by Daniel Bell
... in post-capitalist society the ruling and the subjected classes of industry and of the political society are no longer identical; that there are, in other words, in principle two independent conflict fronts. Outside the enterprise, the manager may be a mere citizen, the worker a member of parliament; their industrial class position no longer determines their authority position in the political society.
It is post-capitalist society, in short, because relation to the instruments of production no longer decides dominance or power or privilege in society. Economic or property relations, while still generating their own conflicts, no longer carry over or become generalized as the major center of conflict in society. Who, then, constitutes the ruling class of post-capitalist society? “We have to look for the ruling class,” writes Dahrendorf, “in those positions that constitute the head of bureaucratic hierarchies, among those persons who are authorized to give directives to the administrative staff.” But while there may be managerial or capitalist elites, real power is in the hands of the governmental elites. (“It is necessary to think of this elite in the first place, and never to lose sight of its paramount position in the authority structure of the state.”) Conflicts occur primarily in the political arena; changes are introduced or prevented by the government elites; and when managerial or capitalist elites seek to exercise power outside their domains, they do so by seeking to influence governmental elites.
Who are the governmental elites? The administrative staff of the state, the government ministers in the cabinet, the judges. But since governments represent interests, there are “groups behind” the elites.
In abstract, therefore, the ruling political class of post-capitalist society consists of the administrative staff of the state, the governmental elites at its head and those interested parties which are represented by the governmental elite. This insistence on governmental elites as the core of the ruling class must be truly shocking to anybody thinking in Marxian terms, or, more generally, in terms of the traditional concept of class...
As Dahrendorf writes, “if it sounds strange ...this strangeness is due to the strangeness of reality.” 5
“The reality is,” according to George Lichtheim, that “the contemporary industrial society is increasingly ‘postbourgeois’, the nineteenth-century class structure tending to dissolve along with the institution of private entrepreneurship on which it is pivoted. Hence the uncertainty that afflicts so much of current political thinking.” The reason is, says Lichtheim, that social welfare legislation and income redistribution “are aspects of a socialization process” that circumscribe the operation of a market economy, while at the same time the spread of public ownership creates a new balance between the public and private sectors. “Least of all does it follow that industrial society retains a ‘bourgeois’ complexion. There cannot be a bourgeoisie without a proletariat, and if the one is fading out, so is the other, and for the same reason: Modern industrial society does not require either for its operation.” 6
For Amitai Etzioni, we are in a “post-modern” era. He opens his book, The Active Society, with the portentous pronouncement, “The modern period ended with the radical transformation of the technologies of communication, knowledge and energy that followed the Second World War.” But unhappily nowhere else, literally, in the 670 pages of text, notes, and glossary that follow, is there a discussion of the technologies of communication, knowledge, and energy, or a specification of what, exactly, “post-modern societies” are like. In the end we have to return to the intention, at the opening lines of the preface:
A central characteristic of the modern period has been continued increase in the efficacy of the technology of production which poses a growing challenge to the primacy of the values they are supposed to serve. The post-modern period, the onset of which may be set at 1945, will witness either a greater threat to the status of these values by the surging technologies or a reassertion of their normative priorty. Which alternative prevails will determine whether society is to be the servant or the master of the instrument it creates.
So, the post-modern, period or society, is not a definition, but only a question.7
For Kenneth Boulding, we are at the start of the post-civilized era. Since civilization, as Mr. Boulding points out, has had a favorable connotation and post-civilization may strike one as unfavorable, one might use the word “technological or the term developed society.” But the distinctive characteristic of this new period for Mr. Boulding is the consciousness of, using Teilhard’s phrase, the noösphere, the sphere of knowledge, as the premise for the social direction of society and the achievement of social, as against individual, self-consciousness. Thus, the thrust of Boulding’s term is to emphasize the possibility of the guidance of society in the new, emerging period of social or mental evolution rather than the adaptive biological or social evolution of the past.8
In the epilogue to the 1969 (Vintage) edition of his British Politics in the Collectivist Age, Sam Beer talks of a “post-collectivist” politics. He feels that the collectivist model of British politics which was party-divided, functionalist, and oriented to the welfare state may be coming to a close. The post-collectivist tendency is a “reaction to the increasing scale and intensity of rationalization in both government and society.” And even though it would not create a basic rupture in the political mode, it could form a readjustment of the polity in England.
And so it goes. It used to be that the great literary modifier was the word beyond: beyond tragedy, beyond culture, beyond society. But we seem to have exhausted the beyond, and today the sociological modifier is post: a theologian, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, has described the religious scene in the United States in the 1960s as “post-Puritan, post-Protestant, and post-Christian.” 9 Lewis Feuer has subtitled his book on Marx and the Intellectuals as a “set of post-ideological essays.” John Leonard in The New York Times has talked of the “post-Literature Culture” as being heralded by the McLuhanite age.10 For S. N. Eisenstadt, the sociologist, the new states have become “post-traditional” societies for though they are ho longer bound by the norms of the past and they seek consciously to change, they live in a suspended world with little approximation to the modern societies of the West.11 Earlier, Roderick Seidenberg, foretelling the victory of rationalism, had described a post-historic man in which we move from prehistory, in which instinct dominated intelligence, through the transitional period of history into post-history, in which intelligence dominates instinct,12 just as in Zarathustra, man—suspended on the rope above the abyss—is the transition between the animal of the past and” the superman to come. And finally in this inventory (only by virtue of humility) we have the theme of the post-industrial society.13
The Two Schemata of Marx
We are all epigones of the great masters.14 Edward Shils was quite right when he commented recently:
One of the great difficulties is that we cannot imagine anything beyond variations on the theme set by the great figures of nineteenth and twentieth century sociology. The fact that the conception of “post-industrial society” is an amalgam of what St. Simon, Comte, de Tocqueville and Weber furnished to our imagination is evidence that we are confined to an ambiguously defined circle which is more impermeable than it ought to be.15
The one figure Professor Shils left out, strangely, is Marx, perhaps because we have all become post-Marxists. St. Simon described stages of history in alternating spirals of organic and critical societies (which foreshadowed Sorokin’s ideational and sensate mentalities), and Comte saw a rationalist progression of society from theological to metaphysical to a scientific stage. Both are insightful, if neglected theories, yet the source of our interest in social change is necessarily Marx. Marx rooted social change in social structure or institutions (rather than mentalities, even though he treated ideas too cavalierly or as epiphenomena), and he charted social change in determinate fashion seeking to lay bare the sources of that determinism in the social relations between men. Few of us would clai
m that the social changes we forecast arise out of the blue, or come solely from men’s imaginative design. Even when they emerge first as ideas they have to be embodied in institutions; and to chart social change is to chart the changes in the character of axial institutions. If, then, there is some pattern of determinism that one has to identify, one has to come to terms, again, with the ghost of Marx. If we seek to chart the stages of development of capitalist industrial society, we have to begin with the predictions of Marx. But in so doing we are confronted with a conundrum, for in this view of the future, there is not, as I shall try to show, one but two schemata, and it is to these two divergent schemata that most of the theories of social development are responsive.
In Capital (especially vol. I, chap. XXXIII, on the “Historical Tendency of Capitalistic Accumulation”) Marx sketched his basic scheme of social development: the structure of the new society, he said, namely, the socialized organization of production, lay fully developed within the womb of the old; this new structure reflected the increasing contradiction between the socialized character of production and the “fetter upon the mode of production” created by the “monopoly of capital”; society was becoming polarized in two classes, a diminishing number of magnates of capital and a steadily growing working class; the character of the new society becomes incompatible with the capitalist form of the old, and finally, the “integument is burst asunder,” and a socialist world has arrived. The metaphor is biological, the process is immanent, the trajectory of development unilateral.
And yet, of course, it did not turn out that way. Whatever the extraordinary power of Marxism as a social appeal, it was in backward countries, not advanced capitalist countries, that Marxist movements have been most successful. More importantly, the social structures of advanced capitalist societies have evolved in a fashion far different from that envisaged in the sketch in volume I. And yet Marx, in the later years, particularly in sections expressed in volume III of Capital did glimpse accurately the shape of things that did come. It is this set of differences between two different schemes of Marx which is the true, starting point for the analysis of social developments in capitalist and advanced industrial societies of the West.
Let us begin with schema one. Marx’s analysis of the capitalist process rests, initially, on two spheres of production: large-scale manufacture and agriculture.16 With the expansion of the capitalist system, however, the distinction between land and capital, and between the landowning and capitalist classes, disappears. The fusion of these two classes leaves in society two main classes: the capitalists, owners of the means of production, and the proletariat. Our assumption, says Marx, is the continuing spread of capitalist production to absorb the entire society; accordingly there are only these two classes. All dritte personen are excluded. As Abram Harris writes:
Dritte personen is a term which Marx used to designate two different but more or less related categories of people. The first category includes such independent producers as small farmers, independent handicraftsmen and all other hangovers of an earlier mode of production who function outside the capitalist process proper. The second category includes two groups (1) priests, shopkeepers, lawyers, state officials, professors, artists, teachers, physicians and soldiers who exist on the basis of the capitalist process but who do not participate in it; and (2) merchants, middle-men, speculators, commercial laborers (white-collar employees), managers, foremen, and all other officials who “command in the name of capital.” 17
Why should these dritte personen be excluded? For Marx, the independent farmers and artisans are outside the capitalist process, though they assume the character of the process. (As owners of their means of production they are capitalists; as owners of their labor power they are wage earners.) In any event, with the development of capitalism, as a class they will tend to disappear. The artists, physicians, professors, et al., are “unproductive workers.” To be productive labor must replace the old value advanced by the capitalist by new value in the form of surplus product and new capital. A cook or a waiter working in a hotel is “productive” because he has created profit for the hotel owner; as house servants they are unproductive even when paid a wage. Unproductive labor receives its income from the expenditures of the two dominant classes involved in production. If the worker-capitalist relation were to spread to medical service, amusement and education, the physician, artist and professor would then be wage earners and “productive.”
In all this, Marx assumed a model of “pure capitalism.”18 As Marx wrote:
Such a general rate of surplus-value—as a tendency, like all other economic laws—has been assumed by us for the sake of theoretical simplification. But in reality it is an actual premise of the capitalist mode of production, although it is more or less obstructed by practical fictions ... in theory it is the custom to assume that the laws of capitalist production evolve in their pure form. In reality, however, there is always but an approximation.
This assumption of a “pure form” is fundamental, then, to Marx’s analysis. It assumes that all non-capitalist spheres of production either would be eliminated by the expansion of the system or become subordinate to it. Whether the capitalist process is considered from the standpoint of commodities or from that of the distribution of income, “there are only two points of departure: the capitalist and the laborer. All third classes of persons must either receive money for their services from these two classes ... or in the form of rent, interest, etc.”.
Within the relation of capitalist and labor, a double process ensues, which is the “absolute, general law of capitalist accumulation.” The progressive accumulation of capital leads to a concentration of capital and its centralization in the hands of the “gigantic industrial enterprises” at the expense, principally, of the “many small capitalists whose capital partly passes into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanishes”. On the other hand, there is a disproportionate employment of constant capital as compared with variable capital, or labor. This produces a relative “surplus population” through the displacement of labor and causes the rate of profit to sink. (“The rate of profit sinks, not because the laborer is less exploited, but because less labor is employed in proportion to employed capital in general,”) Out of this comes the grand passion play of the economic apocalypse:
Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the labor process, the conscious technical application of science ... the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market. ... Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital ... grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers. ... Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.19
In a famous passage in the author’s preface to Capital, Marx argues that these results will work themselves out inevitably with iron necessity, and that the fate of England, the first country where this will happen, foreshadows the fate of all others. As Marx wrote:
The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas. If, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural laborers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell him, “De te fabula narratur!”
Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of
the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future (pp. 12–13, emphasis added).
Marx’s first schema of social development, it should be emphasized, is not an empirical description but is derived from his model of “pure capitalism.” Yet “pure capitalism” itself was a theoretical simplification, and by the time Marx had begun to write the third volume of Capital, the growth of a large-scale investment banking system and the emergence of the corporation had begun to transform the social structure of capitalist society. If in the first stages of capitalist society there had been an “old” middle class of formers, artisans, and independent professionals, what was one to say of the emerging “new” middle class of managers, technical employees, white-collar workers, and the like. This is the basis of schema two. Marx observed this phenomenon with extraordinary acuity.
Three crucial structural changes were taking place in the society. First, with the rise of a new banking system, the accumulation of capital no longer rested on the thrift and savings of the individual entrepreneur engaging in self-financing, but on the savings of the society as a whole. Marx comments: “This social character of capital is promoted and fully realized by the complete development of the credit and banking system. It places at the disposal of the industrial and commercial capitalists all the available, or even potential capital of society” (vol. III, p. 712).