nowhere defines what is meant by this alluring, nostalgic, and treacherous conception...
...The problem is that they refuse to admit it...
...To a remarkable degree, under the new sackcloth of philosophical pessimism, the old confident assumptions of the liberal ideology are still present in Goodwin's mind...
...In so doing, he has suggested the outline of a hope of removing what I believe to be the most formidable obstacle to the creation of an effective politics of emancipative change—though in his Thoreauvian gloom he does not seem to see in his own analysis any hint of solutions...
...The first third of The American Condition is devoted to tracing the intellectual condition of modern man back to the great intellectual and economic revolutions of the Renaissance...
...unionized, and "unsocialized" workers...
...As long as The New York Times and The Washington Post, the Ford Motor Company and the Ford Foundation, the Chase Manhattan Bank and Exxon, are all to a significant extent under the control of individual or family owners, the fact that small parcels of stock are more or less widely dispersed or that many top managers are unrelated to the founding families is less significant than the continuing fact of hereditary economic and social power...
...Each of these categories exists, to be sure, but only vestigially...
...To blame the shortcomings of modern American society on the scientific revolution is neither wholly convincing nor demonstrably useful, and up to the halfway mark or so, while he is laboring over such matters, Goodwin's touch is not sure...
...Only minorities—blacks, and not all of them, some students, and * others— proclaim the necessity of class consciousness, while those who make up the political equivalent of the classic working class eagerly proclaim their membership in the "middle class" on the strength of their improved ability to acquire consumer goods...
...The problem of class in America is simple...
...The Marxist analysis of class seems to have less and less relevance to American society, and indeed to advanced industrial societies generally, because it is usually applied to an obsolete set of definitions of class...
...This, too, seems to verge on the tautologic: to say that the miseries of modern man are caused by the great forces that made the modern world comes close to saying that the modern world is the modern world, and not that of the Middle Ages...
...But the analysis of the anti-Communist liberals, on the other hand, the ideology of "the end of ideology" was in too much of a hurry to announce the passing of social class as a basis of social injustice or of social conflict...
...Phrases of the old metal begin to flash out...
...But in the second half of The American Condition, where he moves closer to the realities of American life and power, his touch grows firmer and his arguments more convincing...
...Bureaucracy," he writes on his final page, "does not contain the seeds of its own destruction—the restoration of unalienated existence...
...The very bureaucratic institutions which were once the focus of liberal hopes...
...There are those in American society who are not fairly treated, who suffer from relative deprivation, who are powerless, and who have not in fact benefited from any favorable redistribution of income, or of wealth, or of power over the last thirty years...
...It is "very powerful...
...That is the heart of the American condition, and that of modern industrial man, and the book would hold together more cogendy if Goodwin had pursued that concept with fewer coy references to Nicholas of Cusa ("perhaps the greatest medieval mind") and other such anfractuosities...
...And he essays an embarrassingly glib parable which seems to mean that he still believes that poverty could be abolished overnight by job training and loans to small businesses, but that he is aware that this idea has been too exploded to be put forward without tongue in cheek...
...The poor are not free, but the non-poor have more to lose than chains . . . Inevitably, they fear that fundamental change will dislodge their precarious gains, level the mild amenities of their lives...
...their unions, in particular, are an intrinsic part of the system...
...Even the surface of his writing is blemished...
...They reject class consciousness, which alone could furnish the foundation for effective action to change things for their collective benefit...
...Goodwin seems to share the fashionable counterculture hostility to science, and he wastes a good deal of time setting fire to straw men...
...Richard Goodwin offers no easy hope that the oppression can be lifted...
...And sometimes the writing itself descends to Stygian obscurity: "The chambers of power-clutched debated the chambers of power-longedfor over the time and method of surrender...
...It proclaimed the passing of class because the condition of the class which the Marxists had always exclusively designated as the working class had changed...
...The socialized workers, he argues, have become a part of the bureaucratized process which has replaced classic capitalism...
...God is the creation of a collective humanity...
...Sometimes he seems shaky on historical or philosophical detail: the Greeks, for example, did build a steam engine...
...The way out of this maze of stale terminology and sterile ideas is a new distinction and new terms...
...It is simply no longer true that society is essentially divided into exploiting capitalists and exploited workers...
...And who are the hidden persuaders...
...the shadows of the north woods, he has flip-flopped from an excessive confidence in the short-term efficacy of political action into what may be an excessive and is certainly a wholehearted belief in its futility...
...Its argument, he says, is freedom, by which he means a spiritual rather than a political condition...
...But the beginning of the task is surely to teach people that they are not free, that it is not true that "we are all middle class now," that the liberal optimism was a delusion, that it takes more than money and consensus to build a great society...
...Or this striking description of modern love: "A sexuality whose intensities are not shared but exchanged...
...For the isolated individual the death of the world, or of any part of it, is a metaphor for his own destruction...
...The source of alienation is not a ruling class, but a social process dominated by bureaucratic institutions which are 'unowned.'" And bureaucracy, in turn, is inextricably linked with technology: "Bureaucracy is the logic of technology," he claims...
...But the central weakness of the liberal analysis was honest and understandable error...
...There can be no morality of right conduct," he asserts, for example, "without community...
...Hodgson is a British journalist and a former Washington correspond ent...
...With Lewis Chester and Bruce Page he wrote "An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968...
...Why is modern man so sentimental about the death of animals...
...On corruption in capitalist as compared to Communist countries: "If money is not power, then power is money...
...There were many reasons for this, including some rather discreditable ones: American chauvinism and a desire to avoid heresy during the McCarthy period among them...
...At one point he descends to the absurdity of blaming the Vietnam war on the scientific spirit...
...the point is that they never used steam power economically...
...As for the unsocialized worker, it is not poverty that is his problem, but alienation and therefore an oppression less immediate but as intolerable as that of hunger...
...More perceptively, at one point, he acknowledges that alienation and the loss of community are "the consequence .. . of the process which provides material abundance...
...No wonder the self-perception of IBM executives jibs at identifying with the mill owners of Engels' Manchester, and, more to the point, that airline desk personnel, IBM operators, pilots, clerks, salesmen, technicians, and service workers refuse to feel solidarity with the locomotive fitters and seamstresses of St...
...The barrier to freedom, Goodwin argues, is alienation, which he defines (again, I found, a little hastily) as subjection to external authority...
...Petersburg in Czarist days...
...The distinction Goodwin draws is between unionized workers, who make up (on his over-generous estimate) only a quarter of the American work force...
...The result is this ambitious, intelligent, confused, and deeply pessimistic book about the condition of America...
...More generally, he ascribes our fall from the paradise of community to the serpents of individualism, science, and technology...
...It is, in fact, permeated by a nostalgia, reminiscent of Tolstoy, or Ruskin, or William Morris, explicitly for "community" and by implication for religion...
...The liberal mistake was to identify the working class with the unionized industrial worker...
...If he can put together the practical political flair of his activist days, and the disabused insight which has come to him in his time in the wilderness, Richard Goodwin could well be one of those who could start to create a new and relevant class consciousness as the foundation for a new and relevant political action...
Vol. 38 • April 1974 • No. 4
