The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  62 The major argument was first summarized by Shachtman in 1943 in his long introduction to the publication, then, of Trotsky’s The New Course, Trotsky’s initial statement on the develpment of bureaucracy in Russia which he wrote as an internal document for the Party in 1923, and which Shachtman translated to establish the beginnings of the revisionist doctrine. Shachtman published a collection of his own writings on the subject as The Bureaucratic Revolution: The Rise of the Stalinist State (New York, 1962).

  Inasmuch as when radical sects split each circle becomes squared, in the ideological break-up of the American Trotskyite movement in the early 1940s, Shachtman declared that a new social form, bureaucratic collectivism, had emerged in the Soviet Union, but at the other end of the quadrille the Johnson-Forest “tendency” argued that the Soviet Union could only be a “state capitalist” society. Johnson was the black writer C. L. R. James, who later went back to his first love, writing about cricket, on which he was an acknowledged authority. Forest was the pseudonym of the theoretician Raya Dunayevskaya, who had once been Trotsky’s secretary. Miss Dunayevskaya retreated to Detroit, where she founded a matriarchal sect whose major theoretical effort was to convince workers that a knowledge of Hegel’s Science of Logic was necessary to understand Lenin. Her book arguing this thesis in part, Marxism and Freedom (New York, 1958), carries an appreciative introduction by Herbert Marcuse. The two other corners were occupied by James P. Cannon, who defended the “orthodox” Trotsky view of Russia as a “degenerated workers’ state,” and James Burnham, who generalized the idea of bureaucratic collectivism into the sweeping idea of the managerial revolution.

  63 As Pareto describes the mechanism of this process: Revolutions come about through accumulations in the higher strata of society—either because of a slowing-down in class-circulation, or from other causes—of decadent elements no longer possessing the residues suitable for keeping them in power, and shrinking from the use of force; while meantime in the lower strata of society elements of superior quality are coming to the fore, possessing residues suitable for exercising the functions of government and willing to use force.

  Paragraph 2057, The Mind and Society (New York, 1935), vol. III, p. 1431, “Class-Circulation.”

  64 Robert Michels. Political forties (Clencoe, Illinois, reprint edition, 1949), pp. 31–37, 185–189.

  65 James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (New York, 1941). Citations, successively, to pp. 80, 72, 236, 159, 221, 32–33, 176, 247.

  66 A striking juxtaposition with Burnham is provided by Max Weber in an essay written in 1917 which contains a section called “Bureaucratization and the Naïveté of the Literati.” Said Weber:

  A progressive elimination of private capitalism is theoretically conceivable, although it is surely not so easy as imagined in the dreams of some literati who do not know what it is all about; its elimination will certainly not be a consequence of this war. But let us assume that sometime in the future it will be done away with. What would be the practical result? The destruction of the steel frame of modern industrial work? No! The abolition of private capitalism would simply mean that also the top management of the nationalized or socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic.... State bureaucracy would rule alone if private capitalism were eliminated. The private and public bureaucracies, which now work next to, and potentially against, each other and hence check one another to a degree, would be merged into a single hierarchy.

  From the essay “Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany,” reprinted as Appendix II, in Max Weber: Economy and Society, ed. Roth and Wittich, vol. 3, pp. 1401–1402.

  67 Clark Kerr, Frederick Harbison, John Dunlop, and Charles A. Myers, “Industrialism and Industrial Man,” International Labour Review (September i960), p. 10. As the writers say further, in their book on this theme: “Although professional management is destined to sweep aside its political or patrimonial predecessors, it seldom becomes a ruling elite in any society. In other words, the state does not become the property of the professional managers, as James Burnham envisioned in his “managerial revolution.” Rather the managers may be as much servants as masters of the state, as much subordinate as controllers of the market. The managers are a pan of the ruling elite but they are not the elite. In the Soviet Union, for example, the industrial managers are clearly subservient to the political and government elite. In Japan the heads of the great zaibatsu were always conscious of their prior obligation to serve nationalist objectives and the interests of the state.... In the modern industrializing society, it appears, management can be supreme only within the orbit of the enterprise, and even here it must share its authority with others who demand and obtain a share in the making of the web of rules which governs industrializing man.” Industrialism and industrial Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 145–146.

  68 The most important study of the changed practices of the private corporation is that of Robin Marris, The Economic Theory of “Managerial Capitalism” (New-York, 1964), who argues that the major objective of managers is not profit maximization but a “sustainable growth rate” whose chief purpose is the maximization of assets. In effect the motivations of the managers, rather than the nature of the market, shape primary corporate objectives. Marris’s work is the technical basis for the more popular argument, along the same line, by J. K. Galbraith in The New Industrial State. The Marris hypothesis is tested and elaborated by a number of prominent economists in the book The Corporate Economy, edited by Robin Marris and Adrian Wood (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). For the Soviet Union, the best study of the role of the managers vis-à-vis the political controllers is by Jeremy Azrael, Managerial Power and Soviet Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1966).

  69 Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York, 1957). Citations, successively, to pp. v, 38–30, 43–44, 207.

  In the long wash of the discussion of Djilas’s theoretical analysis there came a strange denouement. In the November 1958 issue of Le Contrat Social, a political bi-monthly edited by Boris Souvarine in Paris, there appeared an article by Georges Henein entitled “Bruno R. and the ‘New Class’,” which traced back Djilas’s idea to Le Bureaucratisation du Monde. Unfortunately, said Henein, Bruno R. was dead.

  In the March 1959 issue of Le Contrat Social, two pertinent letters appeared on the subject—one from Bruno R. himself, very much alive, the other from Hal Draper, the former editor of Labor Action, the Shachtmanite paper. Bruno R., identifying himself as a man named Bruno Rizzi, tells only sketchily about the writing of the book, and nothing about himself. He remarks that he first told Trotsky, “who I loved and regarded even as my teacher,” of his ideas in 1938. He also denounced Burnham for plagiarizing his book and in doing so taking only the “negative side.”

  But it is Draper’s letter which, for the first time, provided some biographical detail about his elusive character. A member of the Shachtmanite faction. Draper had long sought and finally in 1948 had located a copy of Bruno R.’s book. That year, in The New International, he printed the only complete review of Bruno R.’s work. In 1956, out of the blue, Draper received a letter from Italy, signed Bruno Rizzi, identifying himself as the author. Eight years after the The New International article he had first read it and was astonished to find that a group of socialists were espousing his theory. In April 1958 Draper and his wife, then in Europe, paid a call on Rizzi. A strange picture emerged. Bruno R., according to Draper, was not an anti-fascist Italian refugee but a commercial traveller who before the war journeyed freely between France and Italy. Rizzi was never a Trotskyite. In Paris, before 1938, Rizzi had sought membership in the Party, but the refugee Italian Trotskyites feared that he might be a fascist spy or, at best, a political eccentric.

  These fears were understandable. In 1937, in Milan, he had published under his own name a book entitled Dove va URSS which contained the seeds of his theory but which was allowed to circulate, said Draper, “because according to the theories of Rizzi, Fascism was in the line of social progress.” Such a view wa
s not completely aberrant among some Marxists. The former French communist Jacques Doriot, the leader of the left wing of the Belgian Socialists, Henri de Man, and a wing of the French Socialist party, led by Spinasse and Rives, had supported Hitler at the outbreak of the war on the grounds that his victory would destroy capitalism and unify Europe. This historical amoralism permeated Burnham’s book, when he wrote that, “The general outcome of the second war is also assured.... There is no possible solution on a capitalist basis.” How often people confuse history—and progress—with necessity!

  About the charge of plagiarism there was no proof, as Souvarine noted in an editorial coda, that Burnham actually “plagiarized” Bruno R. Since no copy of the book was available, there could be no literal borrowing of text. The idea itself was “in the air.” In fact, as Max Nomad often claimed, the source of many of these conceptions go back to the theories of the Polish anarcho-syndicalist Waclaw Machajski, who, in 1899, in his book The Evolution of Social Democracy, asserted that the messianism of socialism was a masked ideology of discontented intellectuals who were using the proletariat as a vehicle to gain power themselves. And even before this one can go back to the origins of Russian socialism in the 1870s and 1880s in the disputes between Paul Axelrod and Peter Tkachev on the dangers voiced by Axelrod of depending only on a militant minority” as the leader of the masses in the forging of a revolution. And earlier one can cite Michael Bakunin as predicting for the future “the reign of scientific intelligence ... a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars ... of the State engineers who will constitute the new privileged scientific-political class.”

  For an earlier and more elaborate account of Bruno R. see my essay in The New Leader, “The Strange Tale of Bruno R.” (September 28, 1959), and the correspondence in the issue of November [6, 1959. The statements from Bakunin can be found in his “Critique of Marxism,” part 3, chap. 4, pp. 283–289 in The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, ed. G. P. Maximoff (Glencoe, III., 1953). Bakunin’s predictions regarding the new forms of domination that would come in the wake of a victory of Marxian ideas are quite striking and worth reading for the whole.

  70 Andrei D. Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (New York, 1968), p. 30.

  71 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York, 1970), part III, especially pp. 164–172.

  72 It is noteworthy however that the talk of the inevitable economic crisis and the economic breakdown of capitalism has largely disappeared from Soviet scholarly writings. This has been replaced by discussions of the social instability of Western society.

  In 1969 the USSR Academy of Sciences created an Institute on the United States of America which, in January 1970, began the publication of its own journal, USA: Economics, Politics and Ideology. As Merle Fainsod notes in a review of the first six issues of the journal: “The articles on contemporary American foreign policy, as might be expected, faithfully mirror the current Party line. But, within these limits, one cannot fail to note that primitive sloganeering has given way to better-informed and more sophisticated analysis of the forces and factors that shape American foreign policy.” On other matters, particularly technical subjects, including economics, the articles tend to he largely tactual, while American management literature and management practices are now thoroughly scoured for materials which may be utilized in the training of Soviet managers. See Merle Fainsod, “Through Soviet Eyes,” Problems of Communism(November-December 1970).

  73 G. Glezerman, The Laws of Social Development (Moscow, n.d.), p. 79. This book is a set of lectures for postgraduate students in philosophy at Moscow University and of the Philosophy Department of the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

  74 With theoretician Glezerman, confusion abounds. On one page, with abundant quotations from Engels and Lenin, we are told laws “reflect an essential connection,” “a universal connection,” and “a necessary connection between phenomena” (p. 46, emphasis in the original). Yet some pages later we are told that “Every law is incomplete, is limited.... In order to foresee any concrete process it is not enough to know one law, for it does not take into account all conditions, of which there are an infinite number. In this connection Lenin wrote in his Philosophical Notebooks that only the infinite sum of general conceptions, laws, gives the concrete in its completeness” (p. 82, emphasis added). One is told that “Marxists are able to foresee the course of social development thanks to their skilful application of theory when analyzing specific historical conditions” (p. 86), for the general trend of scientific development “is in the last analysis determined by the requirements of production....’ (p. 80, emphasis added). Yet it is not clear whether the “last analysis” is by the analyst (which might mean the latest surviving analyst) or at the end of the historical epoch; but if the latter, how then could one know beforehand which of the many “infinite” elements determining social development is the true one?

  And finally, in our effort to find out what is a “law,” we are told that “lastly, the ... peculiarity of a law is that it expresses the stable, constant connection between phenomena. The objective world, nature and society that surround man, are constantly changing. But for all that, definite, relatively stable, constant connections are preserved. As Lenin noted in his Philosophical Notebooks, a law is the enduring, persisting in phenomena” (p. 47, emphasis in the original). Mr. Glezerman’s effort to define change and constancy is better answered by the remark of Professor Sidney Morgenbesser of Columbia who, when asked by a young radical in his philosophy class whether he believed in Mao’s “law of contradiction,’ answered: “I do and I do not.”

  75 A. M. Rumiantsev, “Social Prognostication and Planning in the Soviet Union,” English language version, Moscow, 1970, presented by the Soviet Sociological Association at Varna, Bulgaria, pp. 9, 6, 12. While all of this is unexceptionable, it is clear that Rumiantsev s strictures are directed against the dogmatists in Soviet planning when he writes, after citing the need to study tastes, fashions and preferences: “A long-term plan based on scientific forecasting of population needs is much more adequate than plans neglecting the factors mentioned” (p. 6). Yet, as a party ideo logist, Rumiantsev also argues that the basic texts of Marxism-Leninism are still correct. See Categories and Laws of the Political Economy of Communism (Moscow, 1969).

  76 I. B. Bestuzhev-Lada, Okno v budushchee: sovremennye problemy sotsialnogo prognozirovaniya (Moscow: “Mysl,” 1970). In his comment on the need to take a probabilistic, rather than a deterministic, approach, Bestuzhev-Lada writes:

  The stochastic principles of the method of approach to the problems of the future, although, apparently, theoretically indisputable, require extremely complex scientific researches in order to be accurately utilized. For this reason, often the temptation to take the path of the least resistance takes the upper hand. This is facilitated by the inertia of thinking and by firmly established traditions (and even biases) connected with equating forecasting with divination.

  The citations here are from a précis of Mr. Bestuzhev-Lada’s book made available to me by Fred Ikle. See, also, Mr. Ikle’s “Social Forecasting and the Problem of Changing Values, with Special Reference to Soviet and East European Writings,” Rand Paper, P-4450 (January 1971).

  77 Leo Labedz, “Sociology and Social Change,” Survey (July 1966), p. 21.

  78 For a comprehensive review of these studies, see Zev Katz, “Hereditary Elements in Education and Social Structure in the USSR,” University of Glasgow, Institute of Soviet and East European Studies (1969) and “Soviet Sociology: A Half-way House,” (Russian Research Center, Harvard University, 1971). I am obliged to Dr. Katz for making these materials available to me and for several discussions which guided me to other relevant data.

  79 Cited by Katz, Glasgow, p. 4.

  80 See the report from Novosibirsk on “Russia’s New Elite,” Wall Street Journal (October 15, 1968).

>   81 About the Minsk conference, see Voprosy Filosofii, no. 5 (1966), Filosofiya nauki, no. 3 (1966), pp. 133–138. also (a) Klassy, sotsial nye sloi i gruppy v SSSR, (b) Problemy izmenemiia sotsialnoi struktury sotsialisticheskogo obshchestva, ed. Ts. A. Stepanyan, V. S. Semenov (Moscow, Nauka, 1968). For material on new occupational and class classifications, see M. N. Rutkevich (1) “The Social Sources of the Replenishment of the Soviet Intelligentsia,” CDSP, no. 9 (1967); (2) “O poniatii intelligentsii kak sotsialnogo sloya sotsialisticheskogo obshchevtva,” Filosofiya nauki, no. 4 (1966); (3) “Kolichestvennye izmeneniya v sotsialnoi strukture sovetskogo obshchestva v. 60-e gody,” Sotsialnye razlichya Sverdlovsk, v. 3, pp. 5–19; Stepanyan and Semenov: (a) Klassy, (b) Prpblemy, op. cit.; O. I. Shkaratan, “The Social Structure of the Soviet Working Class,” CDSP, vol. XIX, no. 12; Sotsiologiya i ideologiya, ed. E. A. Arab-Ogly et al. (Moscow, Nauka, 1969). These are cited from Zev Katz (Harvard paper. 1971).

  82 V. Afanasyev, Scientific Communism (Moscow, 1967), p. 179.

  83 Reprinred in The Futurist (Washington, D.C., December 1970), pp. 216–217.

  84 Eduard Arab-Ogiy, Nauchno-tekhnicheskaya revolutsiya i obschestvennyi [The Scientific and Technical Revolution and Social Progress] (Moscow, 1069).

  85 For a review of some of these currents, see Revisionism, ed. Leo Labedz (London, 1962), and Z. A. Jordan, Philosophy and Ideology, A Review of Philosophy and Marxism in Poland (Dordrecht, Holland, 1963).

  86 For example, the leading Polish communist Wladyslaw Bienkowski, the Minister of Culture briefly in 1956, wrote a book Motory Socjalizmu (The Motors of Socialism), dealing with the changes required in socialist ideology because of the new role of science. The book was offered to several publishing houses in Poland but was refused; it was published without the author’s permission by the emigré publishing house, Kultura, in Paris, in 1969.

  87 Radovan Richta, Civilization at the Crossroads, English language edition, October 1968; printed in Czechoslovakia, distributed in the U.S. by International Arts and Sciences Press, White Plains, N.Y., 1969. Because the study is virtually unknown, yet of interest for theories of social development, I quote it at length here.