IS EQUALITY A NECESSITY?
Fox, Alan
Alan Fox Is Equality A Necessity? The following article firs,t appeared tn the English journal Socialist Commen- tary. Since it seemed of interest to non-British readers as well, we asked...
...Their privileges therefore become the price they extort from the rest of us for 'avoiding the miseries of violent conflict...
...On the contrary, in Britain it has always been considered “inappropriate” at the higher, middle, and often even the lower levels of political activity and collective bargaining, to analyze and discuss social, political, and industrial issues in terms of class, exploitation, and power...
...Every group is convinced that other groups are somehow managing to protect themselves eff ectively-the classic distrust situation-and, precisely because it feels unable to entrust its fortunes to company or government decision-makers, feels driven to enforce its own claims by whatever means it can...
...All the signs are that these tendencies reinforce each other in a rising spiral if left unchecked...
...It might be that the answers to such questions would reveal one major approach to consist of (1) a wish that inequalities could be greatly reduced...
...Fortunately Western societies have to hand a set of institutions for the nonviolent transfer and application of political power...
...Why should they...
...a game in which gross disparities of wealth, income, and status are simply made impossible...
...And this process of cherishing IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...This society is also, in many respects, a low-trust society...
...The other arguments are far more interesting...
...I pass lightly over these only because they are the tedious universals of human vanity, greed, and weakness, which can be taken for granted in every situation...
...These will possibly surprise some readers who deduce from the fact that Britain is a class-ridden society that it engages in classridden political debate and industrial bargaining...
...Let us continue playing Hamlet without the Prince...
...and (4) the decision that wisdom dictates continuance of the social-democratic or liberal stance pursued hitherto...
...3) fear, therefore, that to present the appropriate analysis and prescriptions would alienate so much potential support as to make impossible the pursuit of limited but attainable reforms...
...Nevertheless, in terms of individual and group commitment to, and moral involvement in, the wider society, we could hope to make it possible for us all to feel some responsible concern for the cohesion and integrity of our common life...
...Because tension and distrust in our society lie far too deep to be illuminated and analyzed within the context of a philosophy of this sort, that the call for a radical analysis has to be made...
...Thus most of the rank-and-file people are conscious only that top management, in seeking to control, prescribe, and program their behavior, in limiting their discretion and autonomy, and in excluding them from the important decision-making, demonstrates through its behavior (whatever it may say) that it does not trust them to pursue the purposes it favors and act by the values it prefers...
...The following article firs,t appeared tn the English journal Socialist Commentary...
...Only a barbarian despises liberal freedoms, and only a fool lightly puts at hazard their associated institutions such as constitutional democracy, collective bargaining, “due process” and the rule of law...
...This explains the frequency of reference to that country...
...Moreover, provided their own interests are assured, their commitments #to the democratic and liberal freedoms is often, to put 50 it mildly, something less than total...
...For, in contrast to the arguments just reported, it begins to look doubtful whether that tradition can be retained unless we change social institutions drastically in such ways as to minimize mutually destructive competition...
...Of course, this is the point in the argument when economists produce their shop-worn clichC calculations showing that if all income over a certain amount were confiscated and redistributed, average income would increase by only a small margin...
...There is, after all, no immutable political logic which binds wholesale public ownership and the abolition of wealth and privilege with totalitarian sup pression of political and trade-union freedoms...
...Such is their position in the division of labor that this expresses the nature of their largely depersonalized and dehumanized relationship with the employing body...
...Given IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...Could these institutions take the strain of such an assault on power and privilege...
...As we have noted, the present distribution of wealth, income, status, and life chances are supported by a deeply entrenched power structure, and to change that structure will require the mobilization and exertion of counterpower...
...where clever young men in ithe City, for example, can make a fortune in a few months by simply buying, stripping, and selling companies...
...Let us imagine, it might be said, a rich man’s government which extorts such privileges for its friends and imposes such oppressive deprivations upon the rest that constitutional democracy comes to appear, to the latter, no longer worth supporting...
...Others may remain unmoved by such propositions and, especially if comfortably placed themselves, may derive much positive satisfaction from, and offer vehement approval of, those inequalities which seem to their fellows so offensive...
...Perhaps the only necessary comment is that few trade unionists are likely to believe it...
...Given the division of labor and technology of most work organizations (not open to major change without considerable economic cost), it is doubtful if rank-and-file employees will ever feel any substantial intrinsic involvement and high trust attitudes in their immediate work tasks...
...We surely have to admit that it was not designed for such a struggle...
...This notion Ithat it is the betteroff manual workers who are uniquely responsi’ble for the plight of the old and low-paid is becoming increasingly popular...
...The following article firs,t appeared tn the English journal Socialist Commentary...
...If, of course, men should come to show themselves prepared to forgo some margin of material benefit in order to enjoy the intrinsic rewards derivable from smallerscale operations, reduction of hierarchy, and high-discretion work, this would be a different matter...
...Temporary slackenings of tempo there will undoubtedly be, but it is plausible to argue that each renewal is likely to bring sharper problems than before...
...The longer we delay trying to actualize such potential as remains for a high-trust society, the less potential there will be to actualize...
...includes conducting this “managed” conflict according to certain mutual expectations of method, behavior, and communica tion...
...All this is highly convenient for those who derive wealth, power, and privilege from the existing order...
...If we did we might discover how flimsy and gimcrack the whole moral structure is...
...If the dictum that socialism means high taxation is politically damaging, it will become more rather than less so as time progresses...
...cancel that holiday in the Algarve...
...Gamesmanship, bluff, and power maneuvers are pressed into service by both sides...
...Not only is the design and structure of work such that rank and file feel little moral adhesion to the organization (be it privately or publicly owned...
...Our argument suggests that in a competitive low-trust society, where everything from which a profit can be made is up for grabs...
...62 ALAN FOX...
...I pass lightly over these only because they are the tedious universals of human vanity, greed, and weakness, which can be taken for granted in every situation...
...Plunged into the miseries of open violence, so the argument might run, we would have little prospect of building the New Jerusalem...
...In Eritain, recent Labour party doctrine on this question has appeared to rely heavily, for the financing of welfare provisions, on the increasing yield of given rates of tax upon a rising Gross National Product...
...They help to account, I believe, for the widespread tacit agreement between political and industrial enemies that certain types of analysis, certain types of argument, certain types of language, must not be used...
...This organizational situation has been analyzed at some length, because in certain respects it represents in microcosm what goes on in the wider society...
...and (3) the discovery that a social contract negotiated with trade unions and other relevant groups, on a relatively high-trust basis, offered a degree of stability which made planned economic growth possible without inflation...
...We refer here to trust and distrust, not as these emerge in personal, face-to-face relations, but as they are embodied in the very nature of rules, control systems, job definitions, and formal or informal practices of a wide variety of kinds...
...More and more the employment contract and the collective agreement become jealously defined exchanges in which each side watches the other carefully for failure to discharge its obligations and seeks the maximum advantage compatible with continuance of the relationship...
...But to serve such a purpose they would have to be presented as simply temporary expedients, and be combined with a presentation of the radical perspective and its prescriptions...
...To those who recoil from it, I believe it fair to suggest that they put to themselves some possibly painful questions...
...As we have noted, the present distribution of wealth, income, status, and life chances are supported by a deeply entrenched power structure, and to change that structure will require the mobilization and exertion of counterpower...
...Why should they-in a low-trust society which teaches them, as it teaches everyone else, to practice acquisitive selfassertion through power...
...One thing is, in my view, certain...
...Each successive decade of even such abundance as they are likely to enjoy will only, in the context of our present social values, confirm Ithem, as it has already confirmed the middle and upper classes, in the delights of private affluence and privileged access to superior education and health...
...The avoidance is practiced not only by the wealthy and privileged, whose intense reluctance to ask searching questions is in the direct proportion to their fear of the answers they would receive...
...If there is one convicproduce the very outcome they predict...
...Increasingly, individuals and groups feel the need to secure by their own efforts what they see as their just deserts, mobilizing and enforcing such degree of power as they can...
...53 exercise of power-have brought most of us widely varying degrees of material benefit...
...I have argued that control requires the mobilization of a majority behind a new watchword for a new game...
...Since it seemed of interest to non-British readers as well, we asked the author to reduce the number of local English references and adapt it for our readers, This was done before the recent Labour victory.-ED...
...If we did we might discover how flimsy and gimcrack the whole moral structure is...
...Subordinated for the most part to work defined by the predominant statusranking as inferior, they are allocated inferior rewards and treated with inferior respect...
...I believe it is not self-evidently absurd to suggest that sufficient numbers of the lower and middle ranks of industrial societies could be brought-given leadership and great educative effort-to respond to such a program...
...The earlier reference to “institutionalized” trust (or distrust) is itself enough to demonstrate that liberal values do not secure their effect simply by being expressed verbally or in interpersonal relations...
...Its very organization of work is likely to convince the rank and file that in some respects, at least, management’s interests and their own are not identical...
...Only when this intellectual logjam is cleared shall we become capable of a dialogue searching for ways of combining modern technology and organization, equality, and the best of the liberaldemocratic tradition...
...Low-Trust Relations and Social Morality THE MORAL QUALITY of this scene, as it develops within a context of gathering inflationary pressure and government attempts to contain the upward movement in incomes, is not enhanced by the tendency of large sections of society (a ,tendency arising from a mixture of ignorance and a will to avoid uncomfortable questions and still more uncomfortable answers) to conceal from themselves the true nature of the situation and to indulge in moralizing cant and hyprocrisy...
...IT WOULD be foolish to play down the full implications of such a frontal assault on privilege...
...In terms of fellowship and communi,ty, this is a picture of moral impoverishment, which makes selfrestraint seem a futile gesture which will only be swallowed up in the rat race practiced by the rest...
...quicken aspirations still further, the tempo heightens...
...These are serious considerations...
...Here we too often move in a world not of class, exploitation and power, but of “fairness,” of weak interpretations of “equality of opportunity,” and “Tory meanness...
...None of this is to imply any such fantasy as that the rich and powerful will be moved to accept greater equality by these arguments any more than by moral reasoning...
...What is being studiously avoided is any searching analysis of why individuals and organized groups at all levels in our kind of society behave as they do...
...These exhortations are tantamount to appeals to behave in a high-trust manner in a low-trust context...
...For by the canons of liberal-democratic institutions as we operate them, this is dangerous language, inflammatory language stirring primitive resentments and aggressions, which it is precisely the business of liberal institutions to civilize and control...
...This society is also, in many respects, a low-trust society...
...Incomes policy without the higher morality...
...Why should they...
...It is vital to the analysis to recognize that there are still many groups at present lacking the aspirations and confidence...
...If exploitation could only imply the oppression of a suffering proletariat, then modifications would be required here too, though not quite as many and drastic ones as is often supposed...
...It is obvious enough, of course, why recent years have evoked a specially rich crop of this kind...
...If, then, we open with the British scene, it becomes important in the development of the argument to note certain facts about the nature of much party-political controversy and industrial bargaining in that country...
...Collectively, they try to modify the situation in their own interests, either unilaterally or in a process of bargaining in which they seek to bind management to precise rules on issues specially important to them...
...The article is written in the belief that the message is in fact worth pondering throughout the Western world...
...If we really want to mobilize a force for equality the only !time to start is now...
...Clearly the central arguments of this article stand or fall on this belief...
...Let us continue playing Hamlet without the Prince...
...of marginal tax adjustments here, enlargement of welfare benefits there, promotion of regional economic growth somewhere else...
...We can gain clues to this low-trust quality by focusing for a moment on the type of work situation which tends, along with other social mechanisms, to generate it...
...For, in contrast to the arguments just reported, it begins to look doubtful whether that tradition can be retained unless we change social institutions drastically in such ways as to minimize mutually destructive competition...
...To those who recoil from it, I believe it fair to suggest that they put to themselves some possibly painful questions...
...The symbol of their relationship with top management is the employment contract it offers them, laying down its precise and specific terms...
...Increasingly, individuals and groups feel the need to secure by their own efforts what they see as their just deserts, mobilizing and enforcing such degree of power as they can...
...This concoption, with its basic theme of the “inevitability of gradualness” in the advance ftoward a rational and just society, and its argument that the governing and administrative classes would be increasingly infiltrated by an enlightened FabianIS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...It is a game that has always been practiced by small, dominant ruling groups and classes, but it is now spreading fast...
...The earlier reference to “institutionalized” trust (or distrust) is itself enough to demonstrate that liberal values do not secure their effect simply by being expressed verbally or in interpersonal relations...
...generate powerful emotions not easily banked down...
...Alan Fox Is Equality A Necessity...
...Not only is justice not done, it is also seen to be not done...
...The British version of this delusion received an early formulation through some of the prominent pioneers of the Fabian Society in late Victorian times (when paradoxically the argumenlt could be made to seem more plausible...
...Bargaining is essentially a low-trust activity for a low-trust situation...
...IT IS WITH RESPECT to this problem of presenting the program and mobilizing support for it from the mass ranks of wage-earners, lower salary-earners, and conceivably even some at higher levels, that I want to develop another central theme...
...Attitudes and values on such matters are normally shaped by far more complex and subtle patterns of influence than direct exchanges of argument alone, though these have their place in the process, even if only for their impact upon those whose opinions are not yet irrevocably formed...
...Perhaps the only necessary comment is that few trade unionists are likely to believe it...
...Perhaps incalculable damage has been done to this search by the historically created association between a Marxist analysis of capitalist society and those Communist (particularly Stalinist) prescriptions indelibly linked with totalitarian destruction of the liberal-democratic political and trade-union freedoms...
...None of this is to imply any such fantasy as that the rich and powerful will be moved to accept greater equality by these arguments any more than by moral reasoning...
...IT WOULD be foolish to play down the full implications of such a frontal assault on privilege...
...A Radical Ideology for a Radical Program...
...In a recent television current-aff airs program we heard: Eminent Interviewer (doubtfully) : “Perhaps given rising prices the lower-paid gas workers who havc just come out on strike have a bit of a point when they see property speculation deals and all that . . . ?” 54 ALAN FOX LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITEDthese trends toward a universalization of pressure groups all fighting for their own hand, the destructive inflationary scramble could reach an intensity dangerously threatening to the stability of existing institutions and values...
...When men believe they see others gaining a defensive or offensive advantage through an assertion of power, they follow suit...
...2) the demonstration that limitation was part of an overall long-term plan to extinguish the gap of privilege and inequality between rich and poor-a plan also covering education, health, housing, and old age, as well as wealth and income...
...Perhaps incalculable damage has been done to this search by the historically created association between a Marxist analysis of capitalist society and those Communist (particularly Stalinist) prescriptions indelibly linked with totalitarian destruction of the liberal-democratic political and trade-union freedoms...
...For examples we may turn again to the British scene...
...This is (the comfortable belief that embodied in these societies is an evolutionary dynamic of progress and reform, which is carrying them through a slow but inevitable transition toward social justice and equality...
...Since existing institutions and mechanisms are underpinned by a deeply entrenched power structure, strong counterpower will be needed to change them...
...Along with these ‘trends go increasing political resistance to taxation ‘and a search for self-justifying excuses for this resistance, which take the form of hatred and contempt for the supposed laziness and moral weakness of welfare recipients...
...Thus the urgency of the problem derives from the fact that, in seeking to mobilize these sentiments to promote a humane and equal society, we are trying to mobilize what already threatens to become a wasting asset...
...b) would lose little (perhaps nothing) personally by a more egalitarian structure...
...Rising aspirations, increasing confidence, and a modicum of power are bringing one group after another into the arena...
...Social values urge us to produce in order to consume more, and to consume in order to produce more...
...of marginal tax adjustments here, enlargement of welfare benefits there, promotion of regional economic growth somewhere else...
...Gamesmanship, bluff, and power maneuvers are pressed into service by both sides...
...This is not a bad definition of exploitation, by anybody’s standards...
...All the signs are that these tendencies reinforce each other in a rising spiral if left unchecked...
...Here we see, not groups that are trying to induce us to change to a different game, but groups that are simply trying to play the existing game...
...An equally laughable aspect of the inevitability myth is the notion that the working classes are destined to move spontaneously toward socialism...
...This is (the comfortable belief that embodied in these societies is an evolutionary dynamic of progress and reform, which is carrying them through a slow but inevitable transition toward social justice and equality...
...IN TURNING TO this question, it is relevant first to remind ourselves of what a dangerous psychological encumbrance has become the central assumption of much liberal or socialdemocratic reformist thought in many Western countries...
...Considerations of this kind-along with the other personal motives I am taking for grantedcontribute to the extraordinary muffling of our political and industrial contention...
...What is there, in their experience of our society, that convinces them the wealthy and powerful classes are likely to go short...
...Used by themselves they must appear, however sincere the motives of the admonishers, to be fulfilling the function of trying to stabilize a system of organized inequality which is revealing some inconvenient symptoms now that the lower ranks mare increasingly aspiring to get in on the act...
...By such means they try to protect themselves within what is largely a competitive, acquisitive, pressure-group society...
...But what we do have, as do so many other countries of similar type, is a deeply stratified society marked by profound inequalities of power, wealth, income, status, education, and other life chances...
...This case rests on the argument that, if such societies continue trying to combine the enthronement of competitive, acquisitive, self-seeking, and socially divisive values with the present massive inequalities of distribution, the growing tendency toward group self-determination and self-assertion through power could introduce gathering social and economic instabilities from which privileged and unprivileged alike may eventually seek protection through authoritarian regimes and policies...
...Some of the reasons are not far to seek...
...It would not then be necessary for those declaring such a philosophy to affairs...
...Such a question evokes a sobering answer...
...Subordinated for the most part to work defined by the predominant statusranking as inferior, they are allocated inferior rewards and treated with inferior respect...
...Here we too often move in a world not of class, exploitation and power, but of “fairness,” of weak interpretations of “equality of opportunity,” and “Tory meanness...
...While prepared-indeed, perhaps anxious-to seek reforms which mitigate inequality, they are not attracted by radical change...
...It is a world wherein are made such extraordinary concessions to privilege as the individual’s socalled rights to buy superior shares of scarce life-giving and life-enhancing resources like 58 ALAN FOX might conceivably prove to be the situation when the really fundamental issues are joined...
...56 ALAN FOX The task here would be nothing less than that of trying to operate the technological and organizational resources of a modern economy within a social framework of institutions and values seeking to evoke some degree of trust and fellowship from participant individuals and groups...
...If so, do they believe this state of affairs to be achievable without mobilizing support for a wholesale program of public ownership and other assaults on the structural origins and supports of inequality...
...Coupled with a determined long-term campaign to level up the incomes, housing, education, and health of the large deprived groups still existing, there might just be a chance thait such a policy would provide soil for fragile shoots of trust, community, and fellowship...
...The expediency case for greater equality can most usefully be directed therefore at those who (a) value the liberal freedoms and democratic institutions of their society...
...The ideological use of language in defining current problems and union behavior would be a study in itself, and labor movement aotivists badly need help in challenging these class definitions-always assuming they would be willing to use it...
...It must surely be clear by now that advanced industrial society on the Western model generates destructive (tendencies toward predatory behavior by individuals and groups which are mounting in intensity...
...Social values urge us to produce in order to consume more, and to consume in order to produce more...
...An important element may engage in rhetoric about equality which was be a belief in the inevitability of marked in- entirely unsupported by proposals for strucequality in all human societies...
...The responsibility for any breakdown would lie with those who resisted the constitutional procedures...
...What is being studiously avoided is any searching analysis of why individuals and organized groups at all levels in our kind of society behave as they do...
...THESE ARGUMENTS must be seen, of course, alongside the many other motives which sup port our liberal-democratic institutions, such as sheer self-interest, the confusing of means with ends, and sentimental veneration of tradition...
...Because tension and distrust in our society lie far too deep to be illuminated and analyzed within the context of a philosophy of this sort, that the call for a radical analysis has to be made...
...We cannot, for example, change the criteria by which we financially reward each other in work without securing fully effective control of the distribution of rewards-which means public ownership of by far the greater proportion of economic resources...
...Here we return to the fact that large numbers of people are failing through ignorance, self-deception, or wishful thinking to grasp the nature of the society in which they live, and the significance of the tensions it is now undergoing...
...The definitions, concepts, and phrases through which is conducted the public debate on ‘all this, reflect overwhelmingly the interests and perceptions of the rich and powerful...
...This case rests on the argument that, if such societies continue trying to combine the enthronement of competitive, acquisitive, self-seeking, and socially divisive values with the present massive inequalities of distribution, the growing tendency toward group self-determination and self-assertion through power could introduce gathering social and economic instabilities from which privileged and unprivileged alike may eventually seek protection through authoritarian regimes and policies...
...They thereupon take up attitudes of wary suspicion in the protection of their own needs, and they reveal other symptoms of distrust in their work behavior...
...Here we return to the fact that large numbers of people are failing through ignorance, self-deception, or wishful thinking to grasp the nature of the society in which they live, and the significance of the tensions it is now undergoing...
...Moreover, provided their own interests are assured, their commitments #to the democratic and liberal freedoms is often, to put 50 Fox Is Equality A Necessity...
...we urgently need to ask a very different type of question: “What are the circumstances which induce members of this society to behave as they do...
...THE PRECEDING OBSERVATIONS are designed to suggest the ethical seediness of our present approach...
...What possible moral basis exists from which to condemn striking gas workers and hospital staffs when we so blandly condone other expressions of self-interest and the corruption of community and fellowship...
...that the privileged must be allowed to retain their position solely because their power would enable them to create violence and threaten things we all value...
...I am concerned here with those leaders at many different levels who-while perhaps prepared to accept under pressure that the power structure, and gross inequalities and class and group distrusts of our society are the root causes of our most serious instabilities-fear that to present the political debate in these terms would promote an escalation of conflict, which might in the end threaten liberal freedoms and valued institutions without even achieving a more equal society...
...For most egalitarians, equality is a moral concept...
...Such a question evokes a sobering answer...
...If 'this is so there would be much to be said, in my view, for having the honesty to admit that submission to the present power structure, which generates and upholds gross inequality, must be considered inevitable and permanent...
...It might be that the answers to such questions would reveal one major approach to consist of (1) a wish that inequalities could be greatly reduced...
...An equally laughable aspect of the inevitability myth is the notion that the working classes are destined to move spontaneously toward socialism...
...We inhabit a world powerfully shaped by the principles of contract, wary mutual inspection, individual and group self-seeking, and other forms of low-trust behavior...
...This is not a bad definition of exploitation, by anybody’s standards...
...The expediency case for greater equality can most usefully be directed therefore at those who (a) value the liberal freedoms and democratic institutions of their society...
...Its very organization of work is likely to convince the rank and file that in some respects, at least, management’s interests and their own are not identical...
...Such are the dynamics of advanced Western industrial society, operating on its present values, that the danger is very real of a mounting tempo of competitive acquisiltiveness, which increasingly erodes sentiments of trust, fellowship, and oompassion...
...Such admonitions could have a legitimate place if designed to shore up that structure and to stem the gathering instabilities until the creation of an equal society could get under way...
...Collectively organized, they can make themselves strong enough to challenge management effectively on certain issues, such as wages, which are of special and immediate importance to them...
...57 This might conceivably prove to be the situation when the really fundamental issues are joined...
...Doctrine and language have adapted far too well to the restraints and niceties deemed, falsely in my view, essential to the conduct of nonviolent political institutions...
...Collectively organized, they can make themselves strong enough to challenge management effectively on certain issues, such as wages, which are of special and immediate importance to them...
...If 'this is so there would be much to be said, in my view, for having the honesty to admit that submission to the present power structure, which generates and upholds gross inequality, must be considered inevitable and permanent...
...And rightly so, by some definitions of those terms...
...The lucky ones at the top of the hierarchy can often exert power for their own ends with little publicity...
...For the sake of the argument, let us examine the case that these rest upon self-imposed restraints which have to be finely judged by those operating them...
...The current grief of many middle- and upper-class worthies is easy to understand...
...language which for these reasons frightens and alienates many of those on whose votes one depends...
...One might suppose from all this moral unction that the business, financial, and professional middle and upper classes of Britain really are being forced to look round for scrag-end of mutton...
...59 the relevant institutions in politics and industry includes extending generous interpretations of the survival needs of the opposing party...
...Could these institutions take the strain of such an assault on power and privilege...
...We surely have to admit that it was not designed for such a struggle...
...I am concerned here with those leaders at many different levels who-while perhaps prepared to accept under pressure that the power structure, and gross inequalities and class and group distrusts of our society are the root causes of our most serious instabilities-fear that to present the political debate in these terms would promote an escalation of conflict, which might in the end threaten liberal freedoms and valued institutions without even achieving a more equal society...
...The longer we delay trying to actualize such potential as remains for a high-trust society, the less potential there will be to actualize...
...Such are the dynamics of advanced Western industrial society, operating on its present values, that the danger is very real of a mounting tempo of competitive acquisiltiveness, which increasingly erodes sentiments of trust, fellowship, and oompassion...
...Not only is the design and structure of work such that rank and file feel little moral adhesion to the organization (be it privately or publicly owned...
...and where speculation by British companies against sterling in times of crises is defended as “simply pursuing the company’s legitimate financial interests” (another phrase culled from a recent television discussion)-any exhortations to trade unionists to be patriotic, moderate, and responsible will remain futile, as ‘they rightly deserve to be...
...and where speculation by British companies against sterling in times of crises is defended as “simply pursuing the company’s legitimate financial interests” (another phrase culled from a recent television discussion)-any exhortations to trade unionists to be patriotic, moderate, and responsible will remain futile, as ‘they rightly deserve to be...
...This is not to say, of course, that they underrate the gravity of the symptoms...
...Low trust is highly contagious, as anyone caught in a burning theater or on a sinking ship soon discovers...
...As rising material standards * The analysis of this section can be found more fully developed in the author’s Beyond Contract: Work, Power and Trust Relations (London: Faber and Faber, 1974...
...More and more organized groups in the middle and lower ranks are discovering the name of the game, and the name of the game is the enforcement of self-interest in a low-trust society by means of power...
...Universal access to the mass media acquaints us all with various ways in which the quick, the clever, the powerful and the unscrupulous can make fortunes without incurring the tedium of hard dull work...
...They have to be embodied in (the actual structure and conduct of our institutions...
...At present there is no alternative vision which commands a widespread appeal...
...Most ominously of all, there are reasons for believing that the tempo of this spiraling distrust is as yet nowhere near its potential peak...
...a very convenient belief, of course, for those with so much of it that they rarely need make Ithemselves conspicuous by either.* Problems of the Low-Trust Society WHATEVER ABSTRACT SENTIMENTS of nationalist feeling or patriotism may be held by the participants, it is clear that this system is profoundly destructive of community and fellowship, meaning by these terms fellow feeling, mutual sympathy, and a shared consciousness of being one with another in the pleasures and pains of living...
...The mobilization of sentiments, however, is only the preliminary (but essential) precondition of further political action...
...IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...Thus most of the rank-and-file people are conscious only that top management, in seeking to control, prescribe, and program their behavior, in limiting their discretion and autonomy, and in excluding them from the important decision-making, demonstrates through its behavior (whatever it may say) that it does not trust them to pursue the purposes it favors and act by the values it prefers...
...includes conducting this “managed” conflict according to certain mutual expectations of method, behavior, and communica tion...
...More and more the employment contract and the collective agreement become jealously defined exchanges in which each side watches the other carefully for failure to discharge its obligations and seeks the maximum advantage compatible with continuance of the relationship...
...THE PRECEDING OBSERVATIONS are designed to suggest the ethical seediness of our present approach...
...57 task here would be nothing less than that of trying to operate the technological and organizational resources of a modern economy within a social framework of institutions and values seeking to evoke some degree of trust and fellowship from participant individuals and groups...
...The majority of the working population subjected to this power structure (in which private ownership or control of economic resources, including the resources of communication and social conditioning, play a predominant role) work in jobs they have no hand in designing and about whose purposes they are not consulted...
...To suppose that men soci ,lized in the doctrines and behaviors appropriate to ameliorative marginal reform will, in sufficient numbers, find their own way spontaneously at some future date to more radical analysis and solutions is, I submit, self-deception...
...Progress in this search therefore depends upon lifting our thought processes out of the mental ruts worn by history...
...53 these trends toward a universalization of pressure groups all fighting for their own hand, the destructive inflationary scramble could reach an intensity dangerously threatening to the stability of existing institutions and values...
...but (c) currently regard major inequalities as “functional necessities” for “incentives” and “progress...
...Although general welfare has been raised by industrialization and its great increase in productivity, such redistribution policies as have had effect during this century have made only limited inroads on a system of organized inequality enforced by superior power...
...In short, if socialism is about equality, equality is about the use of power, not to make marginal adjustments within the system that produces inequality, but to change the system itself...
...Whatever management says about teamwork, its design and handling of the work situation indicates that it pursues purposes it really does not expect rank-and-file employees to share...
...On the contrary, in Britain it has always been considered “inappropriate” at the higher, middle, and often even the lower levels of political activity and collective bargaining, to analyze and discuss social, political, and industrial issues in terms of class, exploitation, and power...
...And in the absence of this spirit, men turn with terrifying readiness to gestures of selfassertion and distrust...
...Indeed, the very urgency of the need to get to grips with the equality issue derives from the probability that powerful forces are constantly at work in the opposite direotion...
...The fact that so many of them clearly imagine that this settles the issue only demonstrates how far political education has still to go...
...It is language which attracts, too, the psychopaths of social and political life whose personalities feed upon conflict and confrontation...
...What moves them is a conviction that gross disparities of wealth, income, status, power, and respect between men do violence to their common humanity and create relationships between them that are profoundly inferior in quality to the best of which they are capable...
...Although the exceptionally well-favored can sometimes become sufficiently frightened to acquiesce in marginal shifts of distribution (which may of course represent useful gains for the recipients), history shows them to be powerfully resistant to changes sufficiently great to be describable as such major reordering of the social structure as is being envisaged here...
...The avoidance is practiced not only by the wealthy and privileged, whose intense reluctance to ask searching questions is in the direct proportion to their fear of the answers they would receive...
...The social instabilities, strikes, and other conflicts we are now witnessing are not gestures by groups with a vision of a nobler society which they are trying to bring to our notice...
...They thereupon take up attitudes of wary suspicion in the protection of their own needs, and they reveal other symptoms of distrust in their work behavior...
...Are we capable of learning in time...
...One can only conclude by arguing that those still prepared to entertain the larger hope must encourage restatements of the socialist critique of society which recognize the urgent need to mitigate the socially corrosive and destructive tendencies currently developing...
...Another, major reason why many active members of labor movements reject the radical analysis and its prescriptions is that they reject equality...
...One of the least attractive features of the British scene is the sight of those comfortably conscious of being among the most favored, directing moral injunctions at manual workers, urging them not to be greedy and to allow a larger share to go to the old and low-paid...
...Rising aspirations, increasing confidence, and a modicum of power are bringing one group after another into the arena...
...The problems to be discussed affect Western societies to very different degrees and, in certain respects, Britain, the pioneer of industrialization (where this article was written), displays the more ominous symptoms in a particularly marked form...
...Such a desperate gamble would only be justified, it could be said, if there were no other channels through which aggrieved groups could express their discontent...
...Bishops and stockbrokers alike are increasingly uneasy at what happens when the lower orders begin lto learn the game previously played only by relatively small and privileged groups...
...And rightly so, by some definitions of those terms...
...In Britain, dominant groups are being infiltrated not by Fabian socialists but by tough, young ex-grammar school meritocrats, astute enough to see that concessions must be made in a variety of directions but confident that, provided this is done, they and their friends will be left free to pull down some very large and very ripe plums...
...In Eritain, recent Labour party doctrine on this question has appeared to rely heavily, for the financing of welfare provisions, on the increasing yield of given rates of tax upon a rising Gross National Product...
...Some of the reasons are not far to seek...
...The second would be that we must submit to this dominance...
...But this is not true of ourselves...
...What possible moral basis exists to support such appeals...
...THESE ARGUMENTS must be seen, of course, alongside the many other motives which sup port our liberal-democratic institutions, such as sheer self-interest, the confusing of means with ends, and sentimental veneration of tradition...
...Volumes tural change...
...IT IS WITH RESPECT to this problem of presenting the program and mobilizing support for it from the mass ranks of wage-earners, lower salary-earners, and conceivably even some at higher levels, that I want to develop another central theme...
...Reinforcing these crucial distinctions are gross inequalities of income and respect, which confirm the overwhelming sense of inferior status...
...It would be pointless to pretend that we in Britain have progressed far in the search for a radical ideology and program appropriate to our own conditions...
...If the dictum that socialism means high taxation is politically damaging, it will become more rather than less so as time progresses...
...Another, major reason why many active members of labor movements reject the radical analysis and its prescriptions is that they reject equality...
...And we shall assuredly not be nerved to pursue such changes unless we provide ourselves with the support of a radical analysis to underpin radical prescriptions...
...Crucial to an appreciation of this point is the recognition that predatory behavior in the jungle is not necessarily, or even often, an expression of innate aggressiveness, but rather a condition of survival...
...Clearly the central arguments of this article stand or fall on this belief...
...Do they really want to reduce inequalities to the most minimal proportions...
...Such a desperate gamble would only be justified, it could be said, if there were no other channels through which aggrieved groups could express their discontent...
...Employees reciprocate these low-trust attitudes of top management with low-trust responses of their own...
...Only when this intellectual logjam is cleared shall we become capable of a dialogue searching for ways of combining modern technology and organization, equality, and the best of the liberaldemocratic tradition...
...Suddenly it begins to emerge, harshly and brutally, as the condition for any politically adult and stable industrial society which hopes to be cohesive, unified, and flexible enough to withstand the sttresses 0of a rapidly changing world...
...Proposals for a major transference of property to public ownership and for an onslaught on all other structural causes of inequality are often conventionally seen as deriving from an “extreme” position associated with an authoritarian political stance and contempt for the liberaldemocratic tradition...
...And here we take up again and put in its context the point made earlier-the widespread avoidance of any attempt to acknowledge and state in appropriately stark terms and with the appropriate analytical cutting edge, the power and class realities of the society we live in...
...This view of social compassion as simply a spin-off from affluence does not seem to be laying the foundation for a humane and equal society...
...Work Organization and the Social Structure IF WE EXAMINE the typical large-scale work organization where many of the negative, destructive impulses of our society originate, its low-trust features become apparent...
...It is justified by much observation that while there are always social predators who must be put down, most social aggression is a form of defense against feared encroachments by others...
...One of the least attractive features of the British scene is the sight of those comfortably conscious of being among the most favored, directing moral injunctions at manual workers, urging them not to be greedy and to allow a larger share to go to the old and low-paid...
...Volumes tural change...
...As we know perfectly well, such term, in the political context, often indicate that their user is urging us to limit ourselves to a gradual process of ameliorative reform, as against fundamental social change...
...Responsibility, mioderation, and restrain’t (if they are anything more than phrases by which a relatively weak group squeezes virtues out of its nec60 ALAN FOX relevant institutions in politics and industry includes extending generous interpretations of the survival needs of the opposing party...
...When men believe they see others gaining a defensive or offensive advantage through an assertion of power, they follow suit...
...They would raise the temperature...
...This explains the frequency of reference to that country...
...and that the most which is hoped for is ameliorative reform...
...This makes them no worse than anybody else...
...But exertion by what means...
...The ideological use of language in defining current problems and union behavior would be a study in itself, and labor movement aotivists badly need help in challenging these class definitions-always assuming they would be willing to use it...
...In such a context we might find not only the moral strength to restrain our own hand, but also the moral confidence to put down such predator groups as were still disposed to chance their arm...
...It is increasingly difficult to see this growing out of the present system of gross inequalities and systematic self-seeking, especially when this is accompanied by the kind of selfdeception and hypocrisy that defines some forms of predatory self-seeking as respectable and others as greed...
...Collectively, they try to modify the situation in their own interests, either unilaterally or in a process of bargaining in which they seek to bind management to precise rules on issues specially important to them...
...Pushed beyond endurance, they take to the streets...
...But if this political power is ever to be mobilized, it must be mobilized on the basis of a social analysis and ideology very different from that which urges us to practice moderation and restraint within the existing structure...
...Crucial to an appreciation of this point is the recognition that predatory behavior in the jungle is not necessarily, or even often, an expression of innate aggressiveness, but rather a condition of survival...
...51 mildly, something less than total...
...Although the exceptionally well-favored can sometimes become sufficiently frightened to acquiesce in marginal shifts of distribution (which may of course represent useful gains for the recipients), history shows them to be powerfully resistant to changes sufficiently great to be describable as such major reordering of the social structure as is being envisaged here...
...We refer here to trust and distrust, not as these emerge in personal, face-to-face relations, but as they are embodied in the very nature of rules, control systems, job definitions, and formal or informal practices of a wide variety of kinds...
...But for those at lower levels, the relevant question is whether the pain of limitation would be offset by (1) the knowledge that no other groups were using power or influence to evade limitation...
...The social instabilities, strikes, and other conflicts we are now witnessing are not gestures by groups with a vision of a nobler society which they are trying to bring to our notice...
...This concoption, with its basic theme of the “inevitability of gradualness” in the advance ftoward a rational and just society, and its argument that the governing and administrative classes would be increasingly infiltrated by an enlightened FabianIS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...Low-Trust Relations and Social Morality THE MORAL QUALITY of this scene, as it develops within a context of gathering inflationary pressure and government attempts to contain the upward movement in incomes, is not enhanced by the tendency of large sections of society (a ,tendency arising from a mixture of ignorance and a will to avoid uncomfortable questions and still more uncomfortable answers) to conceal from themselves the true nature of the situation and to indulge in moralizing cant and hyprocrisy...
...51 important processes of decision-making, and confined to work with which few are able to feel any real moral involvement...
...Now, in the decades ahead, many groups which are currently weak or quiescent are likely to mobilize and join the competitive struggle...
...If class necessarily implied an oversimplified picture of clear-cut confrontations involving large masses of politically conscious wage-earners facing malevolent employers, then clearly a different word would have to be chosen...
...Plunged into the miseries of open violence, so the argument might run, we would have little prospect of building the New Jerusalem...
...These can be expressed in a variety of forms...
...Should current trends continue to develop, many of them might greet it with relief...
...All the evidence is that the nearer conditions approach to equality of treatment, the easier most men find it to accept limitations to their material aspirations in a spirit of fellowship...
...quicken aspirations still further, the tempo heightens...
...If top management reveals, in the ways it structures and administers the work situation, that it distrusts the rank and file, the rank and file have the best of all reasons for distrusting top management...
...The moral structure of society is simply not standing up to the strains the universalization of rising aspirations and intensifying group pressures are bringing to bear on it...
...If class necessarily implied an oversimplified picture of clear-cut confrontations involving large masses of politically conscious wage-earners facing malevolent employers, then clearly a different word would have to be chosen...
...It must surely be clear by now that advanced industrial society on the Western model generates destructive (tendencies toward predatory behavior by individuals and groups which are mounting in intensity...
...or in any other policy that preserves those structural features of our society, which snatch us all up willy-nilly in the low-trust game...
...All the evidence is that the nearer conditions approach to equality of treatment, the easier most men find it to accept limitations to their material aspirations in a spirit of fellowship...
...Proposals for a major transference of property to public ownership and for an onslaught on all other structural causes of inequality are often conventionally seen as deriving from an “extreme” position associated with an authoritarian political stance and contempt for the liberaldemocratic tradition...
...But what we do have, as do so many other countries of similar type, is a deeply stratified society marked by profound inequalities of power, wealth, income, status, education, and other life chances...
...If we really want to mobilize a force for equality the only !time to start is now...
...There seems no adequate reason, however, for allowing our moral convictions about man and society to be blighted at the outset by such pessimistic, hypothetical considerations...
...And in the absence of this spirit, men turn with terrifying readiness to gestures of selfassertion and distrust...
...3) fear, therefore, that to present the appropriate analysis and prescriptions would alienate so much potential support as to make impossible the pursuit of limited but attainable reforms...
...We inhabit a world powerfully shaped by the principles of contract, wary mutual inspection, individual and group self-seeking, and other forms of low-trust behavior...
...But if they are not presented with it they will not be able to greet it in any way at all, and may well seek relief in a very different political program, provided this appears to offer escape from the corroding insecurities of galloping inflation...
...But exertion by what means...
...Considerations of this kind-along with the other personal motives I am taking for grantedcontribute to the extraordinary muffling of our political and industrial contention...
...It would not then be necessary for those declaring such a philosophy to affairs...
...The first would be that the liberal-democratic tradition of constitutional democracy is capable of producing only marginal reforms-an extremely grave conclusion for those with compelling convictions which range much further...
...No longer can we rest content with a view of equality as the terminal point in a slow, evolutionary journey which mercifully will long last out our own time...
...Such are the persuasive cynicisms of a low-trust, class society...
...The fact that so many of them clearly imagine that this settles the issue only demonstrates how far political education has still to go...
...It is of little consequence whether the ends relate to private profit, economic efficiency, or some remote and meaningless abstraction called “the public interest” (often impertinently defined to exclude them...
...Along with this go long-standing apprehensions that once such a bandwagon were to begin rolling, we should find many jumping on it whose motivations and purposes bore little resemblance to our own...
...in reforming lthe procedures of collective bargaining...
...Others may remain unmoved by such propositions and, especially if comfortably placed themselves, may derive much positive satisfaction from, and offer vehement approval of, those inequalities which seem to their fellows so offensive...
...But by the same token, it could be argued, reformist governments must recognize the same danger...
...We see here the moneyed classes-the expensive lawyers, the stockbrokers, the top executives, the property speculators, the wheeler-dealers of the City-sadly shaking itheir heads at this greedy refusal of the affluent wage-earners ‘to allow their less fortunate brethren to catch UP...
...What possible moral basis exists to support such appeals...
...They would raise the temperature...
...The responsibility for any breakdown would lie with those who resisted the constitutional procedures...
...59 and health treatment for himself and his family...
...At present there is no alternative vision which commands a widespread appeal...
...The radical solution will only be able to recruit talent and energy if it can liberate the debate from these historically crealted constraints...
...One thing is, in my view, certain...
...And the name of Ithis game is equality...
...In the circumstances of the present and future, they are likely to learn fast...
...The article is written in the belief that the message is in fact worth pondering throughout the Western world...
...To argue that the pursuit of greater equality must be ,abandoned because in the last resort the wealthy and the privileged would offer violent resistance to the majority political will, as constitutionally defined, would present two implications of major importance...
...Major sections of the American trade union movement are now aotively displaying all these trends...
...In doing so, they provide the same cue for action by others, and thus the downward spiral of distrust is reinforced...
...This becomes most obvious when group pressures for economic ends create or aggravate massive problems of costs and prices, currency stability, the export trade, and other economic and social variables...
...Bishops and stockbrokers alike are increasingly uneasy at what happens when the lower orders begin lto learn the game previously played only by relatively small and privileged groups...
...In short, if socialism is about equality, equality is about the use of power, not to make marginal adjustments within the system that produces inequality, but to change the system itself...
...It is of little consequence whether the ends relate to private profit, economic efficiency, or some remote and meaningless abstraction called “the public interest” (often impertinently defined to exclude them...
...generate powerful emotions not easily banked down...
...The absence of any cutting edge is also noticeable among leaders of the labor movement...
...They are manifestly not being nourished by our present situation of cumulative low trust...
...However, I don’t think we need go into the higher morality oE all this . . .” Eminent Interviewer (hurriedly) : “No, no, of course not . . .” No, indeed, let us not go into the higher morality of it all...
...Incomes policy without the higher morality...
...Let us imagine, it might be said, a rich man’s government which extorts such privileges for its friends and imposes such oppressive deprivations upon the rest that constitutional democracy comes to appear, to the latter, no longer worth supporting...
...What Is to Be Done...
...For this reason we cannot begin too soon on a far more intensive mobilization campaign...
...55 Economist (smiling): “Perhaps the government ought to have been cleverer about prices...
...Coupled with a determined long-term campaign to level up the incomes, housing, education, and health of the large deprived groups still existing, there might just be a chance thait such a policy would provide soil for fragile shoots of trust, community, and fellowship...
...It is language which attracts, too, the psychopaths of social and political life whose personalities feed upon conflict and confrontation...
...Rarely are they unjustified...
...Between these two groups there is little likelihood of a rational moral discourse through which egalitarians might hope to persuade the rest to adopt more generous-spirited conceptions of how men could and ought to live together...
...For most egalitarians, equality is a moral concept...
...We see here the moneyed classes-the expensive lawyers, the stockbrokers, the top executives, the property speculators, the wheeler-dealers of the City-sadly shaking itheir heads at this greedy refusal of the affluent wage-earners ‘to allow their less fortunate brethren to catch UP...
...There is, after all, no immutable political logic which binds wholesale public ownership and the abolition of wealth and privilege with totalitarian sup pression of political and trade-union freedoms...
...It would be pointless to pretend that we in Britain have progressed far in the search for a radical ideology and program appropriate to our own conditions...
...It is thus becoming possible to turn the conventional argument on its head...
...I believe it is not self-evidently absurd to suggest that sufficient numbers of the lower and middle ranks of industrial societies could be brought-given leadership and great educative effort-to respond to such a program...
...The definitions, concepts, and phrases through which is conducted the public debate on ‘all this, reflect overwhelmingly the interests and perceptions of the rich and powerful...
...where clever young men in ithe City, for example, can make a fortune in a few months by simply buying, stripping, and selling companies...
...All these, it might be said, would threaten the smooth working of the institutions on which we set such value...
...that the privileged must be allowed to retain their position solely because their power would enable them to create violence and threaten things we all value...
...Major sections of the American trade union movement are now aotively displaying all these trends...
...Specialists of other societies must decide how far these lessons have a wider reference...
...Along with this go long-standing apprehensions that once such a bandwagon were to begin rolling, we should find many jumping on it whose motivations and purposes bore little resemblance to our own...
...What moves them is a conviction that gross disparities of wealth, income, status, power, and respect between men do violence to their common humanity and create relationships between them that are profoundly inferior in quality to the best of which they are capable...
...And we shall assuredly not be nerved to pursue such changes unless we provide ourselves with the support of a radical analysis to underpin radical prescriptions...
...Only a barbarian despises liberal freedoms, and only a fool lightly puts at hazard their associated institutions such as constitutional democracy, collective bargaining, “due process” and the rule of law...
...We should proceed, until events persuade us otherwise, on the assumption that if we proved able to convince enough people that in order to build a cohesive and stable society we must abolish wealth and privilege, we could exert this power through nonviolent institutions to secure our ends...
...Although general welfare has been raised by industrialization and its great increase in productivity, such redistribution policies as have had effect during this century have made only limited inroads on a system of organized inequality enforced by superior power...
...Their use of power goes relatively unremarked...
...The problems to be discussed affect Western societies to very different degrees and, in certain respects, Britain, the pioneer of industrialization (where this article was written), displays the more ominous symptoms in a particularly marked form...
...Conversely, support for that tradition is associated with a political stance which urges “responsibility,” “moderation,” and “restraint...
...Have social inventiveness and creativity so totally deserted us that we must remain transfixed in the political postures which developed out of the mutual hatreds and distrusts among the Left during the 1920s and O OS...
...In any case, what determines people’s behavior in this context is what they believe is happening elsewhere, and it is characteristic of lowtrust situations that participants believe the worst...
...In some cases their strength is sufficient to give them a negative veto power over certain management preferences and even certain government preferences...
...Since it seemed of interest to non-British readers as well, we asked the author to reduce the number of local English references and adapt it for our readers, This was done before the recent Labour victory.-ED...
...Those less fortunate at the middle and lower ranks are obliged to combine and fight for their own hand collectively, making themselves visible and noisy and thereby attracting attention from those who believe-or wish others .to believethat only when power is visible and noisy is it being used...
...and (4) the decision that wisdom dictates continuance of the social-democratic or liberal stance pursued hitherto...
...More and more organized groups in the middle and lower ranks are discovering the name of the game, and the name of the game is the enforcement of self-interest in a low-trust society by means of power...
...Thus the egalitarian can argue, along lines to be sketched out in this article, that there is need for advanced industrial societies of the Western democratic type to move toward far greater equality if they hope to preserve their stability on the basis of democratic institutions, constitutional procedures, “due process,” and what are usually referred to as the liberal freedoms...
...that socialism and equality are simply not on the agenda...
...2) a profound pessimism about the chances of mobilizing Ithe political support for this aim...
...Evils there are, but they do not wholly blacken the scene...
...Instead of such questions as “How can we compel the members of this or ithat group to behave as we want them to behave...
...Such associations contribute to a situation in which any social analysis in terms of class, exploitation and power arouses automatic fear and rejection even among those whose own interests stand to benefit...
...The British version of this delusion received an early formulation through some of the prominent pioneers of the Fabian Society in late Victorian times (when paradoxically the argumenlt could be made to seem more plausible...
...This is the logic for arguing, then, that the health and perhaps even the survival of the liberal-democratic tradition rests upon a determined and planned cultivation of high trust based on equality, and that this requires the use of power to change the economic, educational, and social mechanisms and institutions of inequality...
...A craving for the security of authoritarian solutions might become widespread...
...We are back to the incubus of gradualism...
...In such a context we might find not only the moral strength to restrain our own hand, but also the moral confidence to put down such predator groups as were still disposed to chance their arm...
...But this is not true of ourselves...
...Are we capable of learning in time...
...go without the weekly bottle of Tio Pepe...
...Given IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...But this is only part of the answer...
...The moral structure of society is simply not standing up to the strains the universalization of rising aspirations and intensifying group pressures are bringing to bear on it...
...but they have also brought us a social system characterized by distrust...
...61 its part for some...
...What possible moral basis exists from which to condemn striking gas workers and hospital staffs when we so blandly condone other expressions of self-interest and the corruption of community and fellowship...
...56 ALAN FOX elite, fostered a belief that forces were in motion which would carry us irresistibly on a leisurely and civilized journey toward whatever pattern of socialism was required by an efficient industrial society (socialism was to be nothing if not efficient...
...It represents a sad state of socialist political awareness and socialist political education...
...To argue that the pursuit of greater equality must be ,abandoned because in the last resort the wealthy and the privileged would offer violent resistance to the majority political will, as constitutionally defined, would present two implications of major importance...
...As rising material standards * The analysis of this section can be found more fully developed in the author’s Beyond Contract: Work, Power and Trust Relations (London: Faber and Faber, 1974...
...No longer can we rest content with a view of equality as the terminal point in a slow, evolutionary journey which mercifully will long last out our own time...
...We are back to the incubus of gradualism...
...In other words, many rankand-file employees experience their work situation as an elaborate system of institutionalized distrust...
...For examples we may turn again to the British scene...
...The second would be that we must submit to this dominance...
...Nevertheless, in terms of individual and group commitment to, and moral involvement in, the wider society, we could hope to make it possible for us all to feel some responsible concern for the cohesion and integrity of our common life...
...It is justified by much observation that while there are always social predators who must be put down, most social aggression is a form of defense against feared encroachments by others...
...Their privileges therefore become the price they extort from the rest of us for 'avoiding the miseries of violent conflict...
...The absence of any cutting edge is also noticeable among leaders of the labor movement...
...Evils there are, but they do not wholly blacken the scene...
...that socialism and equality are simply not on the agenda...
...Western society contains within itself destructive tendencies still a long way short of their full development...
...There is no reason to stress only self-interest, though no doubt that plays IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...If so, what are these alternative methods...
...Every group is convinced that other groups are somehow managing to protect themselves eff ectively-the classic distrust situation-and, precisely because it feels unable to entrust its fortunes to company or government decision-makers, feels driven to enforce its own claims by whatever means it can...
...but they have also brought us a social system characterized by distrust...
...And here we take up again and put in its context the point made earlier-the widespread avoidance of any attempt to acknowledge and state in appropriately stark terms and with the appropriate analytical cutting edge, the power and class realities of the society we live in...
...Do they really want to reduce inequalities to the most minimal proportions...
...They have to be embodied in (the actual structure and conduct of our institutions...
...There seems no adequate reason, however, for allowing our moral convictions about man and society to be blighted at the outset by such pessimistic, hypothetical considerations...
...And this process of cherishing IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...The aggravation of inflation by a multiplicity of organized groups each seeking to protect itself is the supreme expression of the lowtrust society, and could culminate in disorder so acute as to promote widespread readiness to submit to aulthoritarian rule...
...I believe we shall not be able to maintain our own resolve, nor inspire resolve in others, without the support of a political analysis and a language which cuts more deeply and incisively than that currently found in most publications of social-democratic or liberal movements...
...Such are the persuasive cynicisms of a low-trust, class society...
...language which for these reasons frightens and alienates many of those on whose votes one depends...
...Better by far to cherish those institutions through which we can gradually introduce reforms which, while not achieving the social millennium, are valued by their recipients, meanwhile preserving the liberal decencies and restraints...
...Individually, men become indifferent in their work performance, behaving largely without personal commitment and involvement...
...It is a game that has always been practiced by small, dominant ruling groups and classes, but it is now spreading fast...
...62 ALAN FOX part for some...
...A Radical Ideology for a Radical Program...
...For by the canons of liberal-democratic institutions as we operate them, this is dangerous language, inflammatory language stirring primitive resentments and aggressions, which it is precisely the business of liberal institutions to civilize and control...
...in reforming lthe procedures of collective bargaining...
...In the face of this, it is essential to promote a wider understanding that no such egalitarian forces are automatically generated within advanced industrial societies...
...includes not pushing them beyond a certain point...
...If exploitation could only imply the oppression of a suffering proletariat, then modifications would be required here too, though not quite as many and drastic ones as is often supposed...
...Politicians of all persuasions could be written on the role of self-fulfilling are said to be uneasy at the low public repute prophecies of this kind, yhich themselves of their occupation...
...In the circumstances of the present and future, they are likely to learn fast...
...The bulk of rank-and-file members (wage-earners and lower salary-earners alike) are subjected to principles of extreme division of labor, which leave them subordinated to hierarchical control and discipline, excluded from the IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...What Is to Be Done...
...a very convenient belief, of course, for those with so much of it that they rarely need make Ithemselves conspicuous by either.* Problems of the Low-Trust Society WHATEVER ABSTRACT SENTIMENTS of nationalist feeling or patriotism may be held by the participants, it is clear that this system is profoundly destructive of community and fellowship, meaning by these terms fellow feeling, mutual sympathy, and a shared consciousness of being one with another in the pleasures and pains of living...
...But for those at lower levels, the relevant question is whether the pain of limitation would be offset by (1) the knowledge that no other groups were using power or influence to evade limitation...
...These are serious considerations...
...Massive inequalities of property ownership are forever generating massive inequalities of income...
...b) would lose little (perhaps nothing) personally by a more egalitarian structure...
...If this appearance is to be avoided, then the radical perspective must be an accompaniment...
...Now, in the decades ahead, many groups which are currently weak or quiescent are likely to mobilize and join the competitive struggle...
...but also the design and struoture of the wider society is such that they are unable to bring any spirit of community and moral involvement to that either...
...IN TURNING TO this question, it is relevant first to remind ourselves of what a dangerous psychological encumbrance has become the central assumption of much liberal or socialdemocratic reformist thought in many Western countries...
...In doing so, they provide the same cue for action by others, and thus the downward spiral of distrust is reinforced...
...There is no reason to stress only self-interest, though no doubt that plays IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...61 are qualities nourished only by hightrust situations...
...Thus the egalitarian can argue, along lines to be sketched out in this article, that there is need for advanced industrial societies of the Western democratic type to move toward far greater equality if they hope to preserve their stability on the basis of democratic institutions, constitutional procedures, “due process,” and what are usually referred to as the liberal freedoms...
...Fortunately Western societies have to hand a set of institutions for the nonviolent transfer and application of political power...
...The mobilization of sentiments, however, is only the preliminary (but essential) precondition of further political action...
...Not only is justice not done, it is also seen to be not done...
...Thus the urgency of the problem derives from the fact that, in seeking to mobilize these sentiments to promote a humane and equal society, we are trying to mobilize what already threatens to become a wasting asset...
...What are the grounds for believing that equality-the contracting of the extremes of wealth, income, and privileges within narrow limits-would sufficiently mitigate the acquisitive group self-seeking which so disfigures our society...
...If so, what are these alternative methods...
...Pushed beyond endurance, they take to the streets...
...Can a philosophy of this kind take the weight of a political struggle which would undoubtedly be of a major order...
...Such admonitions could have a legitimate place if designed to shore up that structure and to stem the gathering instabilities until the creation of an equal society could get under way...
...The lucky ones at the top of the hierarchy can often exert power for their own ends with little publicity...
...It is called constitutional democracy...
...but (c) currently regard major inequalities as “functional necessities” for “incentives” and “progress...
...All these, it might be said, would threaten the smooth working of the institutions on which we set such value...
...If the solution is not to be found in moral diatribes, neither is it to be found in attempts at disciplinary or repressive legislation...
...We cannot, for example, change the criteria by which we financially reward each other in work without securing fully effective control of the distribution of rewards-which means public ownership of by far the greater proportion of economic resources...
...And a central argument of this article is that it represents a sad state of affairs for those who want to pursue socialist equality while retaining what is best of the liberal-democratic ‘tradition...
...What is there, in their experience of our society, that convinces them the wealthy and powerful classes are likely to go short...
...An appropriate term might be “institutionalized trust...
...But if they are not presented with it they will not be able to greet it in any way at all, and may well seek relief in a very different political program, provided this appears to offer escape from the corroding insecurities of galloping inflation...
...Should current trends continue to develop, many of them might greet it with relief...
...Universal access to the mass media acquaints us all with various ways in which the quick, the clever, the powerful and the unscrupulous can make fortunes without incurring the tedium of hard dull work...
...Subsequent piecemeal social reforms and the overall enhancement of economic welfare have reinforced this by creating a widespread delusion that Britain is engaged in a longterm progress toward an egalitarian society...
...In a recent television current-aff airs program we heard: Eminent Interviewer (doubtfully) : “Perhaps given rising prices the lower-paid gas workers who havc just come out on strike have a bit of a point when they see property speculation deals and all that . . . ?” 54 ALAN FOX LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED Eminent Economist (smiling): “Perhaps the government ought to have been cleverer about prices...
...Their use of power goes relatively unremarked...
...and that the most which is hoped for is ameliorative reform...
...and (3) the discovery that a social contract negotiated with trade unions and other relevant groups, on a relatively high-trust basis, offered a degree of stability which made planned economic growth possible without inflation...
...Such is their position in the division of labor that this expresses the nature of their largely depersonalized and dehumanized relationship with the employing body...
...It represents a sad state of socialist political awareness and socialist political education...
...Responsibility, mioderation, and restrain’t (if they are anything more than phrases by which a relatively weak group squeezes virtues out of its nec60 ALAN FOX essity) are qualities nourished only by hightrust situations...
...It is thus becoming possible to turn the conventional argument on its head...
...Doctrine and language have adapted far too well to the restraints and niceties deemed, falsely in my view, essential to the conduct of nonviolent political institutions...
...Work Organization and the Social Structure IF WE EXAMINE the typical large-scale work organization where many of the negative, destructive impulses of our society originate, its low-trust features become apparent...
...These will possibly surprise some readers who deduce from the fact that Britain is a class-ridden society that it engages in classridden political debate and industrial bargaining...
...If top management reveals, in the ways it structures and administers the work situation, that it distrusts the rank and file, the rank and file have the best of all reasons for distrusting top management...
...The issue is whether these mutually destructive pressures of selfdefense, in which we are all caught up, drive us to desperate remedies before we have learned how to control them...
...Can a philosophy of this kind take the weight of a political struggle which would undoubtedly be of a major order...
...In this they express a general tendency among men everywhere to return trust for Crust, distrust for distrust...
...It will only be found, if at all, by changing to a different game...
...or in any other policy that preserves those structural features of our society, which snatch us all up willy-nilly in the low-trust game...
...Along with these ‘trends go increasing political resistance to taxation ‘and a search for self-justifying excuses for this resistance, which take the form of hatred and contempt for the supposed laziness and moral weakness of welfare recipients...
...But while the egalitarian may make little headway through moral disputation, evidence is accumulating which enables him to argue the equality case on grounds of practical expediency, and since inegalitarians usually pride themselves on their hard-headed realism, there may be gains made from this approach...
...It is increasingly difficult to see this growing out of the present system of gross inequalities and systematic self-seeking, especially when this is accompanied by the kind of selfdeception and hypocrisy that defines some forms of predatory self-seeking as respectable and others as greed...
...but also the design and struoture of the wider society is such that they are unable to bring any spirit of community and moral involvement to that either...
...Instead of such questions as “How can we compel the members of this or ithat group to behave as we want them to behave...
...But while the egalitarian may make little headway through moral disputation, evidence is accumulating which enables him to argue the equality case on grounds of practical expediency, and since inegalitarians usually pride themselves on their hard-headed realism, there may be gains made from this approach...
...a game in which gross disparities of wealth, income, and status are simply made impossible...
...However, I don’t think we need go into the higher morality oE all this . . .” Eminent Interviewer (hurriedly) : “No, no, of course not . . .” No, indeed, let us not go into the higher morality of it all...
...To suppose that men soci ,lized in the doctrines and behaviors appropriate to ameliorative marginal reform will, in sufficient numbers, find their own way spontaneously at some future date to more radical analysis and solutions is, I submit, self-deception...
...But if they chose size, hierarchy, and low-discretion work (insofar as these were required for material abundance), we could not expect the work organization as such to offer a very high-grade pattern of human association...
...This is the logic for arguing, then, that the health and perhaps even the survival of the liberal-democratic tradition rests upon a determined and planned cultivation of high trust based on equality, and that this requires the use of power to change the economic, educational, and social mechanisms and institutions of inequality...
...The bulk of rank-and-file members (wage-earners and lower salary-earners alike) are subjected to principles of extreme division of labor, which leave them subordinated to hierarchical control and discipline, excluded from the IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...The aggravation of inflation by a multiplicity of organized groups each seeking to protect itself is the supreme expression of the lowtrust society, and could culminate in disorder so acute as to promote widespread readiness to submit to aulthoritarian rule...
...A craving for the security of authoritarian solutions might become widespread...
...For the sake of the argument, let us examine the case that these rest upon self-imposed restraints which have to be finely judged by those operating them...
...By such means they try to protect themselves within what is largely a competitive, acquisitive, pressure-group society...
...The other arguments are far more interesting...
...But to serve such a purpose they would have to be presented as simply temporary expedients, and be combined with a presentation of the radical perspective and its prescriptions...
...In terms of fellowship and communi,ty, this is a picture of moral impoverishment, which makes selfrestraint seem a futile gesture which will only be swallowed up in the rat race practiced by the rest...
...If so, do they believe this state of affairs to be achievable without mobilizing support for a wholesale program of public ownership and other assaults on the structural origins and supports of inequality...
...We can gain clues to this low-trust quality by focusing for a moment on the type of work situation which tends, along with other social mechanisms, to generate it...
...It is called constitutional democracy...
...These can be expressed in a variety of forms...
...Western society contains within itself destructive tendencies still a long way short of their full development...
...2) the demonstration that limitation was part of an overall long-term plan to extinguish the gap of privilege and inequality between rich and poor-a plan also covering education, health, housing, and old age, as well as wealth and income...
...tion shared by many laymen on this issue it is that honesty is often underrated as a Beliefs & Issues: Need for Clarification political asset by those active in public I HAVE TRIED to sketch here the bare bones of one kind of radical analysis and set of prescriptions...
...In Britain the air is thick with jeremiads predicting social disaster unless the trade unions (or the “other” unions-never one’s own) can be taught sense and social responsibility...
...They are manifestly not being nourished by our present situation of cumulative low trust...
...And a central argument of this article is that it represents a sad state of affairs for those who want to pursue socialist equality while retaining what is best of the liberal-democratic ‘tradition...
...If they do not want an equal high-trust society, how do they see the present grossly unequal, low-trust version as coping with the strains generated by our competitive, acquisitive institutions and values...
...tion shared by many laymen on this issue it is that honesty is often underrated as a Beliefs & Issues: Need for Clarification political asset by those active in public I HAVE TRIED to sketch here the bare bones of one kind of radical analysis and set of prescriptions...
...As we know perfectly well, such term, in the political context, often indicate that their user is urging us to limit ourselves to a gradual process of ameliorative reform, as against fundamental social change...
...Massive inequalities of property ownership are forever generating massive inequalities of income...
...It would be a great mistake, in other words, to see present troubles as the highest point of a tide destined to ebb and afflict us no more...
...In the face of this, it is essential to promote a wider understanding that no such egalitarian forces are automatically generated within advanced industrial societies...
...In some cases their strength is sufficient to give them a negative veto power over certain management preferences and even certain government preferences...
...An important element may engage in rhetoric about equality which was be a belief in the inevitability of marked in- entirely unsupported by proposals for strucequality in all human societies...
...This becomes most obvious when group pressures for economic ends create or aggravate massive problems of costs and prices, currency stability, the export trade, and other economic and social variables...
...But if this political power is ever to be mobilized, it must be mobilized on the basis of a social analysis and ideology very different from that which urges us to practice moderation and restraint within the existing structure...
...go without the weekly bottle of Tio Pepe...
...2) a profound pessimism about the chances of mobilizing Ithe political support for this aim...
...This makes them no worse than anybody else...
...The radical solution will only be able to recruit talent and energy if it can liberate the debate from these historically crealted constraints...
...Most people in such situations experience, in greater or lesser degree, a sense of being used as inferiorly treated means in the service of ends determined by superiorly treated management-ends about which they have not been consulted...
...Bargaining is essentially a low-trust activity for a low-trust situation...
...Low trust is highly contagious, as anyone caught in a burning theater or on a sinking ship soon discovers...
...Most ominously of all, there are reasons for believing that the tempo of this spiraling distrust is as yet nowhere near its potential peak...
...If there is one convicproduce the very outcome they predict...
...While prepared-indeed, perhaps anxious-to seek reforms which mitigate inequality, they are not attracted by radical change...
...Indeed, we cannot do without it, for it is a crucial resource in mobilizing the necessary sentiments...
...In this they express a general tendency among men everywhere to return trust for Crust, distrust for distrust...
...Temporary slackenings of tempo there will undoubtedly be, but it is plausible to argue that each renewal is likely to bring sharper problems than before...
...If the solution is not to be found in moral diatribes, neither is it to be found in attempts at disciplinary or repressive legislation...
...One can only conclude by arguing that those still prepared to entertain the larger hope must encourage restatements of the socialist critique of society which recognize the urgent need to mitigate the socially corrosive and destructive tendencies currently developing...
...If this appearance is to be avoided, then the radical perspective must be an accompaniment...
...It would be a great mistake, in other words, to see present troubles as the highest point of a tide destined to ebb and afflict us no more...
...Have social inventiveness and creativity so totally deserted us that we must remain transfixed in the political postures which developed out of the mutual hatreds and distrusts among the Left during the 1920s and O OS...
...Pressed by legislation which, however immaculately processed through parliamentary protocol, bore intolerably upon their property, income, and status, the favored classes would likewise question the worthwhileness to them of constitutional procedures and would resort to force, carrying with them, no doubt, the police and armed services under the banner of “preserving the national heriltage...
...It will only be found, if at all, by changing to a different game...
...Industrialization and commercialization-with their extreme differentiation of functions, their precise definitions of obligations, and ‘their principles of self-interest pursued through 52 ALAN FOX processes of decision-making, and confined to work with which few are able to feel any real moral involvement...
...Since existing institutions and mechanisms are underpinned by a deeply entrenched power structure, strong counterpower will be needed to change them...
...Specialists of other societies must decide how far these lessons have a wider reference...
...If, of course, men should come to show themselves prepared to forgo some margin of material benefit in order to enjoy the intrinsic rewards derivable from smallerscale operations, reduction of hierarchy, and high-discretion work, this would be a different matter...
...They help to account, I believe, for the widespread tacit agreement between political and industrial enemies that certain types of analysis, certain types of argument, certain types of language, must not be used...
...Rarely are they unjustified...
...If they do not want an equal high-trust society, how do they see the present grossly unequal, low-trust version as coping with the strains generated by our competitive, acquisitive institutions and values...
...Between these two groups there is little likelihood of a rational moral discourse through which egalitarians might hope to persuade the rest to adopt more generous-spirited conceptions of how men could and ought to live together...
...Our argument suggests that in a competitive low-trust society, where everything from which a profit can be made is up for grabs...
...This view of social compassion as simply a spin-off from affluence does not seem to be laying the foundation for a humane and equal society...
...This is not to say, of course, that they underrate the gravity of the symptoms...
...I have argued that control requires the mobilization of a majority behind a new watchword for a new game...
...Given the division of labor and technology of most work organizations (not open to major change without considerable economic cost), it is doubtful if rank-and-file employees will ever feel any substantial intrinsic involvement and high trust attitudes in their immediate work tasks...
...The symbol of their relationship with top management is the employment contract it offers them, laying down its precise and specific terms...
...The current grief of many middle- and upper-class worthies is easy to understand...
...The first would be that the liberal-democratic tradition of constitutional democracy is capable of producing only marginal reforms-an extremely grave conclusion for those with compelling convictions which range much further...
...Politicians of all persuasions could be written on the role of self-fulfilling are said to be uneasy at the low public repute prophecies of this kind, yhich themselves of their occupation...
...We should proceed, until events persuade us otherwise, on the assumption that if we proved able to convince enough people that in order to build a cohesive and stable society we must abolish wealth and privilege, we could exert this power through nonviolent institutions to secure our ends...
...stimulate feelings and aspirations among one’s own rank and file which would strengthen rival leaders or movements not easily contained...
...Why should they-in a low-trust society which teaches them, as it teaches everyone else, to practice acquisitive selfassertion through power...
...I believe we shall not be able to maintain our own resolve, nor inspire resolve in others, without the support of a political analysis and a language which cuts more deeply and incisively than that currently found in most publications of social-democratic or liberal movements...
...But it also makes them no better...
...Subsequent piecemeal social reforms and the overall enhancement of economic welfare have reinforced this by creating a widespread delusion that Britain is engaged in a longterm progress toward an egalitarian society...
...Indeed, we cannot do without it, for it is a crucial resource in mobilizing the necessary sentiments...
...These exhortations are tantamount to appeals to behave in a high-trust manner in a low-trust context...
...Reinforcing these crucial distinctions are gross inequalities of income and respect, which confirm the overwhelming sense of inferior status...
...It is obvious enough, of course, why recent years have evoked a specially rich crop of this kind...
...One might suppose from all this moral unction that the business, financial, and professional middle and upper classes of Britain really are being forced to look round for scrag-end of mutton...
...includes not pushing them beyond a certain point...
...This notion Ithat it is the betteroff manual workers who are uniquely responsi’ble for the plight of the old and low-paid is becoming increasingly popular...
...Those less fortunate at the middle and lower ranks are obliged to combine and fight for their own hand collectively, making themselves visible and noisy and thereby attracting attention from those who believe-or wish others .to believethat only when power is visible and noisy is it being used...
...What is now in doubt, however, is whether such a process can reverse the slide into that extreme low-trust vortex which threatens the tradition we seek to preserve...
...Such associations contribute to a situation in which any social analysis in terms of class, exploitation and power arouses automatic fear and rejection even among those whose own interests stand to benefit...
...Of course, this is the point in the argument when economists produce their shop-worn clichC calculations showing that if all income over a certain amount were confiscated and redistributed, average income would increase by only a small margin...
...It is a world of the more or less...
...In Britain the air is thick with jeremiads predicting social disaster unless the trade unions (or the “other” unions-never one’s own) can be taught sense and social responsibility...
...Most people in such situations experience, in greater or lesser degree, a sense of being used as inferiorly treated means in the service of ends determined by superiorly treated management-ends about which they have not been consulted...
...The majority of the working population subjected to this power structure (in which private ownership or control of economic resources, including the resources of communication and social conditioning, play a predominant role) work in jobs they have no hand in designing and about whose purposes they are not consulted...
...Better by far to cherish those institutions through which we can gradually introduce reforms which, while not achieving the social millennium, are valued by their recipients, meanwhile preserving the liberal decencies and restraints...
...In other words, many rankand-file employees experience their work situation as an elaborate system of institutionalized distrust...
...Progress in this search therefore depends upon lifting our thought processes out of the mental ruts worn by history...
...And the name of Ithis game is equality...
...An appropriate term might be “institutionalized trust...
...But this is only part of the answer...
...Indeed, the very urgency of the need to get to grips with the equality issue derives from the probability that powerful forces are constantly at work in the opposite direotion...
...Private education and private medicine are growth industries in Britain...
...This organizational situation has been analyzed at some length, because in certain respects it represents in microcosm what goes on in the wider society...
...IS EQUALITY NECESSARY...
...we urgently need to ask a very different type of question: “What are the circumstances which induce members of this society to behave as they do...
...All this is highly convenient for those who derive wealth, power, and privilege from the existing order...
...stimulate feelings and aspirations among one’s own rank and file which would strengthen rival leaders or movements not easily contained...
...Private education and private medicine are growth industries in Britain...
...Suddenly it begins to emerge, harshly and brutally, as the condition for any politically adult and stable industrial society which hopes to be cohesive, unified, and flexible enough to withstand the sttresses 0of a rapidly changing world...
...What are the grounds for believing that equality-the contracting of the extremes of wealth, income, and privileges within narrow limits-would sufficiently mitigate the acquisitive group self-seeking which so disfigures our society...
...55 thinking elite, fostered a belief that forces were in motion which would carry us irresistibly on a leisurely and civilized journey toward whatever pattern of socialism was required by an efficient industrial society (socialism was to be nothing if not efficient...
...Each successive decade of even such abundance as they are likely to enjoy will only, in the context of our present social values, confirm Ithem, as it has already confirmed the middle and upper classes, in the delights of private affluence and privileged access to superior education and health...
...Obviously for those at the top of the pile, the situation we are contemplating represents nothing but loss, and they could be expected to react accordingly...
...But if they chose size, hierarchy, and low-discretion work (insofar as these were required for material abundance), we could not expect the work organization as such to offer a very high-grade pattern of human association...
...In any case, what determines people’s behavior in this context is what they believe is happening elsewhere, and it is characteristic of lowtrust situations that participants believe the worst...
...But it also makes them no better...
...For this reason we cannot begin too soon on a far more intensive mobilization campaign...
...Obviously for those at the top of the pile, the situation we are contemplating represents nothing but loss, and they could be expected to react accordingly...
...Employees reciprocate these low-trust attitudes of top management with low-trust responses of their own...
...Industrialization and commercialization-with their extreme differentiation of functions, their precise definitions of obligations, and ‘their principles of self-interest pursued through 52 ALAN FOX the exercise of power-have brought most of us widely varying degrees of material benefit...
...In Britain, dominant groups are being infiltrated not by Fabian socialists but by tough, young ex-grammar school meritocrats, astute enough to see that concessions must be made in a variety of directions but confident that, provided this is done, they and their friends will be left free to pull down some very large and very ripe plums...
...But by the same token, it could be argued, reformist governments must recognize the same danger...
...What is now in doubt, however, is whether such a process can reverse the slide into that extreme low-trust vortex which threatens the tradition we seek to preserve...
...Conversely, support for that tradition is associated with a political stance which urges “responsibility,” “moderation,” and “restraint...
...It is a world wherein are made such extraordinary concessions to privilege as the individual’s socalled rights to buy superior shares of scarce life-giving and life-enhancing resources like 58 ALAN FOX education and health treatment for himself and his family...
...It is a world of the more or less...
...Pressed by legislation which, however immaculately processed through parliamentary protocol, bore intolerably upon their property, income, and status, the favored classes would likewise question the worthwhileness to them of constitutional procedures and would resort to force, carrying with them, no doubt, the police and armed services under the banner of “preserving the national heriltage...
...Attitudes and values on such matters are normally shaped by far more complex and subtle patterns of influence than direct exchanges of argument alone, though these have their place in the process, even if only for their impact upon those whose opinions are not yet irrevocably formed...
...Individually, men become indifferent in their work performance, behaving largely without personal commitment and involvement...
...Whatever management says about teamwork, its design and handling of the work situation indicates that it pursues purposes it really does not expect rank-and-file employees to share...
...cancel that holiday in the Algarve...
...It is vital to the analysis to recognize that there are still many groups at present lacking the aspirations and confidence...
...Used by themselves they must appear, however sincere the motives of the admonishers, to be fulfilling the function of trying to stabilize a system of organized inequality which is revealing some inconvenient symptoms now that the lower ranks mare increasingly aspiring to get in on the act...
...Here we see, not groups that are trying to induce us to change to a different game, but groups that are simply trying to play the existing game...
...The issue is whether these mutually destructive pressures of selfdefense, in which we are all caught up, drive us to desperate remedies before we have learned how to control them...
...If, then, we open with the British scene, it becomes important in the development of the argument to note certain facts about the nature of much party-political controversy and industrial bargaining in that country...
Vol. 22 • January 1975 • No. 1
