The Coming of Post-Industrial Society
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Without their immediate and unremitting guidance and correction the industrial system will not work. It is a mechanically organized structure of the technical processes designed, installed and conducted by the production engineers. Without them and their constant attention, the industrial equipment, the mechanical appliances of industry, will foot up to just so much junk.22
Veblen wrote in the first flush of excitement after the Russian Revolution, and he felt that a syndicalist overturn of society was possible—in fact, he thought it could be the only one, since political revolutions in advanced industrial society were passé. For half a century that idea has seemed strange indeed, but its revival by the French writers has been possible because the idea of a professional new class has meshed with the idea of alienation.
Where Mallet, like Veblen, restricted his analysis largely to the technicians, the French social critic André Gorz, an editor of Les Temps Modernes, has extended his thesis to the “alienated situation” of the entire professional class. Until now, he argues, the trade union movement has taken the necessary stand of fighting for “quantitative gains,” but this continuing strategy has become increasingly dysfunctional because it has tied the workers into the productivity of the economic system and the consumption society. The new strategy for labor, as well as for all professionals, should be to fight for “qualitative” changes, and in particular for control of production. In Gorz’s words:
... technicians, engineers, students, researchers discover that they are wage earners like the others, paid for a piece of work which is “good” only to the degree that it is profitable in the short run. They discover that long-range research, creative work on original problems, and the love of workmanship are incompatible with the criteria of capitalist profitability.... They discover that they are ruled by the law of capital not only in their work but in all spheres of their life, because those who hold power over big industry also hold power over the State, the society, the region, the city, the university—over each individual’s future ...
It then becomes immediately evident that the struggle for a meaningful life is the struggle against the power of capital, and that this struggle must proceed without a break in continuity from the company level to the whole social sphere, from the union level to the political realm, from technology to culture.... From then on everything is involved: jobs, wages, careers, the city, the regions, science, culture, and the possibility of developing individual creative abilities in the service of humanity.... This goal will not be reached merely through nationalization (which risks turning into no more than bureaucratic governmentalization) of the centers of accumulation of capital and credit: it also requires the multiplication of centers of democratic decision making and their autonomy; that is to say, a complex and coordinated network of regional and local autonomous bodies. This demand, far from being abstract, has or can have all the urgency of imperious necessity.... because once a certain level of culture has been reached, the need for autonomy, the need to develop one’s abilities freely and to give a purpose to one’s life is experienced with the same intensity as an unsatisfied physiological necessity.
The impossibility of living which appeared to the proletarians of the last century as the impossibility of reproducing their labor power becomes for the workers of scientific or cultural industries the impossibility of putting their creative abilities to work. Industry in the last century took from the countryside men who were muscles, lungs, stomach: their muscles missed the open spaces, their lungs the fresh air, their stomachs fresh food; their health declined, and the acuteness of their need was but the empty functioning of their organs in a hostile surrounding world. The industry of the second half of the twentieth century increasingly tends to take men from the universities and colleges, men who have been able to acquire the ability to do creative or independent work; who have curiosity, the ability to synthesize, to analyze, to invent, and to assimilate, an ability which spins in a vacuum and runs the risk of perishing for lack of an opportunity to be usefully put to work.23
The most serious efforts to apply Gorz’s ideas to the American scene have been made by some radical young economists at Harvard, notably Herbert Gintis. Gintis sees a “new emergent social class in modern capitalism,” a new working class which he broadly labels “educated labor.” Drawing upon the standard work of Edward Denison, and of his Harvard colleague Samuel Bowles, Gintis emphasizes the importance of “educated labor,” because if one compares the relative contribution of physical capital (machines and technology) with “human capital” in the economic growth of the United States between 1929 and 1957, labor is between five and eight times more important than physical capital. But Gintis sees educated labor as pressed into a mold by the requirements of the capitalist system. A revolutionary outlook emerges because of the alienated desire of educated persons for a full life as producers, as against the fragmentation and specialization which is their lot in the workaday world. For Gintis, the student rebellion against the university foreshadows the possible revolt of all “educated labor” against capitalism.
The weakness of this abstract analysis lies, first, in seeing the students as the model for the revolution of the future. The university, even with required courses, is not the prototype of the corporate world, and it is highly unlikely that even “raised student consciousness” was a consciousness of “oppression.” Universities are a “hot house” in which a student lives in a world apart, free largely, especially today, from the sanctions and reprisals of adult authority for almost any escapades. After graduation students enter a different, highly differentiated society and begin to take on responsibilities for themselves and their new families. It is not so surprising, therefore, that whatever the initial benchmark of radicalism, the college generation, as it grows older, becomes more conservative.24
A second weakness is the monolithic rhetoric about the requirements of “the system.” Paradoxically (and perhaps tongue-in-cheek) Gintis drew his analysis not from Marcuse but from the functionalist school of sociology, particularly Talcott Parsons, which Marxists have attacked as too simple a view of the “integration” of society. In any event, both the functionalist and the Marcusian views are too constricted in their understanding of the diversity and multiplicity of the society and the culture. There is no “system” which “reproduces” the existing division of labor in the next generation, but many different trends deriving from the diverse sources of occupational trends in the United States.
And third, Gintis sees bureaucratization as identical with capitalism (“The bureaucratization of work is a result of the capitalist control of the work process, as bureaucracy seems to be the sole organizational form compatible with capitalist hegemony”), rather than as a pervasive feature of the historic development of all technological and hierarchical societies, capitalist and communist.25And what he misses, in his abstract conception of bureaucracy, are the large number of changes taking place in organizations which are modifying the classic hierarchical structures of bureaucracy by encouraging committees and participation. While such changes, it is true, do not alter the fundamental character of authority, the modifications often serve to provide the individual with a greater degree of participation than before.
The sources of these critiques are the moral impulses of socialist humanism, but though one can sympathize with their values, it is folly to confuse normative with analytical categories and convert social tendencies into rhetorical wish fulfillment, as Gorz and Gintis do. The engineers, for example, fit many of the attributes of the alienated “educated worker.” Few of them are allowed to decide how their skills and knowledge will be used; the transition from a defense economy, combined with the drastic slash in research-and-development spending, has made many of them aware, for the first time, of the precariousness of a “career.” Yet they do not in the least identify themselves with the “working class.” (As Fortune found in a recent study of engineers, in June 1971, “Many have moved up into engineering from blue-collar
union families and don’t want to slip back.”) What counts for the engineer is the maintenance of a “professional status.” They complain that the word engineer is now used to describe everyone from a salesman (a systems engineer at IBM) to a garbage collector (a sanitary engineer, in the Chicago euphemism). The effort to reassert their professional status—through membership in high-prestige associations, through stiffer requirements for professional certification, through changes in school curricula—is an effort at differentiation, not identification.26
This effort to maintain professional status—one aspect of a society in which individual social mobility is still a positive value— comes into conflict, however, with the New Left populism, which derogates professionalism as “elitism.” In the schools, in the hospitals, in the community, the New Left political impulse is to deplore professionalism and hieratic standing as means of excluding the people from decisions. Thus one finds today the paradox that “educated labor” is caught between the extremes of bureaucratization and populism. If it is to resist the “alienation” which threatens its achievement, it is more likely to assert the traditional professionalism (certainly on the ideological level) than go in either direction. To this extent, the phrase “new working class” is simply a radical conceit, and little more.
The Constraints on Change
There is little question, I believe, that in the next few decades we shall see some striking changes in the structure of occupations and professional work. Within the factories there will be new demands for control over the decisions of work as the new, younger and more educated labor force faces the prospect of long years in a mechanical harness and finds the monetary rewards (which their forebears struggled to achieve) less important. Within the professions there will be more social-mindedness as a newer generation comes to the fore and the structure of professional relationships changes. Within medicine, for example, one of the central occupations of a post-industrial society, the inevitable end of the “fee-for-service” relationship, replaced by some kind of insurance-cum-government payment scheme, means the end of the doctor as an individual entrepreneur and the increasing centrality of the hospital and group practice. A whole new range of issues opens up: who is to run the hospitals—the old philanthropic trustees, the municipal political nominees, the doctors, the “constituencies,” or the “community”? How does one balance research and patient care in the distribution of resources? Should there be more big teaching hospitals with greater sophisticated facilities or more simple community medical services? Similarly, within the law, the greater role of government in welfare, services for the poor, education, consumer standards, and health provides a whole new area of public-interest law for the lawyer alongside the older areas of business, real estate, labor law, wills and trusts. The multiplication of junior and community colleges and the break-up of the standard curricula in most universities provide an arena for experiment and change.
And yet, ironically, at a time when many needed reforms seem about to be made in the area of work and in the professions—in part out of the upheavals of the 1960s, in greater part because of the deeper forces of structural changes of a post-industrial society— there will be stronger objective constraints on such changes (apart from the vested and established interests which are always present) than in the previous several decades of American economic and social development.
There is, first, the constraint of productivity. The simple and obvious fact is that productivity and output grow much faster in goods than in services. (This is crucial in the shift in the relative shares of employment: men can be displaced by machines more readily in goods-production than in services.) Productivity in services, because it is a relation between persons, rather than between man and machine, will inevitably be lower than it is in industry. This is true in almost all services. In retailing, despite self-service, supermarkets, and pre-packaging, the rising proportion of the labor force engaged in marketing reaches a ceiling of productivity. In personal services, from barbering to travel arrangements, the nature of the personal relations is fixed by time components. In education, despite programmed learning and television instruction and large lecture classes (which students resent), the costs of education have been increasing at five to seven percent a year, while productivity for all services (including education) has shuffled upward at 1.9 percent a year. In health, despite multiphasic screens and similar mechanized diagnostic devices—a gain in numbers examined, but a loss in personal care —there is only so much of a physician’s time to be distributed among patients. And, at the extreme, the example of live musical performances, where, as William J. Baumol is fond of pointing out, a half-hour quintet calls for the expenditure of 2½ man hours in its performance, and there can be no increase in productivity when the musician’s wage goes up.27
This problem comes to a head in the cities whose budgets have doubled and tripled in the last decades (apart from welfare) because the bulk of municipal expenditures—education, hospitals, police, social services—falls into the non-progressive sector of the economy, and there are few real economies or gains that can halt these rises. Yet it is productivity which allows the social pie to expand.
The second constraint is an inflation which has been built into the structure of the economy itself by the secondary effects of bilateral actions of strong unions and oligopolistic industries. The inflation which has wracked the American economy since 1968 has been due, in great measure, to the deceptions of President Johnson, who masked the costs of the Vietnam War from the country and who was afraid to raise the necessary taxes to finance the war. The bill, inevitably, will be paid for in the later years. But the Vietnam War apart, inflation has become a structural problem for the economy. The major alarums and noise of collective bargaining in such major industries as steel and auto, electric products and rubber, have been, in reality, mimetic combats in that an unstated but nonetheless real accommodation has been worked out between the contending parties. The unions receive substantial wage increases, and these increases become the occasion for even more substantial price increases which the industries, with their ability to “administer” prices, are able (until recently) to pass on to the public without protest either from the unions or from government.28
As a result of this system, the unions have been able to force wages up at an average rate of 7 percent annually for the past four years (while in some industries, such as printing and the construction trades, the rate has been 12 percent a year). Meanwhile productivity has been growing at only 3 percent a year. If the economy were only a manufacturing economy, this would be manageable. The labor costs in goods manufacturing are about 30 percent of the total costs. A 10 percent wage increase means, then, only a 3 percent increase in the cost of production, which can be offset by productivity. But in the services sectors, the wage proportion may run 70 percent or more of the total costs of the services, so a parallel 10 percent increase in wages adds 7 percent to the cost of services; productivity in the services sector, however, averages between 1.2 and 1.9 percent. The gap between these rates is a rough measure of the secondary effects of the cost-push factor of inflation that is being built into the system.
It is the changed nature of the service economy which is responsible for the structural elements of inflation that have become built into the economy. According to John Kenneth Galbraith’s view of the “new industrial state,” inflation is maintained by negotiated wages and ever rising administered prices in the corporate sectors of the economy. But the experience of 1965 to 1970 showed a different pattern. In those years, the price index rose 30 percent. The price of automobiles, one of the most highly-concentrated industries, rose 15 percent. Durable goods—television, appliances, furniture—rose 18 percent. But the price of services—medical care, schooling, recreation, insurance—had gone up 42.5 percent. Some of that price rise was due to strong demand; yet in greater measure it was due to the increases in wages and prices in those areas with little corresponding gains in productivity.
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When the pattern of steadily rising wages becomes so fixed, one finds an exacerbation in the governmental or communal services sector, for the higher “prices” become, necessarily, higher “taxes”— and more political grumbling. One can extend the urban problem to the society as a whole. As a larger portion of the labor force shifts into services, there is inevitably a greater drag on productivity and growth, and the costs of services, private and governmental, increase sharply. And yet there is, also inevitably, a greater demand for government activities and government goods to meet the social needs of the populace. But one then faces a painful contradiction, for if the wages in the service sectors, especially government, rise without compensating gains in productivity, they become additional claimants on social resources, competing for money needed for hospitals, schools, libraries, houses, clean water, clean air, etc.
In the nature of post-industrial society, the government has become the single largest employer in the society. But winning wage increases from the government is a far different problem from winning increases from private industry. Increasingly there looms what James O’Connor has called “the fiscal crisis of the state.” The multiplication of government functions creates a need for new revenues. The concomitant expansion of the government bureaucracy increases costs. But government budgets are subject to constraints far different from those of private corporations, which can try to pass on their costs through price increases. Government revenues can increase in three ways. One is to step up the rate of economic growth and use the resulting gains in GNP for government purposes rather than private consumption. (This was how the government social programs were financed in the early 1960s.) But such acceleration risks inflation, and at the moment no Western society seems to know how to bring inflation under control. The second is to increase productivity in the government and service sectors, but while some gains are possible, intrinsically these will always lag behind the “progressive” industrial sectors. A third way is to raise taxes. But there is an increasing public outcry against rising taxes. The alternative is to cut government programs and hold down spending, but given the multiple pressures from different groups—business wants to cut social programs but maintain subsidies; labor wants higher budgets in all areas; reform groups want to cut the defense budget but expand social programs—this is not easy. And in all likelihood the fiscal problems will increase. This may well be an intractable problem of post-industrial society.29