"Bastard" Capitalism
Samuel, Ralph
One of the most interesting and, in many ways, encouraging political trends in contemporary England is the emergence of a group of young writers and intellectuals known as the "New Left." This...
...Surrounded by numerous competitors, subject to the operation of blind market forces, he could neither control the price which his product commanded, nor influence the over-all direction of an industry in which his firm played a small and rather insignificant part...
...The industries of salesmanship have been the "growth" industries of the fifties, holding the inside track in the Conservative "dash for freedom...
...Salesmanship is often seen as standing rather apart from the mainstream of the business economy, a product of the "mass society" rather than of contemporary capitalism...
...yet it is at the same time one of the most class-bound in the world...
...Of course people are not as the advertisers would like them to be, ridden by anxiety and driven by snobbery...
...The Board of A.E.I...
...The Merchant Banks, the Big Eight and the leading insurance houses are represented on the boards of almost all the major companies, and provide the chairman for half the fifty largest firms...
...The private boardrooms have become an annex to the Cabinet...
...The designer of the Coronation Coat of Arms creates the Tate and Lyle "brand image," and lectures to packaging executives on "the personality of the pack," while a President of the Board of Trade compares the achievements of advertising to those of ecclesiastical art: Throughout history the Church has used artists to advertise religion: some of the greatest pictures of bygone centuries had been produced in this way .. . Commercial Television in the future would work in the same direction...
...bales out, in coal and in cotton, capitalist interests which have ceased to prosper...
...will serve to illustrate the marriage of business and the upper classes...
...Behind the rhetoric of the Opportunity State, new inequalities are generated and old ones revived: there are two nations at work, two nations at school, two nations in old age...
...The upper classes shared in the disgrace...
...Thus the corporations assume an authority that was formerly the prerogative of the great national institutions, and their close link with the Public Schools ensures that the "confident assumption of effortless superiority"—attached in the past to rulers and dignitaries—is now carried over to support the ambitious pretensions of a business society...
...But though there may be relatively few who willingly sacrifice their individuality for the newer styles of advancement, a distressingly high proportion of the new "opportunities" go to those who do, and it is they who set the pace for the rest of society...
...With the disappearance of the individual entrepreneur, the sources of class privilege have been diversified, reposing now upon offices with access to corporate wealth quite as much as upon ownership itself...
...In postwar Britain business offered the only escape from the twin demons of inflation and taxation...
...The businessman might be celebrated in his locality, but beyond the limits of his community his greatness went unrecognized, and the London center of social and political power escaped him altogether...
...The decade in which the Conservative Party has proclaimed the achievement of "one nation," and Labor theorists heralded the arrival of the "post-capitalist society," has seen a widening of the divisions between the "voiceless poor" and the powerful rich, the managers and the managed, Public Schools and Secondary Moderns...
...Royal Academician, James Fitton, pleases The Director by telling an assembled business audience that "the artist and the businessman had one essential gift in common—that of organization," and the Art Critic of the Guardian defends salesmanship from its detractors: Today salesmanship is almost a dirty word...
...The 1959 election gave political sanction to the ascendancy of business and class...
...Intellectuals come increasingly to accept what can no longer be avoided...
...The traditional ruling class has, in fact, made as decisive a revival as business itself by taking up the active commercial career...
...Now with his new £6 million hotel in Park Lane...
...There have been decisive changes, some of which have notably humanized the workings of the system—checking its excesses, controlling its operation, limiting its free play...
...in his boyhood he was Page of Honor to both Edward VII and George V; Lord Bicester (Eton and Sandhurst...
...Business now touches politics at critical points, and business leadership takes on an increasingly political character...
...The article which appears below has been adapted for DISSENT by its author from its original appearance in Out of Apathy...
...The economist disappears into the middle positions of the executive "team," graduating from Brand Manager or Chief Buyer, in charge of Sales Promotion or Carton Design, to become what the Hedley's career advertisement calls a "Bachelor of Industry...
...Lord Mancroft ex changes a government Ministry for a position with Great Universal Stores...
...A democracy which yet allows many of the crucial decisions affecting its future to be made with scant reference to people, parliament and government...
...the Principal of an Arts College judges the "Label of the Year" competition sponsored by the Society of Labelogists...
...in electrical engineering —or, like Hedleys and Unilever, parcelling out the market in oligopolistic partition...
...No line was more carefully drawn, in the age of laissez-faire capitalism, than that which separated business and government...
...Contemporary business, in contrast, has been stripped of its Nonconformist garb and has discarded the Puritan sobrieties in favor of newer styles of luxury which, increasingly, are built into the way of life of the firm...
...It is the most remarkable of the recent business conquests...
...Shareholders have that lovely, lively, lyrical feeling as the rush of take-over bids mints them money...
...Lord Chandos, its chairman, traces his ancestry to the fourteenth century (the first Chandos rose as a captain in the Hundred Years War...
...It may have been tamed in important directions, but in others its power has rather been extended, shaping the character of the nation's future and coloring the quality of its life...
...The corporations stood unchallenged at the center of the economy, and around them clustered privilege, in new forms and old, which circumvented and finally reversed the post-war effort at income redistribution...
...If Britain is to succeed," he proclaimed, "then so must A.E.1...
...Yet if Fra Angelico could sell Christianity, and Watteau could sell aristocracy . . . the difference is only one of degree...
...The accountant looks after the businessman's expense account living...
...A society self-divided Business and class are not, of course, the only forces at work in Britain today...
...The welfare services stand in permanent rebuke to the spirit of capitalism, however inadequate they may at times appear...
...Chairman of the Northern Ireland Development Council, a director of I.C.I...
...The City, in fact, has become the hub of the business system, and interlocking directorships, multiple holdings and diversified investments now make up the pattern of the corporate business baronies...
...The Royal College of Arts respea.fully hears Lord Cliandos call for more business patronage...
...As THE WHOLE WAY Of life took on an increasingly commercial tone, the upper classes came to look more confident than at any time since 1914...
...G. H. Copeman's study of The Directors showed that 58o%o of 1,243 leading directors had received a Public School education (5% of them at Eton), and R. V. Clements The Managers showed a notable elite preponderance in the upper echelons of the managerial hierarchies even in so unfashionable an area as South Lancashire...
...Powell Duffryn evacuates the South Wales coalfield to find a new, and greater fortune, in oil...
...The country, as Evelyn Waugh later remembered it, "seemed to be under enemy occupation...
...Capitalism and Conservatism seemed finally and unchallengeably secure...
...Profits," complained Lord Chandos, "are without honor in our country...
...But at the end of the road there are cold, harsh realities of the future to be faced...
...Getting ahead" for most people means something more moral than submitting to the personality market—mastering a craft or learning a trade...
...A review of Out of Apathy is planned for the next issue of DISSENT.—EDITORS Scarcely twenty years ago the capitalist system was, to all appearances, disintegrating—in England its symbol was Jarrow, "the town that was murdered," its representative figure Montagu Norman, the sinister governor of the Bank of England who engineered the rise of unemployment and the fall of governments...
...The new relationship is complex as well as close, and its balance has not always been the same...
...as the first results came through...
...Status" anxieties on the American model have been joined to the traditional divisions of the English class system, giving to society a tone more stridently snobbish and vulgarly commercial than would have seemed possible in 1945...
...72 of the 366 Conservative M.P.s were educated at Eton alone...
...Britain, at the beginning of the sixties, is a society divided against itself: a democratic society which yet has been unable to create for itself a genuinely democratic way of life...
...Capital gains were more profitable than interim dividends, bond-washing more fruitful than absentee investment, and the panoply of corporate privileges the only means by which wealth could accumulate and privilege be secured...
...Many of our institutions have been steadily emancipated from the claims of oligarchy and privilege, even if they have not yet escaped the influence of the traditional governing classes...
...We find they sell more oil...
...Few people live in constant anxiety that their neighbors are outpacing them...
...Company pluralists and industrial statesmen, they stand at the intersections of government and industry, business and politics...
...In Victorian England the characteristic firm was small, under-capitalized and vulnerable to the cyclical downturns of the economy...
...Within the business world, a remarkable movement of internal colonization has merged firm with firm, meshed banking and industry, and replaced the individual manufacturer by the corporate business leaders...
...The Chairman of the University Labor Club becomes Industrial Relations Officer in a North-Eastern factory before stepping up into Personnel Management for a Home Counties firm...
...Britain's 500 leading firms employ between them one third of the nation's labor force, and account for half its capital investment...
...It combines the counterfeit egalitarianism of the Conservative "opportunity" state with the commercialization of deference, a combination which, through the success symbols of advertising is given currency in the society as a whole...
...the clergy are underpaid and the crisis at the Bar is the subject of prolonged controversy in the correspondence columns of The Times...
...BUSINESS, SINCE THE WAR, has grown steadily more aristocratic...
...The "overmighty baron," at the head of his connection, enjoyed decisive powers altogether denied to his independent predecessors, and broke down the lines which previously separated the estates of the realm, to recruit into the service of his "indentured retinues" merchants, administrators and even clerics (Wycliffe was one of the army of men retained by John of Gaunt): groups who hitherto had been largely independent of the magnates' sway...
...Swollen in size where their predecessors were constricted, masterful where they were impotent, the modern corporations dominate their chosen spheres, claiming entire industries as their "franchise"—I.C.I...
...Today he is accepted for what he is, and indeed celebrated for his achievements...
...An intensity of conviction accompanied by serene self-confidence...
...The graduate seeks his employment, the artist his patronage, the architect his contracts...
...In packaging there is a Packaging Institute, a Packaging Centre, a Packaging Club and six packaging journals (including the Journal of the Institute of Packaging...
...competitive individualism—"getting on" and "getting ahead"—exalted again as the proper regulator of individual conduct and lever of social progress...
...The English graduate starts life as a Sales Consultant before moving on into Public Relations...
...Business at the top Prestige has followed power and business has been carried to the Top, enjoying, today, greater esteem than at any other time in English history...
...Even university staff are not untouched...
...The leader of the legal profession departs for the Board of Shell, the giant oil combine...
...The flourishing of conspicuous luxury—and its widespread celebration— showed how successfully they had defied the 1945 prophecies of their imminent destruction...
...The boundaries between banking and industry have also broken down...
...But their views illustrate the ways in which capitalism now secures its hold because, like the status quo, it is there, confidently established at the heart of the nation, generating acceptance of the business view of the nation's life: as a Stevenage engineer put it: The Conservatives do represent big business, and I think that makes them the more efficient party...
...The business corporations, in fact, are the seat of great power...
...It was not always so...
...economists act as consultants to investment houses and Unit Trusts...
...To focus on business and class is not to ignore these strengths, nor to deny the extent of post-war change...
...Onassis to Drake and to Ulysses ("his own life has been .a kind of Odyssey into which the element of the fabulous enters almost as much as with Ulysses himself") and detailed the career of Mr...
...The ambitious packaging man can even become an M. Inst...
...The images of advertising, in fact, reflect rather clearly the change that has taken place in our society since the war...
...The Public Schoolboy deserted the older professions to become an energetic executive or bustling broker...
...important social groups—the gentry, the professionals and the intellectuals—who formerly stood outside its orbit...
...In Victorian England the risen man of business—condemned as "plutocrat" and "rich vulgarian"—could only gain entree into the traditional upper classes by distancing himself from the active commercial life...
...Businessmen must all be delighted, and investors large and small will surely be singing "Land of Hope and Tory...
...Nor is the business influence confined to those—in the upper and middle classes—who minister to its immediate needs...
...some traditional resistances have disappeared, and there have been none to take their place...
...Overmighty baronies, they respect none of the traditional demarcation lines, and reach out to engross every kind of commercial enterprise...
...Charles Clore, the "takeover King," in a tone reserved, in the past, for the Empire Builder or the heroic explorer: "Find your opportunity and work hard," he has said...
...Business was in disgrace, businessmen suspect, and business values held in almost universal contempt...
...The I.C.I...
...Machiavelli wrote of the problem of princes as they appeared to him in relation to sixteenthcentury Italy...
...At the same time there have been others which considerably increase the business hold on the nation...
...He no longer has to record public services to gain his knighthood or his peerage: it is enough that he has been successful in his trade...
...When they came to the City they did not find their power diminished...
...A country jealous of its traditions, its reticence, its stubborn common sense, which is yet given over more and more to the pressures of business and the persuasions of salesmanship...
...salesmanship has become pervasive in a society which, in certain respects, genuinely resembles a "mixed economy...
...if he is wise he will consider very carefully a career in plastics, especially with such go-ahead firms as B.I.P...
...If business now subsidizes elite education, it is not so that Public School leavers shall find their place in the Small Back Rooms of the New Technology—any more than the predominantly Classical education of a previous upper class generation was designed to produce compilers of Greek Lexicons and Latin Glossaries—but rather to fit them for the industrial leadership of a new type...
...the solicitor finds his company formations and property deals take up more time than litigation itself...
...Since the war, however, both the attraction and the possibilities of business employment have dramatically increased, while the old professions have lost their attractions...
...As Chairman of this £200 million industrial giant, he has found ample scope for the free play of his masterful personality: entering a pricecutting war with Callendar Cables, competing for a £40 million atomic power contract ("I like races," he declared, "that I am going to win"), making a victorious "take-over" bid for Elliott Automation, or reshaping the organization of Metro-Vickers and British Thompson Houston, A.E.1.'s mighty vassals...
...This concentration on the bureaucratic middle ignores the existence, at the top, of quite non-bureaucratic corporate elites: business leaders, drawn increasingly from the upper classes or assimilated to them, who exercise powers more extensive in range and political in character than those of the classical entrepreneur...
...And this can be more easily accomplished because, with the introduction of Commercial Television, business now rejoices in a "captive audience," "relaxed" and "receptive," who receive the salesman's message in what A.B.C...
...Profit was once more the dominant rationale of economic activity...
...One illustration of the new prestige of business is the changed pattern of the political career...
...Even when capitalism was at its apogee, business was not considered a fit occupation for the gentry...
...The businessman himself enjoys higher prestige than ever before...
...Today, however, business has no place for the unsuccessful minister: Sir Thomas Dugdale is "kicked upstairs" to the House of Lords, after his failure at the Ministry of Agriculture...
...Lord Monckton was the most successful Conservative minister when he resigned, Lord Chandos perhaps the strongest man in the Cabinet when he relinquished the Colonial Secretaryship...
...Business, its power reinforced, its prestige enhanced, its privileges extended, encroaches increasingly on the life of the nation...
...Since the war, however, the attractions of business have multiplied and all the old professions—with the predictable • The "Public Schools" are fee-paying private schools...
...The basis of rentier living, however, was debilitated in the twenties and thirties, and by 1945 it had collapsed...
...Reporters at Lord Camrose's party at the Savoy Hotel, picked their way among smiling Conservative ministers and exultant celebrities to find Mr...
...A professor of economics sits on the Board of the Financial Times, a lecturer takes charge of the Manchester branch of a stockbroking firm...
...For business, so powerful in scope, and political in character, is calling for the qualities a Public School training is designed to ensure: a Whig sense of elite mission, a Tory urge to personal command: "the Prefect and the Rugger captain," for Lord Chandos, "Colts who will be thoroughbreds" according to the Vice-Chairman of the British Institute of Management, when he called for a "better breed of recruits" to bear the "Management Burden": The burden of high office is no new conception...
...It has also begun to publish a series of "New Left Books," of which the first is Out of Apathy, a collection of essays...
...Feudal privilege became diversified in form and promiscuous in origin, depending upon office as much as ownership: government connections were manipulated to secure war contracts, exchequer loans and tax immunities, administration engrossed to secure franchises, jurisdictions and profitable offices...
...Behind the anti-industrialism of Carlyle and Ruskin, or Matthew Arnold's contempt for bourgeois philistinism, was the firm tradition of the independency of the man of letters...
...This group first came to attention in the journal Universities and Left Review, which has since become New Left Review...
...It has become, through salesmanship, pervasive in the society as a whole...
...There is, in fact, a great deal of paradox in post-war Britain...
...Many others, immune to such direct persuasions, are powerfully affected in other ways by living in what is increasingly a "business society...
...Business, in Victorian England, was an estate apart, northern and provincial, separated by politics, religion and locality from the dominant elites...
...In pursuit of the consumer, business seeks to associate with its products the qualities of the good life and is concerned, more and more, with the motivation of the individual, shaping his ambitions, defining his aspirations, and touching him in areas of life that previously were thought of as private...
...Packaging has corporate giants like Reed's and Metal Box at its heart, and in advertising it is the largest firms who are responsible for the higher irrationalities of salesmanship: Unilever's who proclaim their product "Whiter than White," Cortaulds who seek to persuade that "with BriLon a new sweetness entered your life: a touch soft as a whispered confidence, gentle as butterfly kisses...
...The governing classes might pay him homage, praising his enterprise and removing the fetters upon his trade, but the actual conduct of government remained the preserve of the traditional elites—the gentry and the aristocracy, joined, towards the end of the nineteenth century, by the new professional upper middle classes...
...the architect plans his showrooms and his prestige offices or works as consultant on one of his property companies...
...indeedit would seem reasonable to recognise him as one of those innovators and iconoclasts who are required, from time to time, in any society, if it is notto sink into stagnation...
...Government money accounts for half the total cost of industry's scientific and technical research...
...Those working class people, for example, who in the October election accepted the Conservative's market definition of social responsibility—" spending the taxpayer's money"—and who cast a "deference vote" for the Conservatives because "they've got the money," "they're born to rule...
...Much of our way of life is formed by quite different, frequently opposing principles...
...The upper class settlement is most marked in banking and insurance— traditional enclaves of aristocratic influence, where, as the Manchester School study of ruling class "cousinhoods" shows, one-third of the directors of leading firms were educated at the six leading Public Schools.* But upper class influence has grown throughout the business world...
...historians are commissioned to write official histories of the major firms...
...Corporate profits took precedence over public welfare (as much money was spent on advertising as on scientific and industrial research, on packaging as on the government's educational budget), and the machinery of government control—those parts which had not been dismantled— served to buttress rather than to diminish the power of the private sector...
...Schools like Choate and Groton are, I believe, confined to a narrow segment of the Eastern upper middle classes whereas in England, from their reform in the mid-nineteenth century, the Public Schools have been the organizing center of the upper class style of life, transmitting upper class codes from one gen eration to the next, and acting as the principal agent in the acculturation of par venus...
...make everything from nuclear power stations to Hotpoint washing machines...
...And beyond the formal freedoms and organizations of a democracy, there is the play of common decency: a general regard for the liberty of the individual that has been so thoroughly assimilated into the way of life that sometimes—in the urgency of protest—we forget that it exists...
...A vintage car, a pretty girl with plenty of push...
...Lord Bicester combines his seat at the Court of the Bank of England with a directorship of A.E.I...
...They inherited money, they bequeathed money and, traditionally, they married money, but they rarely engaged actively in business enterprise...
...Snobbery, excluded from public rhetoric in post-war Britain, has made a powerful return through the media of persuasion, where it is crossed with "status" anxieties, competitive striving and market promotion...
...TODAY THE FIRM has grown to be a mighty corporation, possessed of great reserves, and largely immune to the, lesser fluctuations of the market...
...All this makes it difficult to see the system as a whole, and it may, perhaps, be easier to see the relationship between contemporary capitalism and the classic system of the nineteenth century if a comparison is drawn with the later Middle Ages...
...Right now things are fine...
...Nineteenth century bourgeois values, formed in opposition to the Anglican-gentry ethos of the governing classes, were individualist in emphasis and, at least in the first half of the century, anti-aristocratic in bias...
...Deference voters" are a minority of working class people, just as the status anxious, "other-directed" are a minority of mainly middle class people...
...There is, in fact, what Peter Shore has called a `bast twilight area" where government and industry mesh and interact, and where corporate influence is brought to bear on public policy quite as often as the other way round: as Sir Patrick Henessy, Chairman of Ford in Britain, declared when his negotiations with the government seemed likely to break down: I think everything will be all right, if only the government people behave themselves...
...Government subsidizes, in steel and aircraft, the major capital outlays...
...Today they are everywhere, concerned with steel as much as oil, engineering and chemicals as well as shipping...
...As the expense accounts grew longer, as the "fringe" benefits grew into the thick crop of company-financed privilege, the traditional upper classes were drawn, more and more, to enter active business life...
...It is the successful politician, the masterful men of power, who today "go on" from Whitehall and Westminster...
...The numbers of opportunities may have multiplied, but the scope of individual achievement is more and more distorted by the supremacy of commercial standards, and independence cramped by the sway of the corporate bureaucracies...
...A peer of the realm, Lord Luke, presides simultaneously over the Advertisers Association and the Packaging Institute...
...Television terms "The Right Frame of Mind...
...Colvilles, the giant Scottish steel firm, receives a government loan of £50m for their new plant...
...if the arts are to survive "in this age of the common man and the sometimes even commoner woman...
...and Alliance Assurance, first President of the Manchester College of Science and Technology, Governor of Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, and of Churchill College, Cambridge (the new foundation for elite scientists), he touches the interests of businessmen great and small, and is in fact their premier statesman: Chairman of their Institute of Directors, leader of the 1959 campaign against nationalization, their spokesman on all those areas of life— including now culture and education—which fall increasingly within the range of corporate influence and business control...
...Lord Weeks, before his recent retirement, was driven, like Lord Chandos, in one of the company's twin Rolls-Royce cars, and serves on the Board of Royal Exchange Assurance, Pilkington Brothers and the Public Schools Appointments Bureau...
...and ninety of the largest corporations have set up the Industrial Fund for Scientific Education whose disbursements, confined to the Public Schools, equip them for the tasks business now demands...
...Medieval historians give the name "bastard" feudalism to the English society of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—a society in which the classic feudal structures had been greatly weakened, but where the traditional feudal elites were able to maintain and even, in new forms, extend their domination...
...Lord Knollys (like Lord Chandos, his family fortunes originate with a Hundred Years WarCaptain), is chairman of Vickers and a director of Barclays Bank as well as three insurance houses...
...It is not only those who become employees of industry who are affected...
...Business now appropriates the style of the traditional upper classes, and exploits their pretensions in the service of its sales...
...General Templer returns from Malaya to a directorship of Royal Exchange Assurance...
...It is to recognize that the growth of business—the values it purveys, the class it sustains, the priorities it once more decides—has been the most powerful trend of the fifties...
...The anti-aristocratic ethos, too, has disappeared...
...In an age of free competition and unincorporated enterprise the margin of success was narrow, security rare, and disasters a frequent occurrence (meteoric social descent was as constant a theme for Victorian novelists as upward nobility for contemporary writers...
...In the nineetenth century, new branches of business were often suspect and had to wait two or three generations before they acquired respectability...
...the former Principal of a London College is a governor of Ashridge, the £175-a-month college for executive cadets...
...The business baronies The revived capitalist system is not the same as the old, though it shares with it certain crucial features...
...The banks were formerly a separate estate within the business world, concentrating their activities on Empire, Land and Oversea Trade, and holding themselves aloof from manufacturing industry...
...The "take-over" bid, the most revolutionary development in company finance since the war, has been accepted by even the most conservative City houses, and Hire purchase shares has now been bought up by the most respectable banking firms...
...They are attended by the entire upper, upper-middle, and lower-upper-mid dle classes, as well as by a large proportion of the ordinary middle classes...
...he was educated at Eton, married the daughter of the Tenth Duke of Leeds, and lives at Trafalgar House, the former seat of the Nelson family...
...They rule over imposing hierarchies, managing the managers and directing the directors...
...For in the past, the intellectual was perhaps more distant from business than any other section of the population...
...Britain may be a humane society, noted for its social cohesion...
...Sociologists act as advisers to market research companies...
...The manager must have a sublimated tenacity of purpose...
...IT'S BUY, BUY, BUY DAY," the Evening Standard headline proclaimed: The Stock Exchange boom became the biggest zoom on the Tories' Glory...
...Running the country, after all, is just the biggest business of them all...
...if not he will find that business has now become the principal patron of the arts, and its support more and more inescapable...
...Chemicals...
...In fact it is as representative of "bastard" capitalism as was coal and cotton for laissez-faire, or Empirebuilding for the capitalism of the turn of the Century...
...There are profound unities in the country, and though they may have been seen, latterly, at their least productive—blunting the edge of radical reform, muffling the voice of protest—they were responsible, in the past, for the spirit and the resistance of 1940, the mood of hope and aspiration in 1945, and the upsurge of genuine classlessness which accompanied it...
...Now they are overlapping in their spheres of action and intertwined in their interests...
...The executive suite is replacing the mitre, the sceptre and the sword as the magnet of upper-class aspiration, and business recruitment from the public school increases year by year: from 38% of all leaders in 1951 to 51% in 1956...
...They are the "magnates" of the industrial baronies and business connections...
...Film rights, ice rink, property deals, theatre management, gold mining shares, a highland estate, in these and in other deals Mr...
...Sir Anthony Eden, after Suez, packed off on a Mediterranean cruise to write his Memoirs...
...The individual baron lost his independent position and was drawn into the great baronial "connections...
...By the end of the fifties business had regained and even reinforced its hold on the country...
...Commander Michael Parker, Personal Secretary to Prince Philip, leaves the Palace to become aide to Felix Fenston, the property millionaire...
...they straddle great industries and touch upon every interest in the business world...
...Today, however, they win immediate Establishment recognition...
...A.E.l...
...Lord Kindersley takes time off from leading Lazards merchant bank to be Chairman of Rolls Royce and Governor of Royal Exchange Assurance...
...Indeed, so large have they grown, and so complex in organization, that sometimes, as in theories of the "managerial revolution," they are misleadingly compared to the great bureaucracies of the public service, and their power is said to be wielded by "faceless," hierarchically-graded managers...
...Business and the Intellectuals Business has recruited the service of the professionals and intellectuals at the same time as it has placed the upper classes in its command positions...
...Nevertheless the pressures are there...
...It was a sorry record and people concluded that the capitalist system could no longer work, nor the governing classes continue to govern...
...and for the Metropolitan intellectual who has come to identify the "cultured life" with the artifacts of gracious living...
...The older professions themselves are drawn more and more into the businessman's service...
...The heir inherited the family estate, the younger son practiced at the Bar or entered the Church, the distant cousin worked in the Indian Civil Service...
...Of Winchester School leavers in the 1840s only 6%Jo went into business, 34% into the Church...
...Lord Chandos had no doubt about the importance of his new position...
...the eminent administrator made a second career on the Company Board...
...At the same time advertising and packaging busily seek to raise their status from "trades" to "professions...
...In the past it was the failed politician who went into business—a "guinea-pig" directorship was a recognized compensation for the superfluous Cabinet Minister, affording him a life of relative indolence and considerable ease...
...The business values Business is thus no longer contained by a culture hostile, in certain respects, to the commercial spirit...
...This code survived the collapse of land values in the 1870s...
...Staffordshire ironmaster or Lancashire millowner, the Victorian businessman was, typically, a small entrepreneur, owning no more than a single factory...
...The rise of the larger company, both home and colonial, brought ample opportunity for absentee ownership and passive directorships, and for three generations upper class life came to depend on Burmah Oil and Kaffirs abroad, steel and shipbuilding at home...
...with its night club and restaurant overlooking Hyde Park from thetop of a 25-storey building, he will have altered London's skyline...
...His prowess is the favored subject of feature writers, and his personality becomes the inescapable subject of the gossip columns...
...Today, business draws its leadership from every section of the Establishment...
...Teaching has suffered a downgrading in status...
...Impersonal objects gain in importance over personal qualities: for the New Town housewife, sitting alone among her new furnishings while her husband works the overtime that pays for their purchase...
...Clore supports his busines palatinate on Furness Shipbuilding and Bentley's Engineering, as well as by his more publicized "take-over" activities in building, property and shoes...
...And there were the aggressive selling tours abroad—electric trains in South America, atomic stations in Canada, visiting Franco (accompanied by the Ambassador) one day, flying to Africa for banking talks on the next...
...exception of accountancy—have suffered a steep decline in Public School entrants...
...The change is mirrored in the Public Schools...
...Frightened leaders of a contracting Empire, they had shown themselves, over two decades, astonishingly incompetent in the very functions—Diplomacy, Finance and Defense—where even their critics had credited them with a certain traditional "flair...
...So today there is the burden of management...
...External boundaries have gone the way of internal divisions...
...In the past their purpose was to fit the upper-class cadet to "serve God in Church and State...
...They have no real equivalent in the United States...
...The Corporations are the "connections" of "bastard" capitalism, affording business leaders a range of genuine powers far beyond the reach of even the greatest Victorian captain of industry...
...Thus business makes a profession of the trades and a trade of the professions, a commerce of culture and a culture of commerce, and the intellectual becomes like the characteristic "retainer" of "bastard" capitalism indentured in the retinues of the business corporation...
...Their careers could never have been so comprehensive, nor their sway so ubiquitous, while enmeshed in the dreary routine of Committees and Debates which makes the "mere" politician seem almost provincial in comparison with the contemporary business leader...
...The businessman has become a formidable presence in the lives of intellectuals...
...The peasant, his bondage ended, his dues commuted, was freer and more prosperous than under "high" feudalism, but at the same time the influence of feudalism on the nation's life was, in other directions, considerably extended...
...in chemicals, A.E.I...
...But in the fifties the edge of government control has been increasingly blunted, and it serves today rather to augment than to attenuate the power of corporate giants...
...Once again they set the pace for society—objects of emulation, the "Top" towards which everyone was urged to aspire...
...If there is unemployment on Merseyside it is to Fords that the government must turn, and upon them that the location of industry will ultimately depend...
...Science Block at Eton stands as symbol for the consummated alliance of business and class...
...business, as well as providing the main source of privileged living, has now become the characteristic occupation of the upper classes...
...Clore has acted as a pioneer, and perhapsthe most polished exponent of the technique that has become familiar underthe name of the "take-over" bid...
...For the business values, too, have been "bastardized...
...He is, in fact, rapidly becoming the favored hero of English society, a knight-errant whose exploits are chronicled in meticulous detail...
...How are the fallen mighty...
...Simultaneously business leaders have made strenuous efforts to attract university graduates, some to seek out technologists, like Lord Chandos who believes that "the young engineering graduate is today the most valuable commodity in the world—except perhaps a bar of gold...
...At the same time they act as politicians quite as often as businessmen, exerting pressures on government, serving on its committees, controlling its controllers...
...Government action smooths the path of corporate expansion, eliminating the risks attending innovation and guaranteeing its profitability...
...The artist may already work for him—styling his products, designing his advertising, his exhibition "stands," his "house" magazine...
...Unilever— a single firm covering multiple subsidiaries—employs as many workers as the engineering industry of the 1860s, and its advertising budget alone (£83m) is twice the amount spent by government on colonial development and welfare...
...BUT IF THE BUSINESS influence has come, through salesmanship, to be greater than in the past, penetrating every home in the land, it is an influence of a different kind...
...Business and the upper classes The career of Chandos is representative, for today the upper class man is most commonly seen in the "executive stance...
...Their verdict, in the 1945 elections, seemed decisive: A vote of censure [wrote Cyril Connolly in Horizon] on the shrewd, city-agent faux-bonhommes, a blow struck against the religion of money, it has given us a government who are "we" and not "they...
...Worried about the future, Harry...
...the noted industrial correspondent writes copy for steel industry advertisements...
...He may, of course, already be on one of industry's "sandwich courses"—whose number has multiplied five times in the last four years—but if not, he will be found in his first year lectures tentatively pencilling rings in the "Appointments" column of The Economist or The Guardian, introduced, in his second, to businessmen scouring their old College in search of recruits, and finding, as his last year draws to its close, that the P.R.O.'s await him with their strenuous persuasion and "personal messages...
...For permission to use this version we are grateful to the English publisher of the book, Stevens and Sons...
...others who are equally anxious to employ the arts graduate, like the Director of Shell who recently declared, "We like to take boys who have learnt Greek...
...Such serenity is evidence of managerial greatness...
...Salesmanship is not only the characteristic industry of "bastard" capitalism, it also popularizes its characteristic ethos, serving, in part, the function performed for Victorian capitalism by the Self-Help manual and the Methodist sermon...
...Nubar Gulbenkian ("The Tories seem to have done damn well") and the Duchess of Argyle ("gosh, isn't the news good"), while nearby the Bishop of Stepney tucked a crucifix into his great black cummerbund, and danced a jig, shouting "Great, great...
...Britain is the world's largest importer of Champagne, the drink that says Success...
...It destroys the individualism...
...The free play of the market has been limited and circumscribed, yet business has moved into areas of national Iife which previously were barred to it, and taken into its service...
...Capitalism, too, has undergone a "bastardization" of its classic forms, while yet retaining its fundamental social character...
...which previously it proclaimed, debasing it to the process of "getting on" and "going places," in which the quest for individual self-sufficiency gives way to the status anxieties of the managerial "staff" and "line," and the borrowed prestige, the personality projected, the taste successfully displayed, gain in importance over the more explicit standards of the past...
...I hey are still isolated figures, and the Universities are far from taking after the American academic pattern where some colleges appear, at times, to be almost extra-mural departments for the big corporations, but the trend is in that direction...
...When the coal industry is to be overhauled, it is the Chairman of I.C.I...
...The business revival has been matched by the great expansion of welfare, the growth of corporate power has gone alongside the extension of government intervention...
...High Sheriff, County of Oxford), is Managing Director of Morgan Grenfell, the leading merchant bank, and a director of the Bank of England, as well as serving on the boards of both Vickers and A.E.I...
...With a "permanent Conservative majority" now so firmly established, the victory was celebrated in a way that would have been unseemly after the elections of 1951 and 1955...
...The scatter of small industrial units has been transformed into great business complexes, which obliterate the traditional lines dividing finance from industry and business from government...
...Nor has his influence been confined to his corporate fief...
...passes on, in atomic energy, the fruits of its own pioneering work...
...The student finds the business offers are the most favorable he receives— and he receives them more often than any others...
...With habitual adaptability to changed circumstances, they sacrificed the rentiers—leaving the retired governor to molder in the Surrey Hills and lament the decline of "independent means"—and shifted the basis of their wealth from shrinking Empire to the expanding companies of industry and finance...
...More and more of the larger companies, following Rolls Royce's endowment of 500 Public School places in 1956, are financing the privileged education of the children of their managers and directors...
...And business, its leadership self-recruiting (from shop-floor or family dynasty) did not have occasion to demand his services: as late as the thirties it was virtually impossible for the intellectual to enter business, even had he wished to do so...
...Indeed, The Observer, finding that businessmen had crowded out its "Table Talk" column—they enjoyed a twenty-fold increase comparing 1949 and 1959—were forced to start a new column (by "Mammon") to cope with the flood of boardroom "celebrities," while the Sunday Times opened the Sixties with "The Multi-Millionaires," a series (by the former principal of Bangor University College) which likened Mr...
...In advertising there is the Advertisers Association and the Incorporated Society of Practitioners in Advertising...
...What The Queen called the "Boom in Lavish Living" was rapidly gathering pace: Money doesn't chink these days, it crackles louder than a forest fire...
...The corporations grow ever more ardent in their courtship: personal visits, a flow of literature, the provision of "transfer" scholarships and attractive training schemes—all are brought to bear on the Public School leaver, and their persuasiveness is increased by the direct role industry has now assumed in maintaining the Schools...
...who directs the reorganization, just as it is Lord Chandos who heads the government inquiry into subsidies for the new Cunard liners...
...Uneasy lies the head that wears a Crown" is a thought expressed by Shakespeare...
Vol. 7 • September 1960 • No. 4
