The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  Although Burnham’s schematic and sweeping theory of the managerial revolution (a “Marx for the Managers ‘ was the biting appraisal by Gerth and Mills of Burnham’s intentions) never took sociological root, the idea that the Soviet Union had become a new social form, neither capitalist nor socialist, was widely accepted by socialist and non-Stalinist Marxists in the forties and fifties and was one of the elements that contributed to the disillusionment with the old ideologies that was characteristic of that period.

  The theme of the transformation of Soviet society into a new social form was given popular expression in 1957 by the publication of Milovan Djilas’s The New Class. The book lacked the theoretical sophistication of Trotsky and evaded the complexities of the analytical issues that had been posed by earlier Marxist writers (Hilferding, Solomon Schwarz, Yugow, Ciliga, Peter Meyer, Yvon), who had made the first statistical analyses of the class and occupational trends of Soviet society. Yet the book was a success for three reasons: it had been written in jail, and smuggled out, by one of the highest ranking former communists of the post-Second World War world, the vice-president of Yugoslavia, who had been expelled from the Party in 1954 for having called for its “democratization”; it was published shortly after the Hungarian Revolution which had given many socialists hope that the Soviet system might, surprisingly, begin to crack; and its simplified exposition was infused with a moral earnestness that was highly appealing.

  Djilas was quick to say that his analysis was principally of the communist world, the only one he knew. (“I do not pretend to know any world outside the communist world, in which I had either the fortune or misfortune to live.”) “It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to define the limits of the new class and to identify its members,” he writes. But “the new class may be said to be made up of those who have special privileges and economic preference because of the administrative monopoly they hold.” However, since the source of the privilege is the power of the Party, the heart of the new class is not the economic managers but the political bureaucracy. The very pattern of the Party, as a cadre of professional revolutionaries, itself foreshadowed the new class. Whereas in previous societies new classes attained power after new economic patterns had taken shape, in the communist world the reverse had happened. The new class “did not come to power to complete a new economic order, but to establish its own and, in so doing, to establish its power over society.”

  With an eye to the question of the managerial revolution thesis, Djilas writes: “It is important to note the fundamental differences between the political bureaucracies mentioned here and those which arise with every centralization in modern economy.” In every advanced society there arises a new white-collar class and “functionaries” who may be becoming a special stratum of society. Though “such functionaries have much in common with communist bureaucrats ... they are not identical.” Bureaucrats in non-communist countries “have political masters, usually elected, or owners over them, while communists have neither masters nor owners over them.” In the communist world, “The government both administers and distributes national property. The new class, or its executive organ—the Party oligarchy—both acts as the owner and is the owner. The most reactionary and bourgeois government can hardly dream of such a monopoly in the economy.” 69

  For Djilas, the death of Stalin meant that an epoch had passed and that some “normalization” of life would now be possible. The new class, he said, would not give up its power, but it “is tired of dogmatic purges and training sessions. It would like to live quietly. It must protect itself even from its own authorized leader now that it has been adequately strengthened”.

  A decade later, the question was raised whether or not the new class was “divided” and whether the growth of a new scientific and technical intelligentsia, a group whose creative elite had a stake in the freedom of inquiry, might not undermine the power of the Party over the society. The theme of an inherent conflict between the scientific intelligentsia and the Party bureaucracy was stated most sharply by Albert Parry in the book The New Class Divided (New York, 1966). Parry used the phrase “the new class” to capitalize on Djilas, but where Djilas, with some ambiguity, thought of the “new class” as the ruling Party bureaucracy, with an admixture of other elites, Parry was simply equating “the new class” with the “intelligentsia,” which, he stated, “constitute nearly one-fifth of all Soviet toilers.” Within this stratum which, as a whole, is more privileged than the working class and peasantry, there are about 600,000 “scientific workers,” and it is the demands of this group, symbolized for Parry by the career and the writings of the physicist Peter Kapitza, that would constitute the challenges to the Party’s monolithic control.

  How extensive or effective such an opposition can be is problematic. That such a mood of challenge exists is evident most clearly from the text circulated by Andrei Sakharov, one of the designers of the Soviet H-bomb, who has become the conscience of the intellectuals. In a section of his manifesto entitled “Intellectual Freedom is Essential,” Sakharov states:

  This position of the intelligentsia in society renders senseless any loud demands that the intelligentsia subordinate its strivings to the will and interests of the working class (in the Soviet Union, Poland and other socialist countries). What these demands really mean is subordination to the will of the Party or, even more specifically, to the Party’s central apparatus and its officials. Who will guarantee that these officials always express the genuine interests of the working class as a whole and the genuine interests of progress rather than their own caste interests?70

  And yet it is unlikely that the demands of a small elite, even though a strategic one, can be decisive in forcing the reorganization of power that would be necessary to assure the independence of the scientific community in the Soviet Union. Yet the necessity for some major structural changes does confront the Party leadership, for these needs derive, as any Marxist would know, from the changed socio-economic nature of the society. Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, has argued that the monolithic Party control on politics, and of the command system on the economy, while once, perhaps, necessary for the industrialization of the country, is now increasingly “disfunctional” because the heavily centralized structure is increasingly incapable of managing a complex “technetronic society” which requires plural initiatives in order to keep on growing.

  Brzezinski identifies five alternative paths of Soviet political development which he sees as logically possible.

  Oligarchic petrifaction: the Party maintains its dominant role; ideology remains dogmatic; political leadership remains collective since the absence of deliberately imposed change does not require major choices. In effect, this would be a continuation of the present tendency.

  Pluralist evolution: the transformation of the Party into a less monolithic body, somewhat as in Yugoslavia, and the ideological erosion of the dogmatic Leninist-Stalinist tradition. In that situation the Party’s “role would be more that of a moral-ideological stimulant than that of a ruler; the state as well as the society itself would become the more important source of innovation and change.”

  Technological adaptation: the transformation of the bureaucratic Party into a Party of technocrats. The state would be led by scientific experts, trained in the newer techniques, and look to scientific innovation for the preservation of Soviet security and industrial growth.

  Militant fundamentalism: the rekindling of ideological fervor, a shake-up in the rigid bureaucratic structure, a smaller, more centralized leadership and a greater posture of hostility to the outside world “along the lines of Mao Tse-tung’s ‘Cultural Revolution’.”

  Political disintegration: an internal paralysis in the ruling elite occasioned by the rising self-assertiveness of key groups and splits in the armed forces and other major support sectors of the system.

  “Looking approximately a decade ahead and using as a guide the present distribution of power in Soviet society,” Brzezinski says the Sovie
t leadership will seek to strike a balance between the first and third variants. It would seek to maintain oligarchic control yet, as in East Germany, to bring more technocrats into the decision-making process. However, says Brzezinski, because of the Party “style,” the hugeness of the country which makes integration difficult, and because of military demands, this course is likely to be impeded. Yet if it were followed, “the fusion of the first and third variants (striving to combine ideological rigidity with technological expertise) would ... involve the transformation during the 1970s of the present communist Party dictatorship into a communist praetorian oligarchy.” 71

  Social Development: The View from Moscow

  If we review where we stand, three major changes have emerged in the last forty years in the development of Western industrial societies: the transformation of the industrial enterprise by the emergence of managers as controllers of the organization; the changing composition of the occupational structure by the relative shrinkage of the industrial proletariat and the expansion of a new technical and professional stratum; and the transformation of the political system through the extension of the state bureaucracy and the rise of political technocrats.

  These processes are at work in both Western capitalist and Russian communist society. In the West, the extension of a state bureaucracy and the increasingly technical nature of political decisions create a problem of balance between those who manage the political system by responding to the major interests (the politicians representing business, labor and other constituencies) and the bureaucracies and technocrats. In the Soviet Union, the existence of a large bureaucracy which has transformed itself into a new class threatens the validity of communist ideology and the promise of a future classless society. For both systems, the common transformation of the occupational and class structures calls into question the “historic images” of the future of industrial society (if neither capitalists nor working class will “inherit the earth”), and raises the fundamental issue of the relation between the political systems of the societies—managerial, statist, bureaucratic, democratic—and the new-type social structure, be it “post-industrial,” “post-capitalist” or whatever other label one uses to designate an emerging society which is dominated by an educated professional-technical science class.

  In Western sociology there has been a sustained inquiry into these trends and a vigorous discussion of the social categories and social theories that might best serve to explain these changes. In the Soviet Union, until recently, there has been virtual silence. There have been few, if any, serious discussions of the structural changes in Western society. (The continuing designation of these societies as “capitalist” implies presumably that communist writers regard the characteristics of the system as defined by Marx and Lenin as still relevant.72) Discussion of the political nature of Soviet bureaucracy, and the theme of a “new class,” is, of course, tabooed. Only the changing composition of the Soviet occupational structure is a subject Soviet sociologists have recently begun to investigate, and here there is a full realization of the delicate nature of the subject and the ideological hornet’s nest it contains.

  If one turns to Soviet sociology, there are three levels of discourse that one can discern.

  There is, first, the tattered realm of official ideology. On that level, theoretical sociology is equated with historical materialism, “theory” consists of quotations from Marx and Lenin, and the standard textbooks repeat a simplified scheme of social development, vulgarizing Marx, as if nothing had changed in Western society in the last hundred years, or Soviet society in the last forty years, to modify the proclaimed schemes.

  Thus, Grigori Glezerman, in a book entitled The Laws of Social Development, writes:

  ... modern bourgeois sociology denies the possibility of cognition and the very existence of the laws or social development and thereby denies in most cases the possibility of prevision in social life. ... Their arguments about the impossibility of penetrating the veil of the future are primarily levelled against Marxism which has proved that communism will triumph. Marx proclaimed his thesis on the unavoidable downfall of capitalist society and its replacement by a socialist society over a hundred years ago.73

  For theoretician Glezerman, there are “general” laws and “specific” laws. The “general” law of social development is that socialism as a new socio-economic formation is inevitable. But since each country in passing through or bypassing capitalism is not predestined to follow the same path, there are also “specific” laws. Since in the course of history there are so many variants, in the logic of the argument we soon find that there is a specific “law” for each case! Such is the quality of theory.74

  A second level is scholarly, but still identified with the Party. It is centered in the Academy of Sciences, rather than in the official Party bodies, and is more interested in balancing the defense of traditional dogma and the upsetting results of “concrete” social research. Much of this work has been under the direction of Aleksei Rumiantsev, vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences until 1971. Rumiantsev has attacked “creeping empiricism,” yet at the same time he supported work in social forecasting as a means of supplying more sophisticated information about the changing character of Soviet society. In a paper delivered at the 1970 Varna meetings of the Sixth World Congress of Sociology, a paper remarkable for its freedom from cant, Rumiantsev set forth the basis for the social forecasting movement which has become a prominent part of Soviet sociology. “The lack of .adequate knowledge and comprehension of the present social situation destines the prevision of the coming changes to failure,” he wrote.

  The difficulty with prognostication ... derives from the very nature of social processes that are multifactor, complex and probabilistic ... we confront the necessity to study not only the objective economic factors, but a number of subjective factors as well: those of tastes, fashion, preferences, etc. ... The effectiveness of social planning depends to a great extent on the adequate consideration of both economic and noneconomic factors, as well as upon the knowledge of interests, motives, needs and inclinations. All that vast information can be effectively utilized only if statistical and mathematical methods, simulation and computer machinery are extensively resorted to in the process of cognition, planning and management.75

  Rumiantsev reflects the thinking of the “managerial communists” for whom the important change is the “scientific technological revolution” which they see as transforming Soviet society. For Igor Bestuzhev-Lada, a working futurologist, the “scientific-technological revolution” has “extraordinarily complicated the management of social processes.” In his book, A Window to the Future: The Present Day Problems of Social Forecasting, Bestuzhev-Lada reviews the different approaches to social forecasting and concludes that the “stochastic approach ... is the most effective, if not the only possible way of their truly scientific study.” He makes the further point that in futurology there has been a lack of research on the developments of moral-ethical norms and the way these developments will shape the scientific-technological revolution.76

  The third level of Soviet discourse is the large array of empirical social researches which take as their starting point the occupational divisions within the Soviet Union, and cautiously explore their meanings. As Leo Labedz points out, “Ever since Stalin said in 1931 that ‘no ruling class has managed without its own intelligentsia,’ there has been the awkward problem of how to define this group and relate it to the general social structure.” 77

  The fact is, as Rumiantsev indicated in 1965, that the “intelligentsia,” defined roughly as “mental labor,” comprise 25 million persons, or about one-fifth of the Soviet labor force. More importantly, as a host of studies document, the inheritance of such a position (and of wealth) is becoming an important fact in the creation of the new class structure in the Soviet Union.78

  A number of studies by Soviet sociologists indicate that in the land of “workers and peasants” few of the children of the
proletariat want to be workers, much less peasants and that the great majority want to go to college and to be members of the “intelligentsia.” As Zev Katz comments, “Though conducted independently in various parts of the Soviet Union, these studies show a remarkable uniformity in their major findings.” In the rankings on prestige, scientists, airplane pilots, and ships’ captains are at the top, jobs in agriculture and services are at the bottom. Moreover, the children of the intelligentsia are disproportionately represented in the universities, and the children of the peasantry find it exceedingly difficult to enter the universities at all. As N. M. Blinov of the sociological laboratory at Moscow University reported in 1966:

  .... class differences still have a strong influence upon social advancement of the individual and, therefore, the class structure as a social element plays a leading part in the formation of individual personality. For example, the relatively small number of people in the village with higher education is explained, among other things, by the fact that the percentage of students from the country is ten times lower than students from the town.79

  Under Khrushchev an effort was made to reverse this tendency by giving special preference for university places to children of workers and peasants and requiring those who sought to go on to the university to engage in a year of manual labor. By 1964 the “reforms” had been dropped and ideas of egalitarian education have been scrapped in favor of a new “meritocracy.” In Novosibirsk, for example, where a new “scientific city” has been created, the Novosibirsk Physics and Mathematics School, an exclusive prep school, selects 200 students annually from 100,000 likely candidates. In 1968 more than 500 such special elite preparatory schools had been opened throughout the Soviet Union. Previously, students in academic high schools spent up to 13 hours a week in manual labor; by 1968 the program was halted. Previously, young people who held jobs or served in the army had been allotted 80 percent of the places in universities; now the figure is down to 30 percent.80