by Daniel Bell
This is not the first translation of my book into Russian. In the late 1970s, the book appeared in the so-called White Series, a selection of works by Western authors published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party for limited distribution and intended for Party research institutions. The print ran did not exceed 300 copies, most of which were lost when the Party units were disbanded, and the name of the book did not appear when the list of works in the former Lenin Library were de-classified. Like Goldstein in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I had disappeared into the black hole of non-memory.
When it was published, my book was caught up in a swirl of ideological conflict because of the perceived threat to Marxism. Raymond Aron, the distinguished French sociologist, had put forth the idea of “industrial society” (an idea derived from Auguste Comte) to show the common features, and requirements, of all industrialized countries. This idea led to an attack on Aron and Walt Rostow (who in 1960 had published his book Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto) by Yuri Zamoshkin in Kommunist in March 1963 (“The Reactionary Theory of the Undifferentiated Industrial Society”). Zamoshkin called the idea a “trick of bourgeois propagandists” to “provide the leaders of imperialist states with a weapon” against the Marxist-Leninist theory of social development. There was no effort to deal with the arguments. It was simply a tirade.
The concept of post-industrial society, while starting off from Raymond Aron, proposed an “axial principle,” the codification of theoretical knowledge. But the Soviet Communist Party had proclaimed itself as the forebear of the new “scientific-technological revolution” that was transforming society. The concept I proposed was a radical challenge to that vague formulation, and my argument drew some very different consequences. The first one who understood these consequences was the Czech sociologist Radovan Richta, who in 1967 published the study Civilization at the Crossroads, which became an intellectual sensation in Czechoslovakia. Richta, who knew of my work from some reprints in an American business publication, stated forcefully:
Science is emerging as the leading variable in the natural economy and the vital dimension in the growth of civilization. There are signs of a new (post-industrial) type of growth with a new dynamic stemming from continuing structural changes in the productive forces, with the amount of means of production and manpower becoming less important than their changing quality and degree of utilization. Herein lie the intensive elements of growth, the acceleration intimately linked with the onset of scientific and technological revolution, (emphasis in the original)
Richta drew the conclusion that a new social and class structure would be emerging that could “quite well be called ‘post-industrial civilization,’ ‘tertiary civilization,’ ‘services civilization,’ etc.” (see chapter one of this volume for fuller quotes from Richta).
The Soviet ideologists were horrified, and at the next meeting of the International Sociological Association, Richta ignominiously repudiated his work and “confessed” his ideological errors. His book disappeared from circulation. This was why, when I published this book on post-industrial society, I included large extracts from Richta’s work so that the reader would have a full account of his ideas.16
The Soviet answer to my work was undertaken by Eduard Arab-Ogly in a book entitled, in English, In the Forecasters’ Maze (Moscow Progress Publishers, 1975). Dr. Arab-Ogly begins respectfully: “The concept of ‘post-industrial society’ as presented by Daniel Bell ... represents perhaps the most original and in many respects exceptional attempt (in the context of non-Marxist sociological writing) to sum up and forecast the social consequences of the technological revolution.” The term post-industrial society, Dr. Arab-Ogly continues, “has come to serve as an article of faith ... for all those who would like to put forward some attractive alternative in lieu of die theory of scientific communism.” And this is why, he says, “it is not surprising that the concept of post-industrial society was almost universally acknowledged not only in the United States and Western Europe but also in Japan.” But then Dr. Arab-Ogly provides “a Marxist analysis” of my role:
The label “official sociologist” fitted Bell better perhaps than anyone. In his book The End of Ideology, which appeared ten years ago, he expounded highly orthodox ideas (from the point of view of official, ruling circles in the United States). In 1964, President Johnson invited Bell as the official representative of American sociology to sit on the Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress set up by Congress to study the social consequences of the technological revolution. From the points of view of official government circles Bell also appeared as the most suitable candidate to head the Commission on the Year 2000, organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In all this,
Daniel Bell was the most prominent representative and ideologist of the social institution now rapidly taking shape in die United States, which has been aptly termed “Big Science.” Using Bell as its mouthpiece and the concept of “post-industrial society” which he formulated, “Big Science,” i.e. the upper stratum of the scientific intelligentsia and top university personnel, has openly demanded an independent role for itself in American society, (pp. 80-81)
What is amusing is that Dr. Arab-Ogly sees the United States as a kind of mirror image of Soviet society, highly organized by social groups in which there are “official” spokespeople representing “class interests” and, in my case, seeking to become “junior partners” with “Big Business” in sharing power and influence in the system of “state-monopoly capitalism.” The idea of shifting and loose coalitions of interest groups seemed difficult for Soviet theoreticians to understand, and the fact of independent scholarly individuals and institutions critically seeking to understand a complex society was even more alien to their understanding. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a non-governmental honorary society, and the idea of “official government circles” selecting “the most suitable candidate” is laughable.
For Marxists, as Dr. Arab-Ogly asserted, the technological revolution expressed in the theme of post-industrial society leads only “to the reproduction of social antagonism [of capitalism] on a still greater scale [as] was pointed out at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow in 1969 and at the 24th Congress of the Communist Party of die Soviet Union.” And in genuflection to party orthodoxy, Dr. Arab-Ogly concluded: “As Lenin stressed, there is no place for an interim social system between capitalism at its final state of monopoly capitalism on the one hand and socialism as the first phase of the communist socio-formation on the other” (p. 84).
Lenin may have been right—but not in the way he or his followers for seventy years may have anticipated. After all, Gorbachev began as a Leninist and then dissolved the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In the Soviet view, I was attacked as an anti-Marxist. But I am not anti-Marxist. There is so much of Marx’s analysis of social structure that has been absorbed into social science, as is true of any insightful theoretical observations. If anything, I am a post-Marxist, and as I said, Marx’s analysis remains as one of the most acute about Western capitalist society for the period from 1750 to 1970. The question is, Where did Marx go wrong? Let me begin with the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the work that summed up Marx’s early writings, including the unpublished manuscript “The German Ideology.”
In the Manifesto, Marx wrote:
The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry and national ground on which it stood. All old, established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones, industries whose products are co
nsumed, not only at home, but in every corner of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant land and climates. In place of the old local and national seclusion of self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.
This is a stunning, prescient statement, a situation we have seen unrolling for one hundred and fifty years and one that will continue into the next century.
Yet there was also a crucial intellectual and political confusion. For Marx, the agency of change was “the bourgeoisie.” The reason was that for Marx, all social structure was class structure. And in this unfolding picture, he also predicted that in the end there would only be two classes confronting each other, the bourgeoisie and the working class. Thus Marx also wrote: “The little middle class, the small shopkeepers, trades people, peasant proprietors, handicraftsmen ... all these classes sink into the proletariat ... crushed out in the competition with large capitalists and partly because their specialized skill is depreciated by the new methods of production. Thus is the proletariat recruited from all classes of the population.”
But that was not to be. If anything, the industrial proletariat has been shrinking in every advanced society in the world, while in post-industrial economies the professional, managerial, technical, and administrative occupations make up almost 60 percent of the labor force. And if the proletariat is shrinking, what warranty is there for the Soviet Communist Party to rule as the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the name of the proletariat?
Marx was one of the first to describe somewhat fully the capitalist process as a system. He singled out die role of technology in the displacement of labor as a mechanism of change. He understood the autonomy of the capitalist process. But he failed in his sociology. History may have been proclaimed as the history of class struggle. But more and more it has become the history of national conflict: Geo-economics confronts geo-politics (and the state often acts defensively against international economic forces) in a world driven by markets and profit. So Marx was half right. But he would have preferred the other half.
The appeal of Marxism as a sociological theory is that it is probably the only one that is both synchronic and diachronic, namely a theory of social structure (the synchronic) and a theory of changes (the diachronic). The difficulty is that while Marx’s two dimensions, social relations and techne, are yoked together, if one looks at the changes in modes of production over time, there is no clear and consistent relation between the two—if one looks, for example, at the changes from slavery to feudalism and from feudalism and capitalism.17
What I suggested, therefore, is that there is a considerable gain from Marx’s scheme it we “de-couple” the two dimensions and treat them as logically independent variables. Thus, along the “axis” of social relations, one can envision slave, feudal, and capitalist societies, all based on property relations; along the “axis” of techne, we can envision pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial societies. The relation between the two sequences depends on how one “rotates” the axes. Thus, along the axis of social relations, the United States and the Soviet Union might be contrasted as capitalist and state-collectivist societies; along the axis of techne, the United States and the Soviet Union would be seen as industrial societies. (This theme is elaborated in the 1976 foreword, which is included in this edition.)
The starting point for the conception of post-industrial society, as should be clear, arose from my effort to gain a greater conceptual clarity in the use of Marx’s scheme. As I began to develop the argument, I sought to understand the relation of technology to science—in particular to the codification of theoretical knowledge in the twentieth-century, and the development of what I have called an “intellectual technology” as against the older form of “mechanical technology”—and to understand the socio-economic consequences of the new occupations and situses unfolded.
The concept of post-industrial deals primarily with the techno-economic realm, and its impacts are vast. In the quarter-century since the first edition of this book, there have been extraordinary changes in that domain. Thus I devote the next two sections of this foreword to a clarification of the nature of technology and to an elaboration on the emergent feature of post-industrial developments, the centrality of information, and what is being called “the information age.”
III
TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH
In 1956 and 1957, Robert M. Solow wrote two classic papers for which he later received the Nobel Prize; they brought technology to the center of economic growth theory.18 Classical economic theory had been concerned with Walrasian general-equilibrium theory and Marshallian partial-equilibrium theory under conditions of perfect and imperfect competition. Economics had been concerned (in the formulations of Lionel Robbins) with the allocation of scarce resources against competing demands. And Keynesian economics, arising during the depression years, had focused on the inability of savings to pass over into investment and the need for increased demand, usually through some government stimulus, to get a stagnant economy moving. It was only after World War II with the rebuilding of the shattered economies of Germany and Japan and the concern with economic development of the post-colonial nations that systematic attention turned to growth theory in economics.
The first effort was the so-called Harrod-Domar formula (named after the British economist Roy Harrod and the Russian-American economist Evsey Domar), which, focusing on capital-output ratios, sought to specify the level of sustained investment that would be needed for a targeted growth rate. (Thus, in a simple example, if the capital-output ratio were 2:1, a targeted growth rate of 5 percent would require a 10 percent sustained rate of investment.) Here the focus was entirely on capital investment.
The 1956 Solow paper, a theoretical model, stated that the level of output per worker in the long run is a function of the rate of investment in capital, the growth rate of the labor force (the usual components of economic theory), and the level of technology. The key point was the role of technical change in shifting the capital/labor ratios in any production function.
In the theoretical paper, technology was taken to be exogenous—a set of factors outside the intrinsic model—and it therefore was treated as a residual, as consisting of the increases in productivity and growth that were unaccounted for by capital or labor. The second Solow paper, focusing on the empirical evidence, sought to measure the contribution of technology to economic growth. The residual could be investment in machinery, human capital, organization innovation, and the like. But in general, it was subsumed to be, and was called, simply, “technology.” The “Solow residual” has accounted for, depending on the time period one chooses, between 40 and 60 percent of U.S. trend growth19. In short, what we have known intuitively or from narrative or from case studies became formalized and integrated into economic theory, which, like all good theory, can be applied to other contexts as well.20
It is clear that if we wish to understand modern society and the way it has been transformed in the past two hundred years, we have to understand the transformation of technology, in particular the change from a mechanical technology to an intellectual technology, the foundation of the post-industrial society.
We are today on the rising slope of a worldwide third technological revolution. It is a rising slope, for we have passed from the stage of invention and innovation into the crucial period of diffusion. The rate of diffusion will vary depending on the economic conditions and political stabilities of societies. Yet the phenomenon cannot be reversed, and its consequences may be even greater than the previous two technological revolutions that reshaped the West and now, with the spread of industrialization, other parts of the world as well.
What I hope to do in this section is identify the salient aspects of the “third technological revolution,” sketch a number of social frameworks that allow us to see how this technological revolution may p
roceed in the reorganization of basic structures, and describe the choices we may have.21
Note well that I make a distinction between a technological revolution and its socio-economic consequences. The phrase “the industrial revolution” obscures two different things: the introduction of steam power as a new form of energy and die creation of factories (social organization) to apply that energy to machines for the production of goods. The reason for the distinction is that there is no necessary, determinate single path for the use of the new technologies. The ways in which technologies can be organized vary widely, and these are social decisions that can be made in a conscious way. No one “voted in” the first industrial revolution in the way that political events such as the French and Russian Revolutions were shaped by active minorities. The industrial revolution moved along the path of least resistance because it generated profits and provided goods at cheaper prices.
The foundation of the first technological revolution was, as is evident, the use of steam for pumps, controlled chambers for locomotion, and machines. In the nascent factories, the machines were bunched together in straight-line shaftings. The reason was simply that steam loses its heat as it moves away from the source, and this controlled the first layouts of the factory. Yet when electric power was introduced and machines could easily be dispersed, factory managers, accustomed to the control pattern that had been established decades before, simply continued the layout of the factory. Similarly, the width of the first railway tracks followed the width of the traditional carriages, though they could have been widened quite easily, as they were later, on different rail systems. Here again, established habits, the first tracks through the virgin forest, so to speak, became the matrix for future activities.