GROWING PAINS OF SPANISH SOCIALISM: HOW NOW "THE NEW CLASS"?
Bazelon, David T.
The notion that there is a New Class in our society—"class" for large groups like owners or workers; "new" because Marx did not include it in his grand schema—is an idea that has arrived. After...
...I used to say ex-Marxist, but I think post-Marxist is more precise...
...I merely ask and do not presume to answer the question...
...That, I suggest, is where the real radicalism will be—indeed, already is, in Italy...
...We don't do that very often...
...Why...
...consists of individuals who have carried the logic of modern culture to its end...
...Now that's an original notion...
...and edited by B. Bruce-Briggs (New Brunswick: Transaction Books), Norman Podhoretz writes the lead essay on this subject of the New Class, freshly presented by the neoconservatives...
...Andrew Hacker, like Bell, will not use the idea...
...For instance, this neoconservative group...
...Comparing the advance of the New Class with the historical rise of the bourgeoisie, I noticed that where there were markets and property in the one, there were organizations and careers in the other...
...In his contribution to this book "Two `New Classes' or None...
...Then, the under-the-top people who make the organizations work: the New Class...
...If that statement of the moral issue is not clear, enough, then how about saying it in Latin: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes...
...But not lying around in a corporate whorehouse...
...An ex-Marxist is someone who is just sorry about the whole thing...
...A boss is a boss, whether or not by virtue of property ownership...
...Today, the idea of a nonowning but privileged class has a special resonance in the East...
...It is the endpoint of a culture in disarray...
...The essay you are now reading is, therefore, something in the nature of a Minority Report...
...Meanwhile, the business class is pictured as an over-the-hill jock being eaten alive by a swarm of gnats...
...The great advance of the nonpropertied has been made 447 by educated/organizational people, not by the classical proletariat...
...It was a great surprise to me to discover that the same idea—property—was central to both...
...The worst ideological excesses of "New Politics liberalism," and these alone, are employed to bedevil the entire New Class, the whole professional and technical intelligentsia...
...But the really important, indeed constitutive, employees of the corporations should not rest too easily, or enjoy the spectacle too much...
...Following Sputnik, the greatest such movement forward was the expansion of the university professoriat in the '60s...
...It is not simply that these people rely on, or defend, or bypass criticism of the corporate order but that they do so on a reduced level, much beneath their former one...
...That's why he declared war, acting for the corporations, on an intentionally misdefined New Class...
...Daniel Bell has traced the original ownership of this Maltese Falcon back to Henri, Comte de SaintSimon...
...These three are Daniel Bell, a post-Marxist who had established his version of the line of thought in The End of Ideology (1960) and pursued it in essays throughout the '60s culminating in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973...
...The conflicts among the latter are then mirrored in factional differences within the intelligentsia itself...
...Otherwise it devolves to neoconservative cartooning...
...When the time comes...
...Then, the Proprietors: owners who control what they own, and actively make their place in the world thereby, whether Henry Crown or the Chevy franchise-holder in Waukegan: the enduring classicists...
...Because now they are a New Class—based in the media, the academy, and the government—challenging a reduced and befuddled business class for ultimate rulership...
...The power of his thought lingers a lifetime, even after one has decided he is wrong or inadequate on this-and-that proposition...
...The heart of the adversary culture—the "mentality"—is hedonism (as elaborated in Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism...
...444 I n a new book entitled The New Class...
...and my own work in The Paper Economy (1963) and Power in America: The Politics of the New Class (1967...
...How many men can Norman Mailer or Walter Cronkite set in motion when he picks up the telephone, compared to Harold Geneen or to What's-HisName at the top of IBM...
...The amoeba of the unpropertied proletariat has bifurcated, perhaps more than once...
...Having been one of the major propagators of the idea, he is now signing off...
...He chose as initial target the most vulnerable of the educated employees, those recently hired by government and universities...
...Galbraith here decided to go with two different names—"technostructure" for the educated people in the corporations, and "educational and scientific estate" for the intelligentsia elsewhere, especially in the universities...
...Privilege is privilege, even if based "only" on organizational position and education...
...James Burnham himself not long ago dismissed the intelligentsia as a New Class, while defending his own managerialist view, with these traditional words: Who hires and fires whom...
...So the first basis for a New Class—essentially Burnham's managerialism—fails because most corporate managers "come from unprepossessing backgrounds," the power is in the corporation as a structure but not in these managers as individuals, and therefore the president of GM is merely one of the haut proletariat...
...In this view, an attorney learning tax practice in the Treasury Department would be New Class, but only until the day he left the government, as he always intended, to use what he learned there for a much better price on the side of the corporations...
...And coalitions compel compromise...
...I would love to join in again...
...In Power in America I assumed the managerialism thesis out of Berle-Burnham and went on to expand the notion of the potenial "reach" of the New Class in America...
...Certainly, ideological dogma—a notable emanation of the New Class—is deadlier in small groups...
...B. Bruce-Briggs, the book's editor, notes that the study on which it is based was indeed provoked by the new use of the term in 1972— identifying the New Class as made up mostly of university and government liberals—by Moynihan, Podhoretz, and Kristol (who is not included because he did not hand in his homework on time...
...Among other effects, this theory certainly took the bloom off the rose of socialism...
...I had by then met some people who were neither post-Marxist nor big-business lawyers, so I added moderately educated people to the mix...
...I call Bell here a post-Marxist...
...On this he offers a very suggestive formulation, much more useful than the neoconservative "class-enemy" thesis: Without the hedonism stimulated by mass consumption, the very structure of the business enterprise would collapse...
...cabdrivers...
...We were wrong...
...The Podhoretz essay appropriately sets the tone for half the problem with the whole collection...
...Come now...
...With a greatly expanded intelligentsia leading, it becomes feasible as never before...
...Criticizing the New Class is both proper and urgently needed...
...he asks...
...Individually, the issue is moral and stark because there is so often a real choice for the educated hireling between careerist motives and the candid, objective, devotional pursuit of idea and image: that is, subjective action within the traditional image of the intellectual...
...There has been movement back and forth between the two groupings—and also great antagonism...
...Hacker isn't the only one who cannot see a class that does not rule...
...Irving Kristol declared war on that New Class in the Wall Street Journal (May 19, 1975), not long after he had been appointed a brigadier general in the Intellectual Supply Corps of the business class...
...But Bell prefers a set of his own more specific analytical terms...
...And as you do, especially notice what the fast, smart ones do...
...The second half of the problem with the book called The New Class?—what it is, if it 445 is—is dealt with in the big essay that is, inappropriately, the last one: "The New Class: A Muddled Concept," by Daniel Bell...
...Hopeless journey...
...A moment for the background of the book...
...But I'll stay with the New Class, even as a wastebasket category and if only to emphasize the reduced significance of property ownership, until the new groupings find a better common name...
...He will see it only when he notices a lot of individuals from a cohesive social background who rule...
...Immediately after his exit from the Shachtman group, he published The Managerial Revolution (1941), in which he put together an effective amalgam to announce a new postcapitalist society aborning East and West—taking the famous Berle-Means thesis as to the separation of ownership and control in large corporations, the exfoliation of government bureaucracy under the New Deal, along with the now well-traveled theory of bureaucratic collectivism...
...As usual, he renders the matter with useful elaboration...
...Not so, leading representatives Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Robert L. Bartley, Nathan Glazer, and Kevin P. Phillips (as well as Norman Podhoretz...
...Working for business, one simply walked the other side of the street...
...But Hacker was certainly more candid than the neoconservative writers, who have hopped so avidly onto the corporate lap, in at least entertaining for a few pages the idea that those privileged educated workers employed by the corporations are to be counted as members of the New Class—the primary, solid core of it, in my view...
...He concludes: It is a mentality, not a class...
...Having lost its original justifications, capitalism has taken over the legitimations of an antibourgeois culture to maintain the continuity of its own economic institutions...
...Finally and least, the Underclass: all the uninvited, those not welcomed in and unable to get there anyway...
...he favors the popular understanding of class in America—as in, She's a classy doll...
...The new mass intelligentsia, our former students, need more generous counseling from cooler minds...
...But wait, I hear bugles sounding: the neoconservatives have risen to stand firm in defense of Western civilization, middle-class values, etc., etc...
...The imaginative use of the idea of property by up-to-date American lawyers—as with exotic devices of the Internal Revenue Code, elaborate schemes of securing debt, and other splinterings of unitary property—certainly carried Karl Marx several steps forward...
...So, with whatever else, I inherited Max Shachtman's theory of bureaucratic collectivism, which he devised to explain the postrevolutionary horror in Russia...
...If Marx was right and property is indeed all that important, then the rise of a segment of the nonowning servants of property to the status of near-masters is equally important...
...The first alters the character of our institutions...
...Doing so, however, the relation of managers to owners was clearly not to be filed comfortably under Master/ Servant...
...what he actually does is to say that the people in question are not a class because they do not rule...
...A large number of sometimestudents stand perilously between the New Class and the Underclass...
...Perhaps that is appropriate for a sociologist busily developing a postcapitalist theory...
...the heightened intellectual content of technology...
...But keep your eyes open...
...Off to the side, the Rentiers: the paper-holders, the residual rich whose wealth is managed—as is everything else—by the educated/organizational New Class...
...So will the corporations and other organizations that they cannot exist without, and that cannot exist without them...
...All but one of the writers, Michael Harrington, is or looks like a neoconservative...
...Well, we all hire out, one way or the other...
...selfishly, with exclusionary thrust...
...His evidence and argument persuade one that the New Class, if it exists, is emergent and certainly not a fully matured class—not like the English uppers, for instance, a few generations ago...
...With a class of this character, one may reasonably expect many and serious intraclass factional struggles...
...Irving Kristol and I know that ideas of classes are great political weapons...
...And whom you serve, when, and in what manner, is the subjective bedrock of membership—much more important, certainly over a full career, than choice of fashionable ideology...
...But keep watching...
...Don't call them a New Class, if that is your pleasure...
...Hacker presumes to discuss whether the New class is or isn't (he was commissioned to write a defense of it...
...The culture that had been designed in other times for a small elite was now manhandled by a mob...
...Daniel Bell acknowledges all of the observable trends in our changing society that would lead one, do lead me, to adopt the New Class notion: the dominance of organizations, state or otherwise...
...There, the pervasiveness of Marxist ideology, along with the unarguable fact of a new group of bosses not accounted for by that ideology, makes the idea utterly obvious...
...I would also embrace the suggestion, implicit in Bell's essay, that the phenomenon of class itself is probably different in our altered modern order: that we may be seeing the disintegration of the idea of class in a solvent of institutional and occupational complexity...
...It is not a "new class" in any social-structural sense...
...As for the second basis—the mass intelligentsia—that fails similarly, but worse...
...If some want to continue to see workers only, just interesting occupational changes—all right...
...Everywhere...
...I understand that Milovan Djilas—second to Tito in the Yugoslav revolution, who revived it with The New Class, published in English in 1957—has been an influential leader of underground political thought among dissident youth in Eastern Europe...
...In my view, the New Class will persist and grow, even if defined out of existence...
...To conclude, let me give a quick sketch of my class map of the United States...
...When I got into the matter in 1959, I mixed my post-Marxism with a brief but intense stint as a corporate lawyer...
...Podhoretz notes with alarm that in 1972 they "came infinitely closer to actual power than any political movement associated with the adversary culture had ever done before...
...That talent of this order should now have undertaken a defense of the established corporate order is, in my view, a major American departure...
...The great events of the '60s broke up that old Partisan Review gang, and much else besides...
...The simple story is that intellectuals were naturally hostile to the dominant business civilization in the United States and so created and adopted an "adversary culture" (Lionel Trilling's phrase)—political radicalism, avant-garde, warmed-over Dada, whatever bombed in Peoria...
...But note that the New Class advances on not one but two fronts: onthejob, and off-the-job...
...They define the New Class solely as an ideological grouping...
...Thus the spectacle of the '60s: a mass of privileged youth, along with cadres of the aging advantaged, wolfishly chomping away at the hand that fed them so well...
...One can look at this from an individual or a social perspective (hopefully and finally, of course, both...
...Not only are they not powerful "classy" individuals, their wordiness and other faults make them even questionably useful to society...
...Now doesn't that give you a feeling for separating-out the educated / organizational well-to-do, whether or not they are "liberals...
...the appearance of an augmented intelligentsia...
...Well, you can imagine...
...The ever-present threat to our bosses is the forging of a 51 percent coalition against them...
...Wasn't that always the most real issue...
...I, for one, never thought it was...
...He took some of this from Bruno Rizzi after refracting it through Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, who probably borrowed a piece here and there from Max Nomad, who of course inherited it all from Jan Waclaw Machajski, who may very well have lifted some from Louis Boudin, after that one came across it in Michael Bakunin...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, even before he became a senator, had identified the New Class as that particular group of the university-educated who dispensed "services to populations that are in various ways wards of the state...
...I mean the problem of identifying the New Class solely by the raw New Politics ideology, and solely for the purpose of wholesale attack thereon: that is, the creation and slaughter of a class enemy...
...We all are still servants, with one master or another...
...All in all, Kristol devised and sold a brilliant (and British) divide-and-rule strategy to our bosses...
...So for me—hold on to your hats!—the American New Class included, for instance, a professor at Harvard, Herman Kahn or one of his generals, a corporate executive, a government bureaucrat, William Kunstler, an engineer, Tom Hayden, and me...
...Whatever the New Class may be, if it be at all, it is obviously still a servant class...
...With a new class—since class is based on a person's position in society—I can only think that awareness of this new position is the stuff of which organizing principles will be made...
...It...
...Another original view of "class...
...But this neoconservative burst, which is itself a New Class maneuver, provides a fairly unpleasant spectacle of rampant self-interest...
...Still, something like a "class" lingers as a needed common denominator...
...Is it really still all right to think of the bosses of GM, and their top helpers, as merely haut proletariat...
...What do you say to Him...
...The heart of it seemed to be education translated into organizational position...
...If there is a New Class other than the liberal-hating cartoon Irving Kristol created long ago and Norman Podhoretz adopted recently, it began with the advance of the nonpropertied...
...Come to think of it, that's the bottom line on the whole idea of the New Class, if there is one, and on the neoconservative's misuse of the idea, even if there isn't...
...In reaction to those events, especially to their culmination in the McGovern nomination, a small but well-placed and highly talented grouping began to appear, most noticeably in and around Commentary and the Public Interest (and, just as noticeably, not in the New York Review of Books...
...The remaining and rather more interesting question is how one gets organized...
...I think he abandoned the term to neoconservative misuse, rather than contesting the territory...
...After nearly a century of episodic and heated discussion, it has arrived, here in America, in perfect disarray...
...With this approach, the proletariat or the peasantry were never classes...
...Socially, the basic factors (or choices) of organization are: the intelligentsia distinguishing itself from its various employers, asserting its own political independence, and making alliances (not domineering or supine identifications) with other classes and groups...
...Moynihan was an adviser...
...The critical proposition was that something other than socialism might, and in Russia did, supplant capitalism, namely, rule by a new class of unpropertied bureaucrats who controlled the state that owned everything...
...If they separate themselves from their classmates employed elsewhere, they weaken their own potential class defense...
...Nathan Glazer, for example, sets out on a safari hunting lawyers who fit the "neo-conservative version of the `new class...
...That is, what do you think of the Boss...
...And, like Bell, I'm a post-Marxist—a junior member of the Partisan Review-Trotskyist group that attempted, back in the '40s and '50s, to terrorize Stalinist middlebrows with homemade polysyllabic bombs...
...The discussion of this concept was undertaken almost entirely within the socialist movement: most particularly, between disappointed thinkers on the way out and the regular fellows remaining to tend the flame...
...Originally, we thought that meant the factory workers and lesser persons, and only them...
...The New Class, I suggest most earnestly, has become an inevitable idea—not least because of this recent "class-enemy" use of it...
...In fact, educated workers in favored organizational positions—whether or not one is pleased to call them a class—are differentiated mostly by the character and agenda of their employers...
...Please note that this expanded lumpenproletariat includes not only enraged blacks, welfare habitues, social losers of a great variety (in and out of institutions), but also an 448 increasingly sizable and significant downward-mobile population: e.g., Ph.D...
...They have taken up the concept of the New Class in a new and big way...
...Kristol shows us how to disorganize a class...
...The neoconservatives have decided to make believe that if there is a New Class, they are not members of it...
...Somebody started calling them the neoconservatives, and the designation stayed...
...Let's say the most real issue for all us New Class people is, What kind of employee of The Organization shall we be...
...maybe four or five of the advisers do not look like it...
...All New Class elements are to be defined, in part, by the institutional powers to which they are most beholden...
...And I discovered that when I had lived through the Great Depression and the New Deal response to it, I had unknowingly been privileged to witness the third great American revolution (no more final or secure than the other two...
...Since that is inevitable, why not, then, the idea of it...
...Podhoretz's essay, entitled "The Adversary Culture and the New Class," is a broad-brush history of the intellectuals in this country...
...Nor should criticism of the loud ideological liberals be left to the frightened neoconservative faction...
...and the bourgeoisie was 446 not one until it became dominant...
...But the one who got all the credit for popularizing the idea was James Burnham...
...More important, we may not notice the massive advance from all quarters of the educated proletariat in our major institutions...
...It is a lunar-clear louseup of the McGovern liberals, now called the New Politics people...
...Three writers I know of were probably stimulated by Djilas's book to speculate about the existence of a New Class (not necessarily consisting of bosses) in the United States...
...But with mass education engulfing the academy, there was a population explosion in the intellectual community...
...Norman Podhoretz, also, is a leading figure in the grouping...
...Still, to his credit, Bruce-Briggs has not adopted this special version of the idea— which nevertheless dominates and characterizes this book...
...the second will participate in remaking our politics...
...But, it must be asked—particularly in the afterglow of the McGovern campaign—is the New Class or any major faction of it, in any probable organized form, capable of building and then entitled to lead a new democratic coalition...
...Now that intellectuals are a class, pursuing careers the way their fathers chased the business dollar, we have the fresh burden of reinventing noncareerist intellectuality...
...This devil theory benefits not them but their corporate and other institutional bosses...
...You never know what they are going to do next...
...For example, the creation and establishment of the Cold War bureaucracy was probably the major New Class advance in the immediate postwar period...
...The rest of the problem with this neoconservative book (which, I feel, is important as an "event") is the limited, skewed, and downright unimaginative notion of what "class" in "New Class" might be or come to be, and whether in any event there is one...
...John Kenneth Galbraith in The Affluent Society (1958) and The New Industrial State (1967...
...After all, by the mid-'60s one also had to deal with our newly massproduced intelligentsia in the United States...
...It is the product of the New Class Study, foundationally undertaken by B. Bruce-Briggs with 4 assistants, 12 contributors, and 18 advisers [of which I was one...
...At the top is the Over Class, essentially C. Wright Mills's power elite: Rockefellers and Mellons, of course, but also corporate and governmental bosses, univeristy and foundation bosses, all institutional elites...
...Bourgeois" was a bit of a wastebasket, too: all property owners were included—financial, merchant, industrial, and candy-store...
...I think somebody also stole something from Robert 443 Michels, but who knows...
...In the end it is exactly the complexity of the historical changes in capitalism that requires him to abandon the concept of the New Class as a term of any utility...
...In the long run, advances on the job may well be more determinative of the character of the class in its maturity...
...or, He ain't got no class— and Hackerdoesn't see any real class around...
...Next, the Unionized Worker: the proletarian who got organized, then used government and his own institutions to force a special place in the system (generously, for himself and others...
...What is true in this story is obscured by the clarity of presentation...
...Accepting it undistorted, we can get on with the longer, larger effort of monitoring the rich internal variety (and conflict) it presents...
Vol. 26 • September 1979 • No. 4
