REVIEWS
Eckstein, George & Bensman, David & Rieder, Jonathan & Perlin, Terry M.
FALSE PROMISES, by Stanley Aronowitz. New York: McGraw-Hill. 465 pp. $10. THE WORKING CLASS MAJORITY, by Andrew Levison. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan. 319 pp. $8.95. In the wake of the...
...His accent is on the rich variation within a labor movement that includes not only Barkans but also unions that supported McGovern...
...No one has ever studied the career of Max Hayes, the leading socialist trade unionist of the pre-World War I era...
...The multinationals in fact have become quite vulnerable targets abroad, witness the numerous forms in which in recent years countries as wide apart ideologically as Chile and Saudi Arabia have circumscribed their ownership and operations...
...The first step in the reeducation of workers is to help them to become aware of their own biographies, that is, the ways in which they have been educated so that their character structure is harmonious with the structure of domination...
...and the tumultuous realignment of the Democratic party...
...This has led them to omit many historical studies done in the last few years, mainly by radical young historians, which are (or ought to be) changing our understanding of the history of American socialism...
...Of course union activity and electoral politics are merely incremental—a word from Levison's pragmatic lexicon that is anathema to Aronowitz...
...Of the 125 U.S...
...WHERE Levison is reformist, eloquent, and wary of model-building, Aronowitz is radical, ponderous, and conceptually ambitious...
...the influence of a transplanted Frankfurt School of neo-Marxism...
...Freedom of the press is converted into assault and battery...
...The justice under which we live from day to day is a sorry saga and all the hot air of Gideon's trumpet will not change things...
...No topic is given more than 50 pages, and some less...
...only readers with prior knowledge about "Radicalism and the Agrarian Tradition" or "Socialism after World War One" are likely to be able to follow the discussions profitably...
...754 pp...
...GLOBAL REACH: THE POWER OF THE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS, by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller...
...Laslett argues effectively that Bell overemphasizes the ideological and moral intransigence of the Socialist party...
...Barnet and Muller conceive of investment of U.S...
...This collaborative effort seems to have had a similar issue...
...These politics will not heal the split between work and play, not minister to feelings of existential malaise, nor eroticize everyday life...
...Later in the book, James Weinstein and Staughton Lynd, two elder statesmen of what once was known as the New Left, discuss their visions of a viable socialist movement...
...298 BOOKS...
...Frequently, such a legal crackdown is less obvious...
...There are some compelling insights into labor history and union practice...
...police break into an apartment and beat up an elderly couple...
...the book is better...
...the people who work an enterprise...
...Accordingly, the organization is topical and chronological...
...Three distinct, albeit related, purposes appear to have motivated Lipset, the liberal American sociologist, and Laslett, an English New Left labor historian...
...If the book had been simply a reader containing these essays, it would have been worthwhile...
...If the workers are still enmeshed in "cultural hegemony," it is because they have been made "manipulable objects of the productions of mass culture...
...But they used to be concentrated mainly in extractive industries and the direction of their expansion was determined by the location of the mineral deposits in undeveloped areas that lacked the capital and/or the incentive to exploit their own resources...
...The authors have very little to say about the activities of U.S...
...We have to look to character and socialization...
...Finally, Levison takes on the myths of the unions...
...Movies and childhood games prepare the child to become an "obedient adult," to relinquish naive delight, and later to accept False Promises of advancement and consumption...
...Underlying this organizational problem is a more basic one, for the editors, particularly Lipset, appear to believe that it is possible to construct general 294 BOOKS theories without first getting to know your data intimately and fully...
...In the last five years, young historians have begun to fill these gaps, inspired partly by a desire to understand the failure of the New Left, and partly by a growing familiarity with the work of such European social historians as Eric Hobsbawm, George Rude, Edward Thompson, and Georges Lefebvre...
...As long as the latter cannot be subjected to socially desirable goals established by public policy, it remains a threat at home or abroad...
...My ambivalence was, I now believe, a reflection of the editors' own ambivalence about the purpose of their collaboration...
...But, if informed by a larger vision, they can be one unglamorous answer to the false promises of transcendence...
...Cops and judges, wardens and hospital administrators, school principals and corporate executives exercise a power over the fate of individuals that is not only wicked but also usually illegal...
...Except for oil, the stress now was on manufacturing and distribution...
...From then on, their freedom to travel or try a new job, or just engage in a range of activities outside work is taken from them by the structure of debt in which they are enmeshed...
...And some might argue that his reformism is insufficiently visionary...
...and even in oil, the refining, manufacturing, and distribution end became ever more important...
...It is critical theory's longing for transcendence that beguiles Aronowitz...
...Since the "old mediations" are still partially intact, Aronowitz calls for a therapeutic politics of liberation from false needs...
...mining companies in Chile pay wages higher than the national level, they cause trouble for Allende...
...In contrast to Levison, Aronowitz sees unions as not only, but primarily guilty of economism and autocracy...
...They require a politics of decency, coalition building, and hard work...
...The Iron Cage—no longer rendered as bureaucracy but culture—cajoles and coerces pliable men and women...
...All the instances cited in this book come from the Boston area but, Zinn claims, such stories can be found in any American city...
...The struggle is within the personality against the lure of the Irish Sweep Stakes, television and bowling, which "force workers to view themselves as objects of manipulation...
...But in the final analysis, False Promises never fulfills its own promise...
...Levison does some statistical juggling of his own...
...With the aid of an odd assembly of witnesses and advocates—including students, prisoners, inmates, tenants, teachers, and a few felons—Zinn presents a catalogue of abuses of the criminal justice system...
...Aronowitz's attempts to explore the "non-economic contradictions" of capitalism and to ground neo-Marxist theory in historical data are admirable...
...Levison heartily endorses Fred Harris's comment that the "blue-collar worker will be progressive as long as it is not progress for everyone but himself...
...Aside from a lack of concreteness, these immodest proposals offer no guarantee of increasing the quantity or quality of justice...
...In tortuous language, he proposes a patronizing view of the worker, anthropomorphizes institutions so that they seem to have an indomitable will of their own, and denigrates ordinary politics in favor of redemptive consciousness-raising...
...While we know much about the intra-socialist debates during the Depression, we know much less about the activity of socialists in organizing the Unemployed Councils and the AFL and CIO unions...
...Phyllis Kachinsky, a student of Howard Zinn's, pursued the matter and, as a result, we can reexperience, in rather vivid detail, the story of one radical paper hawker's beating, arrest, and conviction...
...In each case, the cop on the beat makes the decision...
...In the wake of the fashionable "discovery" of working-class alienation and blue-collar blues in the late 1960s, academics and intellectuals have written a considerable amount of material on the worker...
...His suggestions for improvement are largely useless...
...He draws from municipal referenda and Richard Hamilton's survey data to document his contention that workers are no more conservative than any other strata...
...And he decries the liberals' myopic view of blue-collar politics, which stereotypes workers as racist or reactionary...
...The authors rightly point to the major role played in the global expansion by the dynamics of unlimited growth inherent in the modern capitalistindustrial system (and not altogether absent even in its Communist version...
...This book reflects little of such new research—although Laslett's piece on socialism and the trade unions is an exception...
...He rather facilely dismisses shifts in class structure and culture...
...They rest on a refreshing faith in "ordinary people" and their "real and immediate needs...
...When he invokes distance from scarcity as a cause for the emergence of radical young workers, we can smile in this era of resource imbalance and stagflation...
...The fact that the MNC are guided by the desire to maximize their global profits need not exclude the possibility that in the process they also aid the host-country's overall development...
...When we put justice on trial, the verdict is always "guilty...
...But it is both more, because it contains replies, and less, because its purpose is confused and its execution uncertain...
...a judge repeatedly insults a defendant...
...Richard Barnet, codirector of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, and Ronald Muller, economics professor at the American University in Washington, present a truly comprehensive study, addressed to a wider public, of what they call the Global Corporation...
...I would reply that until we have enough such historical studies to warrant generalization, no comprehensive new attempt at explaining the failure of American socialism is possible...
...What affluent working class?, demands Levison...
...Sally Miller has studied Victor Berger and his Milwaukee machine, Arnold Kaltenick the socialist municipal administrations, Daniel Walkowitz radical Troy molders, Jon Kruchko the birth of UAW local 674...
...In the 1950s and '60s, over two-thirds of U.S...
...It shares its characteristics, in particular the oligopolistic control of the market, and the replacement of economic efficiency with financial control and overall organization as the key factor of its success...
...There is only one major area where real efforts at coalition can occur, and that is ironically in the area where much of the current polarization was created, the realm of electoral politics...
...The professors of law and civil libertarian defenders interviewed in this book show a surprising lack of concern for clients' rights...
...When he examines his subject concretely, he is forced to admit that "it would be a mistake to exaggerate the degree to which young workers have liberated themselves from the institutions of socialization...
...He wants to rescue the concept of culture to explain why ethnic workers remained divided from each other and why workers today accept economic inequalities...
...These two recent treatments of the American working class present conflicting versions, but both are responses to the legacy of the 1960s: the ascension of the political and cultural radicalism of the New Left and the counterculture...
...Many workers...
...More valid are some of the other complaints: that the MNC with their greater financial stability attract vital local capital away from local enterprise...
...global firms responsible for 40 percent of U.S...
...In general, both Lipset and Laslett agree that to explain the failure of American socialists, one must look primarily at those structural features of American society that placed severe restraints on their actions, rather than to the inadequacy of the socialists themselves...
...And so, romantic longing disenchanted, he then reaches for the arsenal of cultural theory, weighty jargon, and systems analysis...
...poor hospital patients are tricked into having unnecessary operations to provide experience for young doctors...
...He is excited by the France of May 1968 and by an esoteric concern with "eroticizing everyday life...
...The labor movement does not provide those 292 BOOKS clues...
...As its economic efficiency becomes more doubtful, its financial strength undermined by deep recession, its social dysfunction ever more apparent, it will be increasingly pushed toward political interference at home and abroad—and thereby increasingly arouse political counterforces...
...New York: William Morrow & Co...
...And so Aronowitz is forced to look elsewhere: the new generation of counter cultural workers who disparage work through their absenteeism and drug use...
...JUSTICE IN EVERYDAY LIFE: THE WAY IT REALLY WORKS, edited by Howard Zinn...
...In Harvard Square a young vendor of the BOOKS 297 Daily World was beaten by policemen after being told to "get the hell out of here...
...Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, Doubleday...
...10.00 Years ago a character in the Pogo comic strip proclaimed that "all freedom is academic...
...The case studies presented for our outraged response are normal—and not so normal—tales of administrative abuse and governmental error...
...The revolutionary subject, no longer defined by its productive but its generational and cultural position, is a worker "qualitatively different from any in the history of capitalism...
...New York: Simon and Schuster...
...Unflinchingly accepting the verdict of "economism," autocracy, and corruption, he stresses that the unions "by and large" have "delivered on bread and butter issues...
...For where Levison was after a "progressive" tendency, Aronowitz wants something grander, "liberatory...
...Levison proceeds to shatter these myths, fusing personal anecdote, statistical data, and trenchant argument...
...The same is true of justice, Howard Zinn would have us believe...
...If the matter ever gets to court—a rare event, I suspect—the police officer has the presumption of honesty and experience on his side...
...At other times, I thought the book quite good as an overview of the problem...
...that the repatriation of a large part of profits (over 80 percent in mining, but—as the authors neglect to emphasize—only half that in other industries) holds back general economic development in Latin America...
...The result is a wildly erratic attempt to blend cogent perceptions of the everyday realities of grievance procedure, barroom, and assembly line with conceptually ornate chapters filled with unwieldy jargon and abstruse visions of redemption...
...Are muggers undeterred by corrupt cops likely to repent at the sight of community patrols...
...When U.S...
...The replies to these traditional reasons for socialism's failure generally amount to an accusation that they are overgeneralized, and not comparative in their perspective...
...This, of course, is Zinn's central accusation: in everyday life the evils discharged by authority repeat themselves with unsurpassed banality...
...He seeks nothing less than a "multidimensional methodology" to explain the failure of Marx's crisis theory and the integration of the American working class...
...BUT Justice in Everyday Life is not intended to evoke nods of recognition from a comfortable readership...
...Who has escaped the frustration of trying to get the heat turned on by a recalcitrant superintendent during a cold spell...
...This case would be known only to the immediate circle of participants—had not the witness who demanded the policeman's credentials been William Bunting, son of President Mary I. Bunting of Radcliffe College...
...As they had done previously on a national scale, they can shift production to countries with low wages and weak ecological, financial, and sociopolitical controls...
...Our historical accounts have also tended to be national in scope, ignoring the regional and local levels...
...And we could have done without yet another brief against ecological destruction, workers' alienation, and similar troubles not exactly specific to the multinational corporation...
...Aronowitz's central mission is to rectify the Marxian slight of the subjective factors that translate economic crisis into political consciousness...
...Underlying this absolutist claim is a disenchantment with the workers who have sought a "share in the expansion of American capitalism, not its downfall...
...Here lies, paradoxically, danger as well as hope...
...It reminds us that the ideal of justice, as Thomas More knew, is to be found "nowhere...
...And Meany's Cold War kinks aside, Levison insists on the "basically progressive role" of the AFL–CIO embodied in its record on civil rights, full employment, and national health insurance...
...Perhaps a more serious fault is the editors' relative indifference to empirical detail...
...But the starting point must still be the realm of the possible...
...These lead in two directions: one, to force the MNCs' international transactions into the open for the information of government agencies and political institutions in the home- or host-countries...
...The latter, much overrated in New Left thinking, is apt to be diffuse and contradictory, valuable primarily as a stimulant...
...but a purely national orientation often leads to shortsighted old-style protectionist programs...
...But none of this should imply that Levison's measured politics are without vision...
...He wants an end to it all: to close down the prisons, dismantle the judiciary, and let local communities police themselves...
...If a policeman or a judge, or some power in the community respected by the policeman or judge, doesn't like what is being said, what is being printed," Zinn says, "they can remove...
...Although the editors' disagreement over this question moves through the entire book, the issue is confronted explicitly only in the second chapter, an interesting dialogue between them...
...but off-hand, Russian, Chinese, or self-created investments don't seem to have produced substantially better results or fewer problems...
...These were the years when America's biggest bankers also became confirmed globalists...
...367 pp...
...and he insists that populist resentment rather than unalloyed racism accounts for Wallace support...
...ought to have a voice in what is produced, the kind and amount of new investments, and all the other aspects of the industry that are social issues...
...Many of Zinn's examples have a resonance for the middle-class audience that will read the book...
...Students are arrested for distributing pamphlets in front of a high school...
...It charges that justice is a conspiracy against the poor, the ignorant, and the psychologically vulnerable...
...Median family income of $10,700 misses the census bureau's mark for an intermediate budget, and the heralded purchase of homes is secured only through debt-financing and overtime...
...11.95...
...and within the Third World, too, the shift was toward manufacturing/distribution...
...Kenneth McNaught brilliantly criticizes Louis Hartz for making liberalism so inclusive a term as to comprehend contradictory and hostile phenomena...
...Aronowitz is no pessimist, for "daily life provides clues" for both "liberatory and authoritarian tendencies...
...Levison is a Cassandra warning the left-liberals of their disastrous neglect of the working class...
...lock themselves into a lifetime of debt when they buy a house and furniture...
...It follows, then, that with culture as a conceptual lever, much of False Promises is devoted to a quest for these prefiguring signs of revolt...
...As for Daniel Bell's postindustrial society, Levison claims that the vaunted increase in the professional and technical sector boils down to a mere 3 million workers— hardly enough to speak of a structural transformation...
...And for the foreseeable future, an important home for these politics will have to be the left wing of the Democratic party...
...The problem, basically, cannot be separated from that of controlling the Big Corporation on the national level...
...IN THE PAST, studies of American radicalism tended to focus on ideology, at least in part because they were based primarily on publications and official documents of the radical groups...
...The authors focus on the U.S.-owned corporations, and while this is justified by the latters' predominance, it might have been interesting to find out whether and in what ways their attitudes differ from those of their European or Japanese counterparts, especially with regard to their operations in Third World countries...
...Aronowitz is pure late 1960s, inspired by the Frankfurt School witches' brew of Marx, Hegel, and Freud...
...the debates on postindustrial society...
...But the dominant inspiration remains the cumbersome and romantic cultural neoMarxism of the Frankfurt School...
...Vague charges such as disorderly conduct, loitering, failure to get a permit are used as pretexts to rid the streets of undesirable elements...
...The Working Class Majority is an unpretentious little book, written with clarity and common sense...
...Levison excoriates the theorists of the new class structure as statistical conjurers...
...The mobility of capital, combined with the central direction of the international organization (in turn made possible by modern communication technology), provides them with almost unlimited possibilities for the manipulation of prices, wages, taxes...
...In both, Lipset overgeneralizes from meagre and often highly unreliable data to an extent astounding for a historical sociologist of such high repute...
...Aronowitz is a working-class Charlie Reich...
...It stems from a failure of liberal political vision, policy, and leadership...
...In this book at least, Lipset has the best of the argument, because the criticisms of Laslett and' others are presented in a piecemeal, sketchy fashion...
...How do we compare this cultural radicalism to something so pedestrian as Levison's concern with full employment...
...He stresses that the current defection of the workers is rooted not in repressive character structure, the dominating effects of mass culture, or embourgeoisement...
...Levison never links his working-class analysis to the dynamics of corporate capitalism and the forms of public and private power...
...The first purpose is to debate whether or not socialism has a future in America, or more specifically, did the American New Left point out structural contradictions in American society sufficiently serious to make socialism a plausible goal in America...
...Since there is no critical reply to their presentation, the discussion of socialism's future is hardly satisfactory...
...he wants to purge them of their attraction to the false myths and trendy romanticism of the 1960s...
...Levison catalogues a multitude of inequities that afflict workers as a class, ranging from job insecurity to the unfair burdens of regressive taxation and inflation...
...In some instances, the authors of the original formulation reply to critics...
...In the process, the reach of the MNC, predominantly U.S.-owned, became truly global...
...Who has not suffered the bureaucratic inanity of dealing with the division of motor vehicles...
...The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the "black-robed dignity of the Supreme Court," this book asserts, are abstractions that rarely reach the ordinary scenes of confrontation between individuals and governmental institutions...
...Aronowitz partially recognizes much of this...
...If Levison sees absenteeism and drug use as signs of tangible discontent, Aronowitz transfigures them through his grandiose language into intimations of revolt...
...Fantasies about radical youth—workingclass or otherwise—were at best seductive phantoms in 1969, but in 1975 they are banal...
...There are even discerning insights into the practical problems of workers...
...Rather, Levison traces this scant increase to the growth of Cold War-related R & D and the expansion of education in response to the baby boom and Sputnik...
...Ironically, Aronowitz praises the bourgeois theorist Talcott Parsons as scientific because "he posits the effective socialization of individuals by their social orders...
...multinationals in Europe and the rest of the industrial world where they operate today under more nearly equal conditions of power, that is, in a neocapitalist climate with considerable social and political stability...
...The tension between Aronowitz's demand for transcendence and Levison's pragmatic reformism embodies a recurrent dilemma for the American Left—such as it is...
...Again, primarily concerned with the effect of this acceleration on the structure of the American economy, the authors fail to pinpoint its major geographical and industrial thrust...
...Recent upper-court decisions concerning defendants' rights, the invalidity of forced confessions, the guarantee of protection against search and seizure, and the extension of the rights of free expression are uniformly ignored by policemen on patrol...
...Right now there are immediate problems facing the American public, ranging from economic contraction to national health insurance...
...Levison's audience and the objects of his pique are those left-liberals who slighted worker discontent, glamorized blacks and youth, and persisted in a "destructive liberal confusion about social class...
...Behind his reasonable programs are some "highly arresting notions...
...In 1965, twenty U.S...
...At some points I loathed the book enough to write: "If you attempt to mate a rabbit and mule, you do not get a hybrid animal of average fertility...
...291 Other myths fall too...
...The Working Class Majority has its flaws...
...Are there any students (or parents) who have not been driven to outrage by an inconsistent public school administration...
...The young radicals of Lordstown are older now, worried about lay-offs and home payments...
...When a passing student intervened and asked the cop to identify himself, another arrest was made...
...Levison pleads for the authenticity of politics...
...Its point of departure is the 1972 desertion of bluecollar workers to Nixon...
...They entertained a variety of myths about the working class: its integration into the middle class, its affluence and its political conservatism...
...In the process he fabricates a sprawling and frustrating work that jumps all over the intellectual map from ethnic sociology to Chomsky on transformational grammar...
...All the familiar arguments are here—Louis Hartz on liberalism and feudalism, Daniel Bell on ideological and moral rigidity, Werner Sombart on prosperity, Stephan Thernstrom on social mobility, Martin Diamond on New Deal cooptation of socialist program, Marc Karson on Catholic antisocialism, Norman Thomas on the flexibility of the American party system, Bernard Johnpoll on internal factionalism, Gerald Friedberg on repression...
...Seven years later, one could seek a friend overseas at the Chase or First National City Bank (and a few others) in any of their 627 offices across the planet...
...Levison's explanation seems more plausible: Much of what is parochial and limited in working class life comes out of this fact...
...through manipulation of charges for internal sales, licenses, and credit they can accumulate the larger share of their profits in low-tax countries (and occasionally "launder" cash for bribing politicians...
...Ironically, the trend toward rapid repatriation of profits is further enhanced by the social and political instability created by the growing opposition to foreign economic domination, as expressed in nationalization or kidnappings...
...They exclude service workers like shoeshine boys from the blue-collar category, place office-machine tenders in the clerical stratum, and rely on the legion of female, secondary wage-earners in clerical and sales positions married to manual workers...
...But workers are not as malleable and stupid as this elitist cultural theory suggests...
...Laslett and Weinstein demonstrate the flexibility of American socialists in the first two decades of this century...
...But even so, the book contains enough good old and new material to make it worthwhile...
...when they exploit the low wage level of Korea to transfer light industries, they contribute to the overcrowding of its cities...
...Finally, then, Justice in Everyday Life is a utopian tract, suffering from all the beauties and dangers of that format...
...when natives prefer Coca-Cola to contaminated water, they succumb to brain-washing U.S.-advertising...
...Not until after World War II did the multinational corporation (MNC) develop in its present shape, a direct result of the dominant position of U.S...
...by the lack of means for the exchange of information...
...For business purposes"— thus the president of IBM World Trade 296 BOOKS Corp...
...Labor unions are essentially national organizations, handicapped in their international cooperation by differences in organizational structure and ideological orientation...
...The Boston Globe picked up the story...
...The authors recognize this essential fact in their modest suggestions...
...It is a severe indictment, almost too unrelieved to be fully convincing, although they steer clear of moralizing or ideological dogmatism, and furnish ample documentation, including results of interviews with MNCs executives...
...Good short statements of the traditional answers are presented, followed by recent criticisms or reformulations...
...In clearly focusing the central problem as one of power and control, Barnet's and Miiller's book, with all its shortcomings, performs an important service...
...What becomes of transcendence...
...foreign investments went into this part of the world—another trend the authors fail to explore in its full significance...
...The infection of democratic ideology and the social legitimation of erotic needs by mass culture among this generation of young workers constitutes the permanent basis of the revolt...
...the manifold failures of liberalism...
...Even so, the interpretation is so unremittingly negative that the arguments lose a little in credibility...
...In the next four years it shot up to 41 percent...
...The Andean Common Market organization, notably, has tried to find ways to achieve eventual transfer of control without slowing the influx of needed capital and the development of a new indigenous managerial class...
...Somewhat apocalyptically he adds, "The old mediations are losing their force...
...capital in a war-weakened world, and of the breakdown of the prewar cartels...
...This is an admirable demand and, like Zinn, some of my best friends are defiant...
...global corporations in underdeveloped countries as a zero-sum activity—whatever they gain must be the natives' loss...
...At the same time, investment shifted from the underdeveloped toward the industrial world...
...What becomes of politics in this scheme...
...The book's lack of historical detail is frustrating, because it makes it impossible for all but the most knowledgeable reader to evaluate the perspectives presented...
...banks had a total of 211 foreign locations...
...And his solutions are unabashedly electoral...
...Levison and Aronowitz meet in a slightly surreal intellectual arena streaked with political antinomies, in which Jerry Wurf and Jurgen Habermas, Meany and Marcuse mix together awkwardly...
...The former could be supplemented by expanded international agreements on taxation and on controls over the movement of capital, as well as by closer international cooperation of labor...
...There is no international authority in existence or in sight that could exercise a true countervailing power, so that, paradoxically, any hope for remedial action has to center on the nation-state...
...Like its domestic Big Sister (often Siamese twin), the MNC may have overreached itself...
...The cumulative effect is to force a unanimous judgment: "the Law," as it presently stands, must be condemned as inherently unjust...
...As I read this collection of articles, both new and familiar, my reactions were generally ambivalent...
...5.95...
...Their inability to choose among the three purposes resulted in an uneven, seriously flawed book...
...Zinn tries to squeeze through the reformer-revolutionary dilemma by urging resistance to corrupt authority at every opportunity...
...by the differing strength of their legal, economic, and political positions...
...Scores of workers voted for law and order because they were legitimately frightened of crime, and opposed social welfare programs because they sidestepped their problems...
...the deterioration of the living standards of the working class...
...companies...
...The Constitution may be what the Supreme Court says it is, but on the streets of the city, power resides at the tip of the policeman's club...
...Symptomatic of this conception are Lipset's two articles on social mobility and on the labor movement...
...Aronowitz stands Levison on his head: the authenticity of politics yields to the politics of authenticity...
...a young man is arrested for uttering a vulgarity at a public meeting...
...They do detect a new turning point in the role of the global corporation some time in the mid- or late '60s...
...There have been some initiatives toward change in the U.S.A., Canada, and the EEC countries, notably in the automobile, chemical, metal, and food industries...
...THE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION is, of course, only the most advanced form of the large modern corporation...
...Large industrial corporations with heavy investments abroad are nothing new...
...The book's third purpose is to present a short history of American socialism...
...Though this book suffers from considerable naivete—some of Zinn's students seem literally surprised to discover that judges are brusque and landlords money-grubbing—it captures legal conflicts that are common to all city-dwellers...
...And they rightly emphasize the specific advantages of the global corporations in this respect...
...On the other hand, as the book points out, the example of OPEC, the forms in which lately the Communist world obtains advanced technology from the West, and the new Japanese and European competition, all have shown ways and opened up opportunities for loosening the grip of U.S...
...Unfortunately, Zinn presents no more than a depressing (though fascinating) laundry list of injustices...
...Alone among today's institutions, the authors stress again and again, the modern global corporation is truly international...
...Against this global flexibility they discern today no really effective countervailing power...
...He does not wish to make better cops or clean up the courts...
...Even Kropotkin, whose ethic informs this work, did not want to abolish prisons until after the revolution began...
...investment in manufacturing operations overseas, they say: Between 1960 and 1966 [their] fixed overseas investment rose from 21 to only 25 percent of their fixed investment in the U.S...
...At the same time, what American radicals did with their time and energy was often ignored...
...Moreover, the book's failure to present a perspective on socialism's prospects by someone like Michael Harrington makes this aspect the least satisfactory, indeed, very irritating...
...a landlord who refuses to provide heat for his tenants succeeds in evicting them when they withhold rent...
...However, Lipset tends to agree with the traditional structural explanations that Laslett would like to revise...
...The police alleged that the paper salesman had spat upon a cop and, after a series of court appearances, hearings, postponements, and two trials, the vendor became a felon...
...Trade unionism can only be a force for "integrating workers...
...As a "reader" on the subject "why socialism failed in America...
...But it ought at least to be explored whether, as in trade, there might not be profit for both sides, however inequitably distributed in some cases...
...Now Lipset and Laslett might argue that much of the recent research is so highly localized as to be ungeneralizable, and therefore not suitable for their book...
...508 pp...
...The authors do not pose this question at all...
...The guts of The Working Class Majority is a debunking of the theorists of the obsolescent working class...
...is quoted—"the boundaries that separate one nation from another are no more real than the equator...
...BOOKS 295 In the Third World, of course, the discrepancies, and hence the abuses, of power are much more pronounced...
...Contrary to the reflexive model posited by orthodox Marxism in which all institutions other than the economic base merely copy the requirements of that base, the family, school, mass culture, etc., are absolutely necessary for the reproduction of the economic institutions...
...Like crime itself, unjust law enforcement is a routine event...
...two, to mobilize local interest groups for direct action...
...q BOOKS 293 FAILURE OF A DREAM?: ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN SOCIALISM, edited by John M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset...
...freedom of expression if they wish...
...The result: 42.3 percent middle class, 57.7 percent working class and so, not surprisingly, a working-class majority...
...But the sum-total of rebellious acts is not a revolution and there is little to be gained in pretending otherwise...
...Moreover, what are the alternatives...
...Perhaps the issues involved are too minor and uninteresting...
Vol. 22 • July 1975 • No. 3
