LETTERS

...The apathetic segment of the population probably had helped hold the system together," remarked Bernard Berelson in his widely cited, seminal essay "Survival Through Apathy...

...Computerization made possible a reduction of inventories in relation to sales in industry as well as in trade...

...Or as Robert Dahl, a most liberal and humane theorist of the welfare state, put it in his work Hierarchy, Democracy and Bargaining in Politics and Economics, "It is inaccurate to say that one of the necessary conditions for `democracy' is extensive citizen participation...

...And through the '70s—as a kind of subterranean counterpart to the more visible right-wing corporate assault on reform —new democratic aspirations have spread among many millions of middle Americans uninvolved in any of the '60s protests...

...But not, Mr...

...Yet it ought to be weighed carefully against other social considerations, with a trade-off often unavoidable...

...England and West Germany in health services and codetermination...

...The other institutional change is the expansion of political controls of the economy in breadth (safety, minorities, consumer, environment) as well as in depth (financial operations, pension funds, etc...

...q "Beyond the Welfare State" Editors: Of the various contributions on "Beyond the Welfare State" in the Summer 1978 Dissent, I find myself in closest agreement with Henry Pachter who with proper caution connects his vision with existing social realities...

...When progressives rediscover the radical democratic wellsprings of our heritage, we will be well positioned to once again take the initiative in American politics...

...As to other fields, the U.S...

...These institutional changes should somewhat facilitate the next key tasks for social reform in the Western world in general and the U.S...

...It also permits considerable waste and mis-investment...

...Spitz's incredulity not withstanding, until we comprehend the legacy that must now be overcome...

...Would he document those statements from the writings of authentic liberals like John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Morris R. Cohen, R. M. Maclver, and Isaiah Berlin...

...But when and where "incremental change" becomes "structural transformation" is often a matter of semantics, temperament, or perspective...

...Indeed, a staple of the right's breathtakingly cynical rhetoric is the pledge to "return government to the people," reflected in Mobil Oil's call for "participatory government" and in Howard Jarvis's castigation of "government of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats," alike...

...Legitimate authority resided in special spaces, like the courtroom, the classroom, and the hospital, and it resided in special words shared only by experts...

...I did not find such traits or assumptions in his quotations from John Kenneth Galbraith, Gunnar Myrdal, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Adlai Stevenson...

...The citizen became a client," as Barton Bledstein described it in his recent, excellent work, The Culture of Professionalism, "whose obligation was to trust the professional...

...Yet, I would caution against rushing into apocalyptic predictions...

...As to efficiency, Pachter seems to take its loss (through bureaucracy, through noneconomic concerns) somewhat too lightly...

...Indeed, decades of welfare-state processes had robbed the American people of skills, folklore, and the confidence and knowledge necessary for effective collective decision-making...

...Another basic requirement applying to any contemporary system of production and distribution is the need to set aside part of the social product for investment...

...Indeed, the flexibility of modern developed capitalism in handling social change derives in large part from its constantly rising productivity, for a while accelerated, especially in agriculture, after World War II...

...limits in the expansion of the multinational corporations...

...My relatively minor reservations bear on two points, bureaucracy and efficiency...

...even U.S...

...Sweden in humanizing the work process...

...Only static primitive societies could content themselves with the replacement of wornout tools—today's "socialist" societies, even in already developed economies, cannot escape the need for investments, although their nationalized enterprises often seem to have difficulties showing any surplus from which to cover them...

...Real decision-making was carried out by experts and administrators—a "fact" of politics celebrated by a variety of self-described progressives...

...In the absence of war (and war is hardly desirable even to the most ardent revolutionary), this means that any radical transformation of our society would have to be imposed from above in the Leninist or Maoist pattern, an alternative as unrealistic as it is unacceptable...

...To the banks, which since Nixon's Bank Holding Act of 1969 have expanded into a wide range of other financial operations, there now must be added insurance companies and nonprofit institutions, such as pension plans and other funds, colleges, union treasuries, etc., as additional major sources of investment funds...

...At the very moment of democracy's apparent trivialization, however, the civilrights movement exploded across the political landscape, challenging conventional wisdom to its core...

...Like earlier controls, these extensions were the result of political decisions, arrived at under social pressures of various kinds and forms, street riots included...

...labor unions have for quite some time relied on political rather than economic pressure to pursue their aims...

...but it would be odd behavior of little consequence...

...the pressure on profits caused by the rise in fixed cost through the increased role of organization...

...Among them, two are standing out...

...a highly developed credit apparatus permits increasingly the financing of current investment out of future revenues rather than out of past savings...

...While I fully agree that the bureaucracy fulfills indispensable functions in political controls and social services of all kinds, and that its very "mulishness" can act as a healthy deterrent against political opportunists or authoritarian aspirants, I would worry more than Pachter seems to do about its propensity to stifle change, resist correction...

...with further regulation in sight (investment, energy, multinational corporations...

...In the West, neoconservatives talk of "incremental change," while radicals fall back on "structural transformation...

...While capitalists have accepted more and more public restrictions on the exercise of private property rights in the means of production, the leading economist of the Italian CF has come out for partial denationalization, and East European Communist regimes are desperately trying to introduce market features into their economies without losing centralized control...

...Old shibboleths have lost much of their meaning...

...In line with their social traditions, some countries have made first steps in these directions: France, with its tradition of state enterprise and technocracy, in investment planning and nationalization...

...Certainly, efficiency should not be the sole determining factor in the production of goods and services...

...Altogether, these developments indicate that modern capitalism has both the ability and the willingness to bend to reforms and controls (or to turn them to its own advantage), while both technological and social changes have fundamentally altered the character of the "working class...

...with its populist tradition leads in financial supervision, environmental and consumer protection...

...Modern capitalism, on the other hand, has been able to refine its methods for capital creation...

...the rise in energy costs...

...If a citizen so desired he had the right to pass out a leaflet or attend a meeting...

...in particular: direction of investment, containment of corporate power, distribution of wealth/ income...

...persistent inflation...

...GEORGE ECKSTEIN q...

...For, along with these trends, there have been some major institutional changes...

...Finally, in the multinational corporation, based on the free flow of capital across national borders, modern capitalism has created an institution whose implications have not yet been fully explored and which, for the time being, eludes the control of national political entities and nationally organized unions...

...It remains to be seen whether capitalist flexibility can be maintained in the face of the most recent trends: the slowdown in productivity in line with the shift from goods toward services...

...DAVID SPITZ HARRY C. BOYTE Replies: By the late '50s, democracy was a safely marginalized activity...

...Especially if one takes into account the rising amount of public subsidies of private investment, either direct, or indirect through the investment tax credit...

...I don't think this fact has received sufficient consideration among socialists whose periodic pessimistic predictions have regularly been confounded 115 by subsequent developments...

...For its maintenance is indispensable to a continued high productivity without which there can be no improvement in living standards nor expansion of social services— under whatever social system...

...Who or what is he talking about...

...S. M. Miller has rightly stressed the significance of this shift in view of a future public investment policy directed toward socially desirable goals...

...Voting (for white America) had become a recognized ritual...

...One is the institutionalization of investment capital through its increasing concentration in the hands of state-supervised financial institutions...

...Sweden in income redistribution...

...Thus, Western capitalism was able to expand social services, and is now busy developing environmental protection into a new growth industry...