Marxism for moderns
HARRY G. JOHNSON
The New Industrial State J. K. Galbraith (Hamish Hamilton 42s) 'The imperatives of technology and organisa- tion, not the images of ideology, are what determine the shape of economic society.' Unlike contemporary self-styled marxists, John Kenneth Galbraith understands Marx's method of social analysis and applies it scientifically to the understanding of contemporary eco- nomic society and its likely lines of change. In contrast to Marx, however, Galbraith has a unique personal knowledge of the mainsprings of power in modern society; and he writes ex- tremely readably, largely because he is not constrained by the reverence for the standards of scholarship that led Marx to acquire an ex- haustive knowledge of the economic theories of his time.
Also in contrast to Marx, Galbraith discerns no inevitability of revolution in con- temporary economic trends; instead, as a sin- cere liberal, he addresses himself to the social class which has been gaining in power-11)e educational and scientific estate' responsible for producing the educated talent and new tech- nological knowledge on which the industrial system increasingly depends—urging them to understand their society and to use their poser to correct its deficiencies. In this respect Gal- braith is the intellectual heir of Veblen; but Veblen himself was in an important sense a marxist who really replaced the Hegelian dialectic by the concepts of biological evolution dominant in his time.
The New Industrial State grows logically out of the author's previous works, The Affluent Society and American Capitalism. It is the crowning-piece of a lifetime effort to under- stand modern capitalism; and it is an extra- ordinarily impressive book, which should—but unfortunately may not—become a classic. Its central message is by now familiar. Social power goes to the scarcest factor of. production, formerly and in succession land, capital and the entrepreneur. Now it has passed to 'the technostructure,' the managerial cadres of the large industrial corporations. The technostruc- ture behaves differently from what economic theory postulates—General Motors is really a committee of specialised lieutenants—and im- poses its requirements and objectives on the sur- rounding society. In particular, it manages private demand to suit the needs of highly capital-intensive and technologically based pro- , duction. and obliges public policy to guarantee the full employment and price stability it re- quires and to finance the more risky branches of the scientific research on which it depends for economic growth and technical advance.
In the society that has resulted, there is no real basis for politically revolutionary movements : not only are blue-collar workers being automated out of existence, but the unions become ministers of the technostruc- ture's need for control over the cost and supply of the relevant labour services; and the dis- gruntled are the poor who lack the educational qualifications to participate in the new indus- trial state. Yet that society has problems: it is dangerously dependent on cold-war military expenditure as an excuse for publicly financed scientific research and development expenditure, it is deplorably indifferent to aesthetic values and hostile to the enjoyment of leisure, and it risks subordinating the inherent values of edu- cation to the requirements of the industrial system. These problems will be solved only if the educational and scientific estate, and its creatures in the industrial establishment, exert the growing power derived from their control over the supply of the scarcest factor of pro- duction to assert the predominance of society over its industrial base.
Professional economists are continually in- vited by the author to deny this thesis, and no one would be more disappointed than Gal- braith if they failed to challenge it. Ceremonial adequacy in reviewing the book demands at least two demurrers. In concentrating on the large established corporation, Galbraith is directing attention to the media by which major past innovations have been institutional- ised into ongoing arrangements for the routinisation of slow-but-steady improvement' in efficiency, and diverting it from the spon- taneous sources of basic innovation that a free competitive system provides.
And in setting up corporate management of private demand as the modern substitute for the discipline of the market, Galbraith conveniently ignores contemporary economic theorising on the problem of information. The fact that the corporation expends vast sums in market re- search, product design and price estimation is a tribute to the sovereignty of the consumer rather than to the power of the corporation; and the fact that the consumer needs to be persuaded to buy one product or model rather than another is a sign, not that he has more money than he knows what to do with, but that he is con- scious of the need for intelligent choice in raising his standard of living, but equally aware that the time he has available for the study of decisions is itself a scarce commodity.
Where Galbraith is on the strongest ground is in his repeated assertion that in the modern industrial state the processes of choice are strongly biased against individual enjoyment of goods that cannot be provided on a mass private-enterprise basis—such as leisure and aesthetic experience—or that can be provided only collectively and at a significant cost in terms of private efficiency and the restriction of private freedom—such as mass urban trans- port, town planning and slum clearance.
These problems have come increasingly to concern more conventional and less controversy- seeking economists than Galbraith, under the rubrics of the theory of public goods and the economic theory of democracy. Their essence, in broad terms, is an inconsistency between the extent of the property owned or represented by those who have to take the decisions in contem- porary society, and the extent of the property affected by those decisions; and it may well be that their existence is not an inherent characteristic of the new industrial state, but the consequence merely of a time-lag in the application of scientific method to the processes of political decision-taking.
In conclusion, it is tempting for a British reviewer to look for signs in the British eco- nomy and society of the phenomena of American society analysed by Galbraith. The task is in fact only too easy, though the results are far from comforting. The influence of the technostructure is evident in government sup- port for defence-based research, and in govern- mentally sponsored efforts to discipline the labour force in the interests of raising produc- tivity, as well as—and most blatantly—in the assumption of the Jones report on the brain drain that what is good for scientists and en- gineers must be good for the country. On the other hand, the general conviction that the raising of material standards of living by indus- trialisation on the modern corporate enterprise plan is vital to social progress and its corollary that any consequential changes must be accepted and even welcomed are conspicuous by their absence. In this context, there is a serious danger that Galbraith's philosophising on modern capitalism will give aid and comfort to those who are already too eager to impose social controls on an industrially efficient capitalism that this country in fact does not yet possess:
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