REVIEWS
James, Estelle & Perlin, Terry M. & Heilbroner, Robert L. & Rabasseire, Henri
ECONOMICS AND THE PUBLIC PURPOSE, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Boston: Houghton Mifliin. xiii + 334 pp. $10. I hope I will be forgiven if I begin a discussion of John Kenneth Galbraith's latest...
...More important, large corporations are to be converted into semipublic organizations by the forced exchange of their shareholders' securities for government bonds...
...Hoffa now is out of jail, but prohibited from engaging in union activities until 1980...
...I t is the thesis of this book that the R&D revolution brings forth a new type of society, which can no longer be called capitalistic in any previously accepted sense...
...I wish there were more attention paid to improving the quality of those public goods disproportionately consumed by the poor, especially judicial, penal, and police services...
...Thus the higher Southern wages were gained at the expense of expanded employment...
...This is undoubtedly power of a sort (and a very important sort), but is it political power...
...If justice is to be achieved, the dams that restrain it must be broken...
...In The Affluent Society, which appeared six years later, the countervailing concept had disap105 peared, but power remained...
...Since then his reputation has steadily declined...
...industrial workers no longer constitute a majority in the most advanced countries, and their percentage of the total work force is decreasing...
...Bell himself shows cogently that capitalist industry now is eliminating the remnants of irrationality in its social system...
...In our own day only the first of these two perspectives remains: political economy has become economics...
...REVOLUTIONARY JUSTICE: THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THEORY OF P.-J...
...It is a great and beautiful thing, "immanent spirit" in action...
...554 pp...
...My own study of Hoffa's leadership shows that he worked unusually hard at his job and was singularly effective in improving the wages and working conditions of Teamster members...
...But do his figures really prove that...
...It is not simply a matter of pragmatists versus utopians, winners versus losers...
...to educate the educators...
...Their applicability to the modern industrial economy is suspect...
...Marx criticized this utopia as an ideology of industrial capitalism and, in this context, devoted considerable thought to the problem of bureaucracy...
...Proudhon, the seeker of liberty, was dangerously infatuated with the political potential of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte...
...507 pp...
...From Plato to Saint-Simon, such visions have always been intimately connected with the educational utopia, where the rulers shall not be elected but selected, and where training and examinations will determine a service class or "meritocracy...
...Achieving justice is a spiritual quest, encompassing, as Proudhon rhapsodizes, "the essence of humanity...
...Yet the Marx-Proudhon struggle is far from settled...
...Bell is rather impatient with factional and functional claimants who quarrel over distributive shares of the GNP, and he calls for a "polis of the future," where the citizens' sole disagreement will be over the concerns of communal welfare...
...Several charges were pending against Partin during this period but they were not pressed until much later, under a new Administration and over the resistance of Sheridan and his colleagues...
...The archaic market sector would be brought toward a parity of power with the corporate center...
...Moreover, as we know too, the industrial workers of the manufacturing trades are losing ground to the workers in the so-called service industries...
...The planning was organized by and for its vast corporate entities—the central repositories of power within the system—and carried out by the operations of the "technostructure," a word that emphasized the bureaucratic, rather than entrepreneurial, attribute of corporate management...
...A moralistic book that focuses on the alleged corruption of a small group of individuals rather than on the values and institutions from which these individuals emerged may have some short-run value, but does not lead us very far toward a valid solution or even much illumination of the problem...
...The second question was political...
...THE FALL AND RISE OF JIMMY HOFFA, by Walter Sheridan...
...Meanwhile the economic and political power of the most important and most exploited group in the society—women—would be enhanced by measures to establish their economic equality, including day-care centers for would-be mothers, and quotas to force the hir106 BOOKS ing of proportionate numbers of female executives in larger firms...
...on the far side, the stars wheeled or the elements combined in cosmic indifference...
...There are no shadings of complexity to the man or the issues...
...the social democratic parties have basked in complacent selfsatisfaction...
...Proudhon's conclusions form the basis of the anarchist antipolitical canon...
...Especially significant are the grave civil liberties questions raised by Kennedy's pursuit of Hoffa: the charges of wholesale wiretapping and other invasions of privacy, the dangers inherent in using the Justice Department and the FBI as tools for attacking political enemies...
...New York: Basic Books...
...I have used it to set the stage for a consideration of Galbraith as a writer in the tradition of political economy, one of the very few such writers in the profession today, excepting a group of radical economists to whose views we will return...
...True, the service industries have increased their share in the GNP, but, simultaneously, they have been industrialized in both senses: their internal operation has taken on the form of large mechanical enterprises— which is true for commercial laundries as well as for banks and railroads—and relations with customers have become depersonalized (as anybody who has recently seen his doctor can testify...
...In The Affluent Society, the condition of social imbalance was to be redressed with minor correctives—increased public revenues to be obtained by a sales tax and a more generous system of unemployment benefits...
...And how right he was: prominent disciples of Saint-Simon became the great financiers of the Second Empire...
...This brings me back to the Marxian view on ideologies...
...THE EDITORS with Hoffa's trade union gains...
...Thus a "class" view of capitalism does not necessarily determine one's political orientation...
...His fidelity to gradualism did not spring from a metaphysical pacifism, he simply felt that those who rush BOOKS 113 headlong into a violent revolution will fail...
...I suspect that the full truth will never be known and that many people, when reviewing the entire chronology, will simply end up believing what their prejudices dictated initially—including the suspicion that there is much truth and much distortion in the positions of both groups...
...it is the practice of a reasonable, nonauthoritarian, collectively responsible society...
...I say "socialization" rather than socialism, (although Galbraith does not flinch from that word) because his proposals cover a wide range of public intervention...
...Proudhon wanted its liquidation...
...Few would deny, I think—including least of all Galbraith himself—that the distinguishing characteristic of his economics has been its political focus, in particular its fascination with the subject of power...
...Discard the anachronisms of Proudhon's ideas, says Hoffman, and "the remainder retains its integral force and cogency...
...Centralization may give the union increased control over the employers, but it also gives the workers decreased control over their own union...
...it is also true that the fate of the anarchists— especially in the Russian Revolution—has been dismal...
...318) . THts RiSUME grossly understates the detail, argument, and sophistication of Galbraith's program, but it should indicate the scope and audacity of the general design...
...Its main sociological features are the suspension of the operational code characteristic of a free-enterprise system and, as Bell shows very convincingly, profound changes in the nature and functions of the traditional classes...
...Saint-Simon already thought that the future belonged to scientists and technicians who would solve the problems of society administratively...
...He certainly regarded women as innately inferior to men...
...It was to study the outcome of the contest from the point of view of the allocation of output among the contending classes of society...
...It is a polyglot group—women-in-general, the market-manipulated middle class, the liberated intellectuals...
...The motive of their actions is not profit but Zweckrationalitat—the abstract drive of all scientific-technological potentialities to realize themselves...
...Bell, however, uses this same information to carry a metahistorical burden: the claim that our society is "post-industrial...
...Personal nonpecuniary returns are a characteristic substitute for private monetary profits, in cases where the law prohibits the latter but permits the former, and stakes become particularly high with such huge accumulations of funds...
...This wage-employment trade-off was especially significant in the South, where Hoffa unionized, in part, to preserve Teamster jobs up North...
...Such an initial perspective need not lead one to dogmatic conclusions, although the temptations are very great...
...I am more convinced than ever," he wrote in the 1840s, "that there is no place for me in this world, and I regard myself as in a state of perpetual insurrection against the order of things...
...but I cannot assume that Bell borrowed his terms inadvertently from the ancien regime...
...Marx's system, Hoffman remarks, appealed to both intellectuals and the working class in ways that Proudhon's moral invocations never could...
...As political economists, the worldly philosophers recognized two aspects to their discipline...
...But it is equally true that such a society does not communicate with its disaffected subjects and, therefore, politics will return, not only through the back door of debates within the technological elite but also through the front door of riots and anomie...
...Capitalism must be seen as a social system permeated from top to bottom with a belief in the divine rights of property, and therefore as a system whose operation systematically produces and reproduces rewards and privileges for those whose place in society is linked with property...
...Sheridan examines at great length the ways in which Hoffa may have hurt the rank and file—through conflict-of-interest business deals, mismanagement of the Teamster pension fund, unsavory associates—but he has virtually nothing to say about Hoffa's performance as a bread-and-butter trade union official...
...As I have indicated, it is by no means certain that such a change would be agreeable, but that is another question...
...This is his failure to match a bold program for reform with an equally bold appraisal for the chances of achieving reform...
...facts" presented by one side were flatly denied by the other...
...All forms are equally culpable...
...Or more pointedly, is it the kind of political power with which political economy is properly concerned...
...His notions about massive free credit led nowhere...
...De Gaulle did try to replace politicians with civil servants in his cabinet, but he had to abandon the project...
...It was not surprising that many subsequently defaulted on their payments...
...The issue of centralization, too, goes much deeper than a mere evaluation of Hoffa...
...Nothing could better describe the depoliticization of economics than that the very word "class" has been virtually expunged from the economic vocabulary, consigned to the keeping of those "soft" sister-sciences, political science and sociology...
...10.95...
...The latter improved greatly on the scheme by proposing that workers be converted into a "third sex...
...This is the nature of Galbraith's description of power itself...
...The social, economic, and political view of the existing structure is without serious rival, just as the views of various priesthoods in religious states have often been unchallenged for long periods of time...
...Risky real estate loans were made at below-market interest rates in order to win influential friends...
...The overarching concept for Proudhon is the idea of justice...
...Inevitably, I have doubts about some parts of the program...
...Bureaucracy indeed has the great merit of achieving what it promises—whereas the plebiscitarian and the representative devices, which claim to bring decision-making under public scrutiny, in fact no longer contribute to political decision-making or may even be a hindrance to rationality...
...Industrywide bargaining may make employers more amenable to settling, since they know that all their competitors will be facing the same wage increase, eventually to be passed along to their customers in the form of higher prices...
...At the conclusion of each, one had the feeling that Galbraith had undertaken an intellectual journey of some daring, but had always stopped short of the destination to which his exploration pointed...
...The aforementioned wage and price controls would become part of the national economic armamentarium, along with a strong fiscal policy...
...It may be true that the postindustrial society is based on intensive communication with those groups that are integrated and have a function or accept that society...
...But it is nonetheless indispensable for one's political-economic understanding...
...I hope I will be forgiven if I begin a discussion of John Kenneth Galbraith's latest and most important book with a small lecture...
...I fear that the day-care centers so enthusiastically advocated as a means for freeing women from the tyranny of child-care may end up at the level of performance of hospitals and homes for the aged...
...But what really distresses Proudhon is the idea of authority and law which government symbolizes...
...Yet Bell assigns it to the scientists, and his book gives the appearance, by its breadth and historical perspective, that he wants to do for this new elite what Das Kapital tried but failed to do for the proletariat...
...The third part describes Hoffa's efforts to get the convictions overturned, resulting, finally, in a conditional commutation by President Nixon...
...The bureaucratic organizations of industry and government, even education, have come under the scientific control of a new knowledge industry, which is the subject of a full chapter...
...Then, in the Summer 1973 issue, Shlomo Avineri attacked the illusion of a scientific elite, in the masterly disguise of a debate between Marx and Saint-Simon...
...Systems will be free to follow the rationale of their particular dynamics, and managers will identify their own interests with those of a reified rationality...
...No, I fear that Proudhon's hopefulness about human progress and his convictions about the triumph of justice cannot now be sustained...
...It is difficult to imagine a society that is governed by more irrational forces than ours—precisely because each of the national, industrial, and cultural empires is driven by its own calculus to the fullest realization of its potentialities without regard for the development and well-being of the whole...
...By "moral" philosophy its practitioners emphasized the demarcation between their field of scrutiny, and that of "natural" philosophy, the province of astronomers, chemists, and the like...
...Is such centralization good, bad, or indifferent...
...This description of the "intellectual technology" does not even fit the famous French inspectorate or the Soviet natchelstvo...
...Sheridan ignores the basic fact that Hoffa was able to retain the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of rank-andfilers, despite the disclosures brought out by the McClellan Committee and the trials...
...They would supplement, or slightly change, the nature of the overall program, but they are offered only to strengthen, not to attack, that program...
...Finally, a third group lost out—those who cared deeply about local control and participapation vs...
...I also appreciate that this is only an "ideal type...
...For Proudhon—moraist, seeker, and idealist—let his vision obscure his viewpoint...
...High minimum wages and generous income support would prevent the Hobbesian competition that has typically demoralized the market sector...
...Living amid great events—the revolutions of 1848, the rise of the Second Empire, the birth of the European revolutionary movement —he was regarded in his day as incomparably more significant than Karl Marx...
...Overblown rhetoric does not blind Proudhon to genuine social problems...
...Lenin would have called this "the highest stage of industrialism," but when Bell calls it "post-industrialism" he seems to have an idea, not unsimilar to Lenin's, that the "highest" goes over the top (dialectically, if you will excuse the term) into a more rational society...
...AFTER WATERGATE, one is struck by certain broader implications...
...The second part takes up Kennedy's crusade against Hoffa and its eventual culmination in two convictions —for jury-tampering and pension-fund fraud...
...The European socialists and their Leninist and Maoist followers who ignored Proudhon's warnings about revolutionary violence have done so at a considerable price...
...It is easy to mock Proudhon...
...What lacks in this generalized discussion is an analysis of the underlying purpose for which the technostructure exerts its organizing capabilities under capitalism...
...One may conclude that the alternatives to a capitalist hegemony, in today's world, are likely to be a kind of military socialism, or a middle-class authoritarianism, or worse...
...With the conquest of power as "the all-consuming passion," the Marxists have not made a new world...
...Bell states the thesis (on p. 373) : (1) economic developments no longer are an independent variable and have been subjected to the "political order...
...Legislation is arbitrary, an artificial effort to smother diversities in public opinion...
...Penetrating the rhetoric of so-called democrats, criticizing other socialists who lack his own emotional sense of the needs of the working classes, Proudhon the occasional journalist became a powerful propagandist, the intellectual center of the European anarchist movement, a title that only gradually shifted to Bakunin and Kropotkin...
...He despises government, of course, because it wages war, taxes the poor unfairly, subsidizes the rich...
...A society built on these premises may include economic features of corporate or state capitalism, of the welfare state, or of socialism...
...Bell, of course, is much too sophisticated a sociologist to ignore the objection that "the end of ideology" itself may be an ideology: the jus1 Daniel Bell, "Labor in the Post-Industrial Society," DISSENT, Winter 1972...
...Capitalism as a system cannot be adequately explained—much less reformed— as long as it is viewed as nothing more than a structure of interlocked bureaucracies that display the self-preservative and self-agBOOKS 107 grandizing drives of any such structure...
...This may lead to discouraging or depressing prognostications, but it would avoid the error of misleading the public as to the means by which, or the ease with which, a program of democratic socialism might be gained...
...the clash of interests so dramatically depicted by Ricardo has disappeared into the anonymous catch-all of "growth...
...To do justice to Bell, he is aware of all this...
...In my view it is not...
...Marx, as we know, thought that the future of society—i.e., the interest of its human aspect— could only be pursued by a propertyless class...
...Where the market sector failed to produce socially adequate performance, as in health, housing, and the performing arts, socialization would be freely used...
...If I understand this chapter correctly, Bell writes that it is possible to chart technological and scientific progress as an exponential curve, 2 which is an independent variable and therefore determines the course of social developments much as the infrastructure in vulgar-Marxism determines the "superstructure...
...The problem that must be raised by political economy is a simple but fundamental one: how does it happen that so many of the prevailing beliefs and operative institutions in capitalist society are compatible with, or supportive of, the claims of massed property...
...This "central star which governs society" is a special, almost cosmic thing...
...That these claims are as intellectually fictitious as those o( monarchy is not a difficult proposition to defend...
...In American Capitalism, policy proposals were little more than a restatement of well-established Keynesian principles, since the countervailing power of capitalism needed little remedy...
...Evidence was offered, then denied...
...He was an unqualified opponent of violent insurrection...
...Yet, as Hoffman notes, he left a legacy at once admirable and challenging...
...Collective bargaining would include the range of income differentials from janitor to president...
...So he looked to an ancient ideal, Justice, with fidelity and hope, and his life and work were admirably quixotic...
...The chaos of events often forced him to shift his opinions, but on one matter, that of family life and the position of women, he was unyielding...
...He sees clearly that the technological establishment may have nothing to communicate to a number of its subjects...
...His credentials as an enemy of privilege are not in doubt...
...Clearly, we have here a case of widespread imprudent management that cannot simply be attributed to the behavior of one unscrupulous individual...
...The social determination of behavior that so deeply interested Adam Smith has been lost to view in the abstractions of supply and demand...
...Meanwhile the task of a practitioner of political economy must be an illumination of for whom, as well as how, the socioeconomic system works...
...Despite the depiction of capitalism as a kind of vast corporate cartel directing to its own benefit the purchasing power of the private sector and using for its own preservation the controlling hand of government, little was offered as a major remedy, save a call to arms of the intelligentsia who would in some fashion alter the public consciousness...
...Hegel called the Prussian civil service the "universal estate...
...On top of the pyramid, he sees "four estates"—the scientific, the technical, the administrative, and the cultural elites...
...I would reverse this proposal and suggest that the scientific elite be deprived of the joys of sex so as to make them more dispassionate, and to provide for their procreation by artificial insemination...
...Bell admits, only to forget it later, that technical problems are political problems...
...witnesses testified, then recanted...
...Much more serious, in my view, is another element in Galbraith's book, an element that deprives his analysis of the cutting power it might have...
...Sheridan is persuasive in his documentation of jury tampering in the Nashville trial...
...The New Industrial State was still more disappointing...
...Marx sought the seizure of power...
...The ideology for this new technological society was provided simultaneously by the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding, the protofascist Oswald Spengler, and by the industrialist-statesman of the Weimar Republic, Walter Rathenau...
...But he does not discuss the implications of stagnation...
...Rather, that which marks off Galbraith's new book is not the diagnosis of, but the suggested response to power...
...Any support of government, Proudhon seems to say, is immoral...
...For that they have a whole arsenal of "game theory, systems analysis, information theory...
...On the other hand, similar things might be said of many of the people with whom Hoffa surrounded himself...
...4) these members of the new power elite are defined as "scientists, mathematicians, economists, the engineers of the new intellectual technology...
...The themes of massive economic strength, already stressed in American Capitalism, and of the manipulation of the private sector, which figured large in The Affluent Society, were combined to portray capitalism as a system in which the organizing principle was that of planning, disguised by rhetoric and ideology to appear as "competition...
...More important—indeed, perhaps most important—the decision-making of the corporate planning establishment would be made subject to a higher level of public decision-making: "[The state] will impose overall planning on the planning system" (p...
...110 BOOKS tween either and the achievement of positions of power...
...And he fails to bring much insight or perspective to his subject...
...Urbana: University of Illinois Press...
...Proudhon, Hoffman insists, is an anarchist...
...To what constituency does Galbraith look for the realization of his blueprint for change...
...Where industrial adventurers once built empires by hunch and lost them, where inventions had to wait for someone to take a fancy to the idea of exploiting them, where land was developed haphazardly— there now is purposeful planning of the market, rational expansion of the enterprise, inventions' tailoring "to order...
...The subject we call economics arose, during the 18th and early 19th centuries, as a branch of moral philosophy...
...Bell promises to write a second volume, in which he will discuss the human aspect of the postindustrial society...
...Its decisionmakers are not the wealthy owners of the means of production but those whose training and function enables them to use, plan, and augment society's equipment...
...A major depression—unlikely but not impossible—a further deterioration of national morale and capability, a serious environmental challenge might loosen the political hegemony of the capitalist view sufficiently to enable a genuine political change to take place...
...Thus, from a strategic bargaining point of view, Hoffa's drive for centralization makes sense...
...As for workers in the United States, it appears that most of them, too, value wages and other material gains over the opportunity to participate...
...It is no less difficult to clarify and sort out what he really meant...
...At the risk of considerable oversimplification, let me summarize it as follows : (1) The power centers of capitalism are to be controlled by socialization...
...What Proudhon offers—and Hoffman is good in describing his many concrete plans for small-scale change—is an alternative to the illusions of capitalist freedom and the disillusionments of communist revolution...
...This may change...
...He simultaneously loved the masses 112 BOOKS and hated the people...
...Now this elite is often called a "meritocracy"—as if there were any correlation between good marks in graduate administration courses and wisdom, or be2 Since growth cannot go through the roof and resources exhaust their possibilities of exploitation, Bell postulates for practical purposes a flattened — as the typical curve...
...This observation seems to be his main justification of the term "post-industrial...
...The earlier Galbraith books were uniformly disappointing with respect to their policy recommendations...
...Nevertheless, it is true that in the most advanced countries, "scientific technology" has become the main ideology of the industrialcapitalist system, and it is somewhat surprising that Bell, for all his erudition, does not even mention Jurgen Habermas's important studies on precisely the subject of his books While Habermas treats scientific rationality as a myth, Bell speaks as though the ability to solve problems bears with it the knowledge of which problems need solving...
...Representative government means that men surrender their own powers of judgment...
...Nor does Sheridan address the issue of centralization of power, which went hand-in-hand To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...
...Within the field of moral philosophy, the area that came to be called political economy concentrated on one aspect of this social clash of wills—that involving the production and distribution of society's wealth...
...SO FAR, all that has been established is a statistical fact from which the brilliant chapter of Bell's book that appeared in DISSENT's bluecollar issue drew some pertinent political conBOOKS 109 clusions...
...Marx's initial judgment, made in 1847, has come to seem almost invincible: Proudhon the novice in economics, the lightweight in philosophy, the danger to the socialist movement...
...Ancillary to his analysis will be a realistic appraisal of the conditions for the assumption of power by a different class...
...For the heirs of Marx, Hoffman notes, have surely failed their master...
...Now Bell has no difficulty in showing that modern workers have much more to lose than their chains, and that their consciousness is far from being "proletarian" in the revolutionary sense of a class whose aim is the end of all classes...
...One may include within the institutions that support property (or at least do not mortally threaten it) parliamentary systems or even a relatively unfettered intellectual freedom...
...A union leader, understandably, would prefer this situation on both counts...
...These members constitute a clearly identifiable and vociferous anti-Hoffa group...
...It is not a mere idea...
...WAS HOFFA, then, an innocent victim of a vendetta or a guilty participant in criminal activities...
...One wonders, however, just how much substance does remain...
...Obviously, if the proletarians lose their historical mission by default, it still does not follow that another class must take over that mission...
...but he does not consider the possibility thatthese people may seek to communicate something to the leadership...
...GALBRAITH'S LATEST BOOK, Economics and the Public Purpose, does not significantly alter this conception of capitalism as a system of disguised private planning...
...but if I understand the author's meaning: the social-economic characteristics no longer are essential to describe this society's mode of operation...
...I am aware, of course, that the notion of class structure and class interests has fallen into considerable disrepute, and is espoused today mainly by that radical wing of economists to whom I earlier referred...
...Proudhon was "diffuse, unsystematic, confusing, and idealistic...
...2) social functions have become severed from property...
...The "mobilization groups" must be mobilized for something, and there is nothing to take the place of an ideology...
...Now Bell seems to assume we are ruled by mathematicians, scientists, and other members of the "intellectual technology...
...NOW I know that only oriental despots hold the messenger personally responsible for the bad news, and I hope that Bell does not desire the realization of his frightening "schema" for the future American society...
...Permanent wage and price controls would constrain the corporation's freedom of maneuver and manipulation...
...Indeed, many do not bother to attend union meetings, to vote in elections, etc...
...Pompidou was a professor of classics and a banker, and Brezhnev certainly did not owe his rise to power to his early engineering-school training...
...He admits that a substantial group of intellectuals— those of C. P. Snow's humanist culture, those of Roszak's counter culture, and those of Charles Reich's "third consciousness"—may drop out of the "schema" and that to keep them quiet may be more than a problem for the police or, following Huxley's more humane advice, the "providers of drugs...
...All unnatural forms of authority, all repressions of individual freedom and inhibitions of social harmony are to be resisted and destroyed...
...Such centralization may be justified by claims of practicality, but it can also, in time, undermine a democracy...
...But what does that prove...
...Finally, they will be controlled by a "political order," with a "directorate" on top and "mobilized groups" at the bottom...
...Justice is the principle of right ordering, the fusion of moral good and social harmony...
...I am wary lest a program of high minimum wages generate unnecessary unemployment...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...but American TV audiences have recently been treated to quite a different view of who rules us, and the Pentagon Papers have revealed that the so-called technocrats made the feasibility studies but, and let's be thankful for small favors, they did not make the policy decisions...
...Power in Galbraith's view consists in the ability of corporate entities to use household purchasing power and government supervision to assure their own continuance, prerogatives, and growth...
...it also can be predicted with confidence that, should his projections come true, his fate would not be a happy one...
...An advocate of perpetual peace, his major work on the subject (War and Peace, which may have been Tolstoy's inspiration) is a near panygeric to the ennobling qualities of war...
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...The New Industrial State (1967) pressed this conception of power further...
...In particular, what lacks is a description of the general class interests that are served by the operation of the technostructure in a capitalist society...
...The latter include those (e.g., on the West Coast) whose particular local situation made it possible for them to do better under conditions of pure local bargaining...
...This is a genuine program for social democracy or democratic socialism, and here is surely the place to salute Galbraith for having offered the most imaginative, courageous, and far-reaching blueprint for economic policy that has been produced since World War II...
...Proudhon's anarchism is, as Bertrand Russell might have put it, "all spots and jumps...
...This issue arises in the labor movement, in corporate agglomerations, and, most strongly, in the government...
...If I may revert to my opening lecture, I believe the Classical Economists and Marx were correct in viewing the economic system as a means for systematically producing and reproducing different class fortunes, and this insight, I think, must be added to that of an appreciation of sheer institutional manipulative capability, if one is to move from economics to political economy...
...Yes, but it is not an accurate one...
...Today we know, much more clearly than Marx knew, that every despotism in recent history has tried to justify itself by the mission to modernize, to industrialize, to rationalize, and to ensure scientific efficiency...
...While many Teamsters benefited from Hoffa's leadership, others lost...
...And only one thing has changed since the days of Marx: white-smock workers have been demoted to the status of employees, admittedly a modification of Marx's prediction...
...It is difficult to believe today that in American Capitalism, published in 1952, power —while already identified as the crucial problem within capitalist economy—was on the whole treated kindly, and regarded as essentially self-annulling through the "countervailing" competition among power-holders...
...5) the government will "base [its decisions] on sponsorship of research and development, of cost-efficiency and cost-benefit analysis...
...Bad as this was, it wasn't precisely a case of fraud, since not only Hoffa but most of the other trustees, too, were aware of and took part in the scheme...
...Perhaps he thought such authority "natural" and honorable...
...From this point of view, the claim that "scientists" will sagaciously and judiciously ascertain the best interests of society is an illusion— if it is not a deceit...
...I fear that nationalizing the armament makers will make them less, not more, subject to public control by bringing them under the protective arm of the Pentagon as a permanent part of the bureaucracy...
...Proudhon is presented as a sometimes hasty, often dramatic journalist and as an aspiring yet incompetent philosopher...
...However, the latter groups can benefit in their negotiations from ties to the former, who can refuse to "interline" with recalcitrant local employers...
...The governing scientists, armed with the awesome powers of modern technology, must answer the question that has bugged all utopians since Plato: who is going to guard the guardians, or, as Marx put it, who is going 3 Two of Habermas's books, Toward a Rational Society and Knowledge and Human Interest, are now available in English (both, Boston: Beacon, 1971...
...3) Central government power is to be strenghtened...
...On the credit side, centralization permits a union to take advantage of certain economies of scale—in negotiating, collecting information, etc...
...3) as a consequence, power is transferred from those who used to run capitalist enterprises— the free-enterprise bourgeoisie—to the manipulators of various control systems...
...Hoffman's book is not a defense, but a detailed account of a political philosophy destined to fail in the 19th century but perhaps more interesting today...
...how does one find a credible witness inthis situation...
...What must be explained is why the pretensions of monarchy have fallen, while those of property still reign...
...Surely the lesson of the past decades is that no such strong constituency exists...
...From one book to the next, Galbraith's conception of power has become progressively refined and integrated into the economic framework...
...Recently, a bevy of Spenglerian terms—most of them borrowed from the imagery of total war—has invaded the sociologists' "estate": total mobilization, which was the ideology of General Ludendorff and of Marinetti in World War I. At the time, this imagery was popularized by Oswald Spengler and Ernst Junger...
...Universal suffrage is useless (why elect one's persecutors...
...The major arms producers are to be nationalized...
...The idea itself is not new...
...Like Mannheim, too, Bell assumes that such a society will be run by an intellectual elite rather than by politicians representing various interest groups, natural divisions, or passionate concerns...
...Following Karl Mannheim, Bell has countered "ideology," i.e., false consciousness, with a call for "utopia," i.e., a precise working plan for a rational society...
...Hoffman is not so sure...
...I have written elsewhere in detail about the gross mismanagement of the pension fund which indeed has cost Teamster members millions of dollars in pension assets...
...Inside the realm of moral philosophy took place those activities whose distinguishing characteristic was that they expressed contests of will...
...As Hoffman says, "his vision of human history is a noble one...
...Proudhon was simply not a very practical thinker...
...THE COMING OF POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY: A VENTURE IN FORECASTING, by Daniel Bell...
...Bell, like Marx, hails the coming of a new economic system as progress, but where Marx also attacked the class that introduced industrial capitalism, Bell accepts the new class rule almost uncritically, naively, even enthusiastically...
...The first part of the book, largely a rehash of other writings, deals with the McClellan Committee investigation and allegations of Teamster corruption, emphasizing connections 114 BOOKS between the union and the Mafia...
...Yet Sheridan offers no analysis of, or remedies for, the union procedures that enable this mismanagement...
...Power is thus identified with the capacity of institutions to further their own purposes, and the remedy for power becomes the blunting of that capability...
...In one form or another, power has been the unifying theme through all of Galbraith's work...
...I think it is the absence of such a class view that accounts for the critical weakness in Galbraith's analysis...
...In an earlier book, Bell coined the controversial term "The End of Ideology," for which he has been attacked quite unfairly, precisely by some who should have acclaimed it...
...In this sense, George Lichtheim called the new society "postbourgeois," Ralf Dahrendorf the "service society," and Zbigniev Brzezinski the "technicentric society...
...Whether impelled by the growing clarity of his own convictions, or freed from the necessity of tactful caution by his withdrawal from public office, Galbraith has formulated a program that is finally adequate to his own diagnosis...
...They have taken on the purposeful rationality that is so characteristic of industrial capitalism...
...Sheridan has accomplished a difficult task: he has made tedious reading of an innately fascinating subject...
...I hope that his postbourgeois, postindustrial society does not turn out to be posthuman, too...
...For all his confusion, he nonetheless had a clear notion of his own dislocation...
...So much for the lecture...
...Now attention was focused on the unequal contest of private versus public power, exemplified in the overcultivation of the sphere in which corporate power was allowed its head and the undernourishment of that in which public power was confined...
...The power that interests Galbraith is the generalized power of bureaucracy...
...Another, less identifiable group also lost out: the people who might have obtained Teamster jobs if Hoffa had not raised wages as much as he did...
...it manipulates majorities in order to repress minorities...
...Still, Hoffa was directly connected with these tampering efforts only by the testimony of a minor Teamster official, Ed Partin, who was in jail awaiting trial for kidnapping and embezzling union funds at the time he agreed to provide testimony against Hoffa...
...The advocates of technocratic rule have added to this ideology the assertion that the total society should be ruled scientifically and rationally by an elite agency that knows (or can determine scientifically) what is in the public interest...
...In contrast to Saint-Simon, Marx pointed out that the pretext of performing a service for the whole of society merely disguises the usurpation of powers by a special class...
...Yet, for all his anarchist purity, Proudhon was elected to the National Assembly in May 1848...
...He follows a rigid chronological order amid a jumble of names and dates, often without giving the necessary topical interconnections...
...He may have written this chapter of his book at the time when McNamara's whiz kids made copy...
...The Communist experiments have given us tyranny...
...the struggle over the division of the product that lay at the center of Marx's analysis has been relegated to the analysis of the marginal productivities of the factors of production...
...In Sheridan's simplistic world, Hoffa is synonymous with evil...
...Surely, it was not his alleged Mafia connection that made this possible...
...they have only burdened the old world with new instruments of authority...
...Surely, the credibility of such a witness is open to question...
...Bell fears above all the "politics of passion," a quality of which his scientists are so innocent that one wonders whether he has checked with Skinner...
...The core of the book, in short, is a bold program designed to cope with the power structure of capitalism...
...In his article in the Spring 1973 DISSENT, Robert Heilbroner said just 108 BOOKS about all there is to say on the question whether capitalism has been superseded by postcapitalism...
...Indeed, as Sheridan reports, the same practices continue today, even though Hoffa is no longer a trustee...
...Nevertheless, to call it "post-industrial" is awkward and seems to be justified only by the nonintrinsic reason that Kenneth Galbraith already has taken title to all other possible terms...
...Yet it has objective manifestations and Proudhon (with Hoffman's analytic aid) presents its outlines...
...And this opponent of all forms of state authority seems to have had no reservations about the exercise of power over his domestic dominion...
...centralization...
...In 1973, after a number of mistrials, Partin was convicted of using extortion and violence in an antitrust violation...
...Small businessmen would be permitted to combine to stabilize prices and output...
...New York: Saturday Review Press...
...They will be employed in five "situses" (another medieval term suggesting the freezing of social relations) : in the economy, in government, the universities, social services, and the military...
...With Economics and the Public Purpose, all that has changed...
...The country he is talking about certainly—in the year of Watergate—is not the United States...
...It fleshes out the earlier portrait by emphasizing the problems inherent in the coexistence of a traditional, truly powerless, competitive market sector and the central corporate structure of capitalism, although even that idea had already appeared in American Capitalism...
...Freedom cannot be balanced with order, for in the process justice is affronted...
...IN HIS BATTLES with Marx, Proudhon has long seemed the obvious loser...
...These chapters are more interesting than the earlier ones especially when Sheridan writes about his own personal involvement...
...The large BOOKS 115 majority of Teamsters may have been getting exactly what they wanted out of Hoffa's leadership, and that may help explain why, as Sheridan says, despite all the efforts of the getHoffa squad, "nothing has reallychanged...
...The first was a "technical" question—to understand how such an apparent melee could produce an orderly solution to the problem of social provisioning...
...Since I shall have to voice some criticism, I now wish to point to my enthusiastic review of one of Bell's earlier books (Work and Its Discontents), and to the inclusion of a superb chapter from his present work in DISSENT's special issue on blue-collar workers.' It is always a pleasure to read Bell's clear prose, to share his vast erudition, and to benefit from his industrious research...
...A uniform expiration date, furthermore, gives the union the power to strike selectively the weakest link in the chain...
...Besides, I share with him an attitude to Marx that night be described as "critical awe"—i.e., the conviction that most of the facts on which Das Kapital was based are now dated, that its predictions have either not come true or have to be substantially modified, and that its specific theories are no longer very helpful, but—and this is a big but—that Marx was right in treating ideologies as the expression of class interests...
...The assertion that Zweckrationalitat (Max Weber's term for purposeful rationality) of the whole is achieved if each part follows its own Zweckrationalitdt does not differ from Adam Smith's assertion that Providence had somehow whispered into each producer's ear what to manufacture in order to realize the preestablished harmony of the market...
...Not only have more jobs been subjected to the rationale of industrial efficiency...
...Below them, there will be people with progressively decreasing years of training: the semiprofessionals, and the clerical, skilled, and semiskilled workers...
...With minor alterations, his analysis could be applied with equal cogency to fascist systems or centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union...
...2) Powerless areas of the economy would be given a new organizational strength...
...These arguments apply especially to the overtheroad truck driver, where the competition is mainly nationwide, rather than to cartage and warehousing, where the market is local...
...His federative ideas—which revolve around contractual relationships between communities and their individual members— are untried...
...429 pp...
...Proudhon's notion of "moral regeneration" is out of place in "a world where only power seems really to count...
...No doubt the revolutions of the 20th century were waged in the name of Marxism...
...While he "did not regard his wife as either brood mare or kitchen drudge," Proudhon was a traditionalist: chastity was his theory and his practice...
...His book is a warning about the threat Hoffa, in Sheridan's view, still poses to society...
...Like many anarchists he was literally a reactionary, resenting the depersonalizing forces of modernity: urbanization, capitalist industrialization, state centralization, and the consequent melting of individual difference...
...It conceals the brutal fact that managers employ scientists and order the problems they wish to be created or solved...
...As Hoffman puts it, "Between absolute monarchy and the most radical democracy there are only variations in the portion of citizens supposed to participate...
...In reading Sheridan's book, one is struck by the charges and countercharges that were exchanged between the Hoffa camp and the Kennedy camp...
...A s head of the Kennedy "get Hoffa" squad, Walter Sheridan was instrumental in putting Hoffa into prison...
...These are, however, cavils...
...Proudhon struggled for freedom in the abstract yet was an adamant opponent of the liberation of women...
...Hoffman does not presume to rank Proudhon with Marx as a creator or synthesizer of ideas, nor does he see Proudhon as the equal of Marx in organizational ability, polemical sharpness, and clarity of historical understanding...
...PROUDHON, by Robert L. Hoffman...
...tification for the claim of a new ruling class that aspires to be the legitimate heir of the bourgeoisie...
...Unlike these BOOKS 111 prophets of totalitarianism, Bell is not interested in the paraphernalia of the national state, and (qua intellectual as distinct from scientist, or as a liberal and humanist) he would be most unhappy in the society he predicts...
...Marxism gave the appearance of empirical analysis and scientific certainty...
...116 BOOKS...
...If revolutionary purity is measured by the official condemnation it evokes, Proudhon spent the requisite time in prison...
...As an economist, I am tempted to do a benefit-cost analysis...
...The Marxist ideology was attractive to the potential rebel because it gave a coherent sense of mission as well as a program both demanding and possible...
...Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's intellectual bones have been claimed by such varied inheritors —anarchists and fascists, syndicalists and individualists, progressives and reactionaries— that it is nearly impossible to assess his influence...
...Much of their work seems to me vitiated by a certain and dogmatism, but my dismay is with the unimaginative application of their views, not with their underlying perspective itself...
...But such variations are illusory and without meaning, for authority is always to be exercised by someone else...
...In reviewing this remarkable book, I am threefold fortunate...
...Alternately illuminating and obfuscating, Proudhon's complex thought has at last been analyzed with precision, sympathy, and deep seriousness in Robert Hoffman's Revolutionary Justice, a book not likely to be topped as a history of Proudhon's ideas...
Vol. 21 • January 1974 • No. 1
