by Daniel Bell
88 The references given at this point are to J. Fourastié, Le Grand Espoir du XXe Siécle (Paris, 1958); and D. Bell, “The Post-Industrial Society,” in Technology and Social Change (New York-London, 1964).
89 A footnote to the text at this point makes reference to the idea of history as a natural process as follows: “Thus past history proceeds in the manner of a natural process and is also essentially subject to the same laws of movement” (Letter from Engels to J. Bloch, September 21, 1890, in Marx, Selected Works, vol. 1 [Moscow, 1933],p. 382.)
90 This problem of characterizing the new managerial class, the scientific elite, and the new middle class clearly bedevils the Czech group even though they have moved away from dogmatic Marxist categories. Earlier, in describing the changing social stratification of capitalism, the writers remark of the tendency, described by a number of sociologists, of the rise of a “new middle class,” the “levelling of the middle estate,” the changing transformation of professional and technical personnel, and the like. This, however, they claim, is not a real change. Apart from a “small section comprising executives living mainly from profit—that is a product of class differentiation within the intelligentsia” [sic], the rise of a new specialist class is largely the expansion of a new working class. Yet clearly, when the writers turn to the discussion of socialism, as above, the problem of the distinction comes through quite sharply (see p. 247). The writers cited in relation to social stratification changes under capitalism are Michael Young, in The Rise of the Meritocracy (London, 1958), D. Bell in Dun’s Review and Modern Industry, 1/1962, and Helmut Schelsky, Die Sozial Folgen der Automatieirung (Düsseldorf-Köln, 1957), and Auf der Suche nach Wirklichkeit (Köln-Düsseldorf, 1965).
91 On the thesis of a convergence of the Soviet Union and the United States as centralized, bureaucratized societies, see C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York, 1958), part I, section 3; Pitirim Sorokin, The Basic Trends of Our Times (New Haven, 1964). For a contrary view, see Bertram D. Wolfe, “Russia and the U.S.A.: A Challenge to the Convergence Theory,” The Humanist (September-October 1968). On the question of economic convergence, see Jan Tinbergen, “Do Communist and Free Economies Show a Converging Pattern?” Soviet Studies (April 196O; and H. Linnemann, J. P. Pronk and J. Tinbergen, “Convergence of Economic Systems in East and West” (Rotterdam, Netherlands Economic Institute, 1065). For a contrary view, see “Will Market Economies and Planned Economies Converger,” by George N. Halm in Essays in Honor of Friedrich A. von Hayek, ed. Streissler, Haberler et al. (London, 1969).
On the question of industrial societies, the literature is vast. A major statement on convergence is that of Marion Levy, Jr., Modernization and the Structure of Societies (Princeton, N.J., 1966). A more cautious statement is by Arnold Feldman and Wilbert Moore, “Industrialization and Industrialism: Convergence and Differentiation” in Transactions of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology (Washington, D.C., September 1962).
Though the concept of “industrial society” is interpreted by Soviet writers as a prime example of convergence theory (for a short review of this issue, see Cyril Black, “Marx and Modernization,” Slavic Review, June 1970), and Raymond Aron is identified as the father of the theory of industrial society, Aron has voiced considerable doubts about the convergence thesis: see. The Industrial Society (New York, 1967), pp. 105–130.
For two major reviews of the literature and controversy on convergence, see Ian Weinberg, “The Problem of Convergence of Industrial Societies: A Critical Look at the State of a Theory,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History (January 1969); and Alfred G. Meyer, “Theories of Convergence,” in Change in Communist Systems, ed. Chalmers Johnson (Stanford, 1970).
92 See Survey (London), Winter 1971, vol. 16, no. 1, for the comments of Dr. Floud, and those referred to subsequently of Professors Bourricaud and Tominaga.
93 These themes are elaborated in the Coda, in the section on culture and consciousness.
1 David Landes, The Unbounded Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, England, 1969), pp. 119-120.
2 Sources for the above are Landes, op. cit., p. 187; J. H. Clapham, The Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914 (Cambridge, England, 1945; original edition, 1921), pp- 82, 84, 54, 70-71; Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1960), pp. 14, 74.
3 In Marx’s writings, there are many contradictory views of this situation. In the Grundrisse, the outline sketch for the master work which preceded Capital, and which was never published by Marx, he envisaged a time when almost all work would be replaced by the machine, and science, not labor power, would be considered the main productive force. In Capital, when he is working out the logic of the changing organic composition of capital, Marx describes a dual process resulting, on the one hand, in an increasing concentration of firms, and, on the other, an increase in the “industrial reserve army,” i.e. the unemployed. Yet Marx could never escape the power of his own rhetoric, and in the penultimate chapter of Capital, when he is describing, nay sounding, the death-knell of capitalism, he writes: “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.” (Capital, vol. 1, p. 837.)
4 The larger theoretical questions of the nature of class position and power, and the changes in the stratification system, are discussed in chap. 6.
5 Victor Fuchs, The Service Economy (New York, 1968), p. 22.
6 All statistical data in this section are from The U.S. Economy in 1980, U.S. Department of Labor Bulletin 1673 (1970).
7 There are no figures available for industry as a whole on the proportion of direct production to non-production workers. On the proportion of white-collar to blue-collar workers in manufacturing for 1960 and projections to 1975, see Tomorrow’s Manpower Needs (Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin 1606), vol. IV.
8 See Technology and the American Economy, Report of the President’s Committee on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966); also my discussion “The Bogey of Automation,” New York Review of Books (April 26, 1965).
9 For the current figures, see Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1971, table no. 347, “Employed Persons by Major Occupation Group and Sex,” p. 222.
10 All statistical data in this section, except as otherwise noted, are from Labor Unions in the United States, 1969, Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin 1665 (1970) and preliminary estimates for 1968-1970 in the BLS release, “Labor Union and Employee Association Membership, 1970” (September 13, 1971).
11 See “The Next American Labor Movement,” Fortune (April 1953), and my discussion, “Union Growth,” in the Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association (December 1954).
12 See Everett M. Kassalow, “Trade Unionism Goes Public,” in The Public Interest, no. 14 (Winter (969).
13 Harry P. Cohany and Lucretia M. Dewey, “Union Membership among Government Employees,” Monthly Labor Review (July 1970).
14 These figures are computed from the 1950 Census, Subject Report 3 A, Characteristics of the White Population 14 years old and over, and 1960 Census, Subject Report 1 A, Social and Economic Characteristics of the Population 14 years and over. I am indebted to Mrs. Jordy Bell Jacoby for the breakdowns and computations. The figures of 34 and 26 percent are not an averaging; as it turns out, the distribution of native and foreign-born is equal across the skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled classifications.
15 “The Post-Industrial Society” (June 14, 1062).
16 All data are from The Social and Economic Status of Negroes in the United States, 1970, Current Population Reports, Series P-23, no. 38.
1
7 Victor R. Fuchs, op. cit., table 66, p. 185.
18 Ginzberg, Hiestand and Reubens, The Pluralistic Economy (New York, 1965), p. 86.
19 Detailed projections by occupations are available only to 1975. Tomorrow’s Manpower Needs, Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin 1606, vol. IV, The National Industry-Occupational Matrix, makes the following estimates (p. 28):
Medical and Health 2,240
Teachers 3,063
Natural Scientists 465
Social Scientists 79
Clergymen 240
Editors and Reporters 128
20 C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York, 1951), p. 352.
21 Serge Mallet, La Nouvelle Classe Ouvrière (Paris, 1963), p. 69 (my translation).
22 See Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (Harbinger edition, 1963), pp. 4-5.
23 André Gorz, Strategy for Labor (Boston, 1968), pp. 104-106. The book was first published in France in 1964, under the title of Strategic Ouvrière et Néocapitalisme.
24 For a comprehensive review of the evidence for this argument, see S. M. Lipset and E. C. Ladd, Jr., “College Generations—From the 1930s to the 1960s,” The Public Interest, no. 25 (Fall 1971). What is also true, as Professors Lipset and Ladd point out, is that each succeeding college generation starts out from a point further left than the preceding one; while they end up more conservative than when they began, the final resting point may be more liberal or left than even the starting point of generations a long time ago. To that extent, there is a basic liberal or left drift among the successive college-educated generations in the society.
25 Gintis’s major statement is to be found in the essay “The New Working Class and Revolutionary Youth,” a supplement to Continuum (Spring-Summer 1970), vol. 8, nos. 1 and 2. The quotation in the text is from p. 167.
26 One sees here, in particular, the sociological differences between English and American life. In England, where engineering has never been considered a true profession, and technical schools until recently never had the status of universities, the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs has grown from 9,000 members in 1047 to 220,000 members today. There are a dozen or so engineering unions in the U.S.-today, and the independent federation, the Council of Engineers and Scientists Organizations, claims to represent 100,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, but there are few collective bargaining contracts in the U.S. that cover engineers.
27 For a comprehensive scrutiny of the technical problems of measurement, see Production and Productivity in the Service Industries, ed. Victor R. Fuchs (New York, 1069).
28 For a detailed discussion of the origin of this system, and how the play was worked out, see my essay “The Subversion of Collective Bargaining,” Commentary (March 1960).
29 For a theoretical model of this problem see William J. Baumol, “Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis,” American Economic Review (June 1967). As Professor Baumol writes:
Since there is no reason to anticipate a cessation of capital accumulation or innovation in the progressive sectors of the economy, the upward trend in real costs of municipal services cannot be expected to halt; inexorably and cumulatively, whether or not there is inflation, budgets will almost certainly continue to mount in the future.... This is a trend for which no man and no group should be blamed, for there is nothing that can be done to stop it (ibid., p. 423).
For a neo-Marxist view of this problem, see James O’Connor, “The Fiscal Crisis of the State,” in Socialist Revolution, vol. 1, no. 1 (January-February 1970), and vol. 1, no. 2 (March-April 1970).
30 For an elaboration of this argument, and a documentation of these assertions, see Daniel Bell and Viginia Held, The Community Revolution,” The Public Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1969).
31 Does business always have the disproportionate influence? It depends on the issue. One has to distinguish between the underlying system of the society, which is still capitalist, and the actual “ecology of games” wherein, on different issues, there are different coalitions, and even sizeable disagreements within the business community on specific political issues.
32 For an elaboration of the “economizing mode,” see chap. 4, “The Subordination of the Corporation.”
33 The data on unit size of enterprise are woefully inadequate, and even such recent accounts as Victor Fuchs’s The Service Economy (1968) are forced to use data a decade old. Fuchs has used a unit size of 500 employees as the cut-off point in his own calculations. Assuming an increase in unit sizes in the decade, I have arbitrarily used a thousand employees as a cut-off point to emphasize the difference in the distribution of employment between the goods-producing and the services sectors. For Fuchs’s data see chap. 8, particularly pp. 190-192.
34Work and Its Discontents (Boston, 1956), pp. 3, 36. The essay was reprinted in 1971 by the League for Industrial Democracy, with an introduction by Lewis Coser.
35 C. Wright Mills, White Collar, op. cit., chap. 8.
36 Marx’s view is laid out most starkly in The Communist Manifesto. At various points he writes:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without incessantly revolutionising the instruments of production; and, consequently, the relations of production; and, therefore, the totality of social relations.... All stable and stereotyped relations, with their attendant train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, and the newly formed becomes obsolete before it can petrify. All that has been regarded as solid, crumbles into fragments; all that was looked upon as holy is profaned; at long last, people are compelled to gaze open-eyed at their position in life and their social relations (p. 29).
Those who have hitherto belonged to the lower middle-class—small manufacturers, small traders, minor recipients of unearned income, handicraftsmen, and peasants—slip down, one and all, into the proletariat (p. 35).
... the development of large-scale industry severs all family ties of proletarians, and ... proletarian children are transformed into mere articles of commerce and instruments of labor.... National distinctions and contrasts are already tending to disappear more and more as the bourgeoisie develops ... (pp. 48, 50).
The Communist Manifesto, ed. D. Ryazanoff(reprinted edition. New York, 1963).
37 The owl of Minerva, as Hegel observed, flies at dusk, and the irony may be that labor, particularly in Europe, may become more aggressively class minded at a time of structural decline and when the economic constraints on achieving gains are greatest.
1 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” in Labyrinths, trans. James E. Irby (New York, 1962) © 1962 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Laurence Pollinger Limited.
2 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston and New York, 1918), pp. 494–495.
3 D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge, Eng., 1963), vol. I, p. 27.
4 Talcott Parsons and Neil J. Smelser, Economy and Society (London, 1956), pp. 255–256.
5 For a discussion of the concept of “structural differentiation,” see Talcott Parsons, “Some reflections on the Institutional Framework of Economic Development,” in Structure and Process in Modern Societies (Glencoe, III., 1960), pp. 98–132.
6 Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1962), p. 21.
7 Ibid., pp. 21–22.
8 Robert E. Lane, “The Decline of Politics and Ideology in a Knowledgeable Society,” American Sociological Review, vol. 21, no. 5 (October 1960), p. 650.
9 For a comprehensive paradigm which sets forth the kinds of questions a sociology of knowledge would have to answer, see Robert K. Merton, “The Sociology of Knowledge,” in Social Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed. (Glencoe, III., 1957), esp. pp. 460–461.
10 Fremont Rider, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library (New York, 1944).
11 Ibid., pp. 11–12.
12 Ibid. None of this ta
kes into account, of course, the technological substitution of micro-fiche cards for books. But that is a problem of storage, not of the growth of knowledge.
13 Derek Price, Science Since Babylon (New Haven, 1961). His first publication on the subject was in the Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, no. 14 (1951). This was extended and republished in more popular form in Discovery (London, June 1956).
14 Derek Price, Science Since Babylon, op. cit., p. 96.
15 Derek Price, “The Science of Science,” in New Views of the Nature of Man, ed. John R. Platt (Chicago, 1965), pp. 47–70, esp. pp. 58–59.
16 Derek Price, Science Since Babylon, op. cit., pp. 100–101.
17 Ibid., p. 102n.
18 Kenneth O. May, “Quantitative Growth of the Mathematical Literature,” Science, vol. 154 (December 30, 1966), pp. 1672–1673.
19 The example is taken from Derek Price, Science Since Babylon, op. cit., p. 108.
20 The account here is drawn from D’Arcy Thompson, On ,Growth and Form, op. cit., pp. 142–150.
21 “The point where a struggle for existence first sets in, and where ipso facto the rate of increase begins to diminish, is called by Verhulst the normal level of the population; he chooses it for the origin of his curve, which is so defined as to be symmetrical on either side of this origin. Thus Verhulst’s law, and his logistic curve, owe their form and their precision and all their power to forecast the future to certain hypothetical assumptions.” Ibid., p. 146.
22 See Louis Ridenour, R. R. Shaw, and A. G. Hill, Bibliography in an Age of Science (Urbana, III., 1952). Ridenour introduces the mathematical equations on the “law of social change” by saying (p. 34):
Since so many aspects of human activity seem to be governed by the same general type of growth curve, it is of interest to inquire whether we can find a rationalization for the empirical law of social change.