Overorganizfd And Overroutinized

...bureaucratic control over the awarding of many and massive government contracts...

...The flowering of the individual and the community may replace the maintenance of "civilization" as the most approved social end...

...But at the present moment I can see only one feasible approach to a revolution against the over-routinized division of labor in politics and culture: the pressuring into collapse of almost all our existing forms of social and political legitimization...

...IN A FEW HANDS: MONOPOLY IN AMERICA, by Estes Kefauver (with assistance of Irene Till...

...I think one would also have had trouble explaining this to Kefauver, but not to Goodman, who has his finger closer to the real pulse of society...

...Community action, neighborhood organization, civil disobedience —the development of new modes of organizational activity rather than of new loci of industrial production—are thus the key to unlock democracy's barred doors...

...With regard to the drug industry he points out the irrelevance of ordinary measures of competition, in that the true buyer of the commodity— the doctor—does not have to pay for it...

...The only way to make any kind of control democratic, whether its locus be in the central government or the local school board, is to recreate in individuals the Aristotelian capacity for self-government...

...And he has a genius for discovering functional equivalents of top-heavy organizations in smaller-scale groups that are doing the same kind of work, no less effectively, with less fiscal waste and throttling of innovation, and without contemptuously treating individuals as interchangeable units...

...Whether the "people" ever had power is another question, which could be discussed along with his quaint notions of the medieval University...

...Most of his targets are by now well-known examples of oligopoly and monopoly in iihdustry...

...of the immense economic waste (nearly $ 5 billion annually) incurred by yearly changeover in the auto industry...

...American liberalism has traditionally been of three kinds: reforming and thus oriented toward government...

...For what he could have said—what Goodman would surely say—is that in a society dominated by corporations and large interest groups, and in which individuals and functional groups are most often powerless, New Dealism is prone merely to make the same old patterns of undemocratic social control more "rational" and efficient...

...Concentration is also Paul Goodman's topic in his People and Personnel, but in a different way—and the difference is instructive about styles of political criticism...

...New York: Pantheon, 1965...

...and of the social dislocation brought about by absentee-controlled corporation dominance in small towns...

...a patent system originated in the eighteenth century...

...Though often exaggerated and sometimes absurd, Goodman's ideas are hardly ever irrelevant...

...is long (of...

...And thus we return, at last, to our original "if only...

...While explaining much about monopoly, it explains little about the genesis of oligopoly and less about its future prospects (for which prohibitive costs of entry in many fields will be the dominant fact...

...Kefauver exposes fallacies and fantasies in the American system of "free" enterprise...

...if Kefauver could have rephrased his argument by adding some realistic sociology, he could still have made a forceful point...

...One always has trouble trying to explain that a local government or private bureaucracy may be just as offensive in its impersonality as "The Government in Washington...

...239 pp...

...But so far, Civilization has proven remarkably resistant to Eros...

...and antigovernmental pastoral utopian...

...At first glance one cannot help but feel critical, but if one reads him more carefully his point becomes clear: "...a government pledged to free-competitive enterprise, harbors within itself a great variety of structures and programs which grant immunities or extend disproportionate privileges to special classes or groups...

...The roster...

...The fundamental point is made by Goodman, when he emphasizes, as have others before him, the sense of individual powerlessness that has come to characterize American society...

...The enemy he sees is unnecessary routinization and over-organization in any setting, be it that of the federal government, corporations, mass communications, large universities and small colleges, the New York City Board of Education, the organization of scientific research, or the Broadway theatre...

...PEOPLE OR PERSONNEL: DECENTRALIZING AND THE MIXED SYSTEM, by Paul Goodman...

...Kefauver has been criticized by New Deal liberals and socialists as naive in his fondness for smallness and free competition...

...In sum, his topic is the social and economic costs of concentration in American industry, and the usually fraudulent defenses offered in favor of those who generate the costs...

...muckraking, with or without some specific political orientation...

...and he puts indelibly on the public record Roger Blough's interesting notion that a competitive price is one which is the same as a competitors' prices...

...Not only are economies of scale in production occasionally real, but economies of scale in control, and thus in the placing of responsibility, are often essential...

...This argument is certainly a sophisticated one, much more so than Kefauver's critics have allowed...

...Documented here for popular consumption are the familiar cases of administered prices and deliberate scarcity in the steel industry...

...Where Kefauver is, like a traditional muckraker, concerned with the costs of concentration, Goodman, like a traditional utopian, is concerned with the costs of concentration as a general method for organizing social life...

...True, the new context which Goodman predicts will be brought about by massive automation may change that—though certainly not without an end to the cold war and a solution to the population problem...

...and, as Fritz Machlup adds, "'corporation laws, franchises and licensing laws...

...import quotas and export subsidies...

...The last two, which at times have had an affinity for each other, are always considered by those who write our "official" histories to be hopelessly unstylish and obviously inferior to their more solidly respectable relative...

...And yet...

...when Daniel Bell and Talcott Parsons criticized Mills by saying that we have a Welfare State, not a Power Elite, he could have replied correctly that they were talking about the same thing he was, only sugar-coated...

...marketing controls and powers exercised by (numerous government agencies) in their respective fields of technoolgy...

...What they offer instead is in each case problematical...

...But that prospect is not very attractive, for who would pick up the pieces...

...For as Goodman recognizes and Kefauver seems not to, while people are never interchangeable some goods are, or at least it is sensible to treat them as though they are...

...of the exorbitant profits reaped by drug manufacturers who use patent rights and price-maintenance techniques against the public interest...

...protective tariffs...

...Of course Goodman, unlike traditional pastoral liberals, is a revolutionary...

...To the Organization Liberal who insists that the Peace Corps has to be run on bureaucratic lines, Goodman politely replies that the American Friends Service Committee does the same things at onefourth the cost...

...and) tax law' " conduce to the same end...

...The liberal muckraker and the quasi-syndicalist utopian reject Government as the major agency of social reform (though both appreciate some of its uses, and Kefauver is proud of his Drug Control Bill...

...He points also to the conclusive evidence which shows that auto style changing is not dictated by consumers but thrust upon them...

...if only .. It is the "if only" that is crucial, of course, both for Goodman and Kefauver...

...For those who need the evidence, two recent books by Estes Kefauver (published posthumously) and Paul Goodman demonstrate how questionable is this official version...

...Yet in the end it is unsatisfactory...

...And in such cases centralization is easily explicable and may even be desirable...

...Until we can find some room for optimism on that score, we cannot limb out of the over-organized rut we are in...

...Utopia is still, sadly, utopian...

...Regulation and control may be fine ideas in theory, but in practice they usually add up to hidden subsidy and devolution of public roles to private persons...

...Still we learn more from those who, like Kefauver and Goodman, keep reminding us of the costs of our present way of doing things, than we do from those who think that if we can only invent a few more government agencies every thing will be wonderful...

...Ultimately Goodman's concern is more useful...

...and surprisingly often the alternative mode of performance he points to—decentralized TV, or public education—seems absolutely easy to put into practice...

...and as to the necessity for patents, he observes that in Germany and Switzerland, historically the leaders in drug research, product patents on drugs have never been permitted, and that in any event research costs are a very small item in the industry's price structure...

...Kefauver's In a Few Hands, prepared from the voluminous records of his Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee hearings, is along with Robert Engler's The Politics of Oil the best example of muckraking in recent times...

...In short, concentration is not a natural growth but has been fostered by government itself...