Copyright 1943
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK
Foreign Agents: Oxford University Press, Humphrey milford, AMEN house, LONDON, E.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK
Foreign Agents: Oxford University Press, Humphrey milford, AMEN house, LONDON, E.
Brady - Business as a System of Power
?
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San Francisco, California 2006
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? REVIEW JAN I
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? BUSINESS AS A SYSTEM OF POWER
? BUSINESS AS A SYSTEM OF POWER
By ROBERT A. BRADY
New York : Momlngslde Heights COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 1943
? Copyright 1943
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK
Foreign Agents: Oxford University Press, Humphrey milford, AMEN house, LONDON, E. C. 4, ENGLAND, AND B. I. BUILDING, NICOL ROAD, BOMBAY, INDIA
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
This Study was made possible in part by funds granted by Carnegie Corporation of New York. That Corporation is not, however, the author, owner, publisher, or proprietor of this publication, and is not to be understood as approving by virtue of its grant any of the statements made or views expressed therein.
? To
WESLEY CLAIR MITCHELL
who, without knowing it, has had much to do with the writing of this book
? FOREWORD
MEN HAVE ALWAYS EXPERIENCED difficulty in pcrcciving the thrust of deeper tendencies beneath the surface phenomena of their day. Particularly when long-established institutional sys- tems have been breaking up under them have they tended to mis- take symptom for cause and to greet predictions of major change with incredulity and aversion. In the main, they wrestle with ob- vious immediacies in familiar terms; for the rest, the deeper tend- encies, they prefer to wait and see. If such a policy has seemed to be not without some justification in more leisurely eras of change, it is today nothing less than disastrous. For we are living through one of the great climactic eras of history, a major faulting of the institutional crust. A symptom of the extent of current change is the extreme ideological confusion. Fascist monopoly capitalism adopts "National Socialism"; organized industry opposes organized labor in the name of "democracy"; and ideological opposites fight side by side for goals that sound alike only because they are left vague. In such a time, when men and their most cherished concerns are being dragged headlong at the heels of confused events, the one chance for constructive recovery of control lies in the diagnosis of
underlying causes.
In this book Dr. Brady cuts through to the central problem dis-
rupting our world, the most dangerous issue democracy faces. This problem is not basically created by Adolf Hitler and the Axis na- tions, but by the organized economic power backing the Hitlers in nation after nation over the industrial world as a device for shoring up for yet a while longer a disintegrating economic system. And while this war against the immediate Axis Hitlers must be fought and won as a necessary step in the reestablishment of a democratic world, we citizens of the United States and of other democratic na- tions would better learn, and quickly, to focus our strategy on the fact that the war is an episode in the world-wide counter-revolution
? viii FOREWORD
against democracy; for, win, lose, or draw in the military war, democracy will be lost unless it also wins, even as it fights the Axis nations, its internal political conflict.
This is a book about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism. The charac- teristic thing about democracy is its diffusion of power among the people. That men have recurrently had to have recourse to revolu- tions in order to assert such a pattern of power attests the inveterate presence within society of a contrary tendency. Power is no less "political" for being labeled "economic" power; for politics is but the science of "who gets what, when, and how. " Alexander Hamil- ton advocated and Jefferson opposed the effort of clotted economic power to substitute concentrated minority class power for diffused power. Lincoln referred to this same tendency when he wrote in
i860, "Soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation"; and he went on to speak of "the miners and sappers of returning despotism" engaged in undercutting democracy. The preponderant weight of economic power in the Constitutional Convention, while conceding the out- ward forms of political democracy, went on at once to curb the exercise of the very power it had just granted; it crippled the force of democratic power at the source by parceling up this power by a marvelously dexterous system of barriers to its expression. Thus political equality under the ballot was granted on the unstated but factually double-locked assumption that the people must refrain from seeking the extension of that equality to the economic sphere. In short, the attempted harmonious marriage of democracy to cap- italism doomed genuinely popular control from the start. And all down through our national life the continuance of the union has depended upon the unstated condition that the dominant member, capital, continue to provide returns to all elements in democratic society sufficient to disguise the underlying conflict in interests. A crisis within the economic relations of capitalism was bound to precipitate a crisis in the democratic political system.
Democracy in the era of economic liberalism has viewed power as a thing to be feared, rather than used; and this disposition, coupled with the checks on democratic action written into the Con- stitution, has prompted American democracy to state the problem
? FOREWORD IX
of power negatively. It has been casual, to the point of recklessness, about the positive development of its own authority. Formally, de- mocracy has held all xhe aces. But actually, as Laski has pointed out, "The disproportion in America between the actual economic con- trol and the formal political power is almost fantastic. " Despite intermittent guerilla warfare between state power and private eco- nomic power through all our national life, democracy has slurred over the challenge to its very existence inherent in growing eco- nomic power. This has been due to a number of factors, (i) The fact that the issue between the two types of power has been so heavily cloaked under the sectional issue between the agrarian and the
Eastern industrial states has diverted attention from the fact that capitalist economic power constitutes a direct, continuous, and fundamental threat to the whole structure of democratic authority everywhere and always. (2) The appearance of the Industrial Revo- lution simultaneously with political democracy distracted men's at- tention from the perennially unfinished task of building democ- racy. Equipped with a new and marvelously growing technology and with a raw continent beckoning to be exploited, Americans turned their attention all down through the nineteenth century to
the grand adventure of getting rich. Democracy was taken for granted as substantially achieved, or at most requiring only to be defended. And a naive and dangerous popular faith has grown, notably since the Civil War, that democracy and capitalist enter- prise are two aspects of the same thing, so that the progress mani- festly occurring in industry must also be happening in the demo- cratic political system. Since democracy itself thus failed to throw constantly new goals ahead to catch the imagination and to evoke
the energy of its citizens, men thus deprived of anything bigger to work for have in the main vindicated the cynical view that they are motivated only by selfish personal interests. Under such a distorted view of democracy, in which the state and society are nothing and the individual everything, democracy has become increasingly identified with the protection of one's personal affairs; and this has steadily sapped its vitality. (3) Because this "American way" has worked so seemingly opulently, and because of man's need in the
rough and tumble of an increasingly insecure world to feel im- mutable security somehow back of him. American citizens, preoc-
? X FOREWORD
cupied with everything but the affairs of democracy, have increas- ingly imputed to the Constitution, the central symbol of American democracy, an extravagant finality. If this great and mysterious It were but defended, democracy remained unchallenged.
In such an environment, democracy has been largely tolerant of the businessman, for the most part encouraging him with a lavish hand; for upon his restless enterprise the public welfare was con- ceived to rest. The "trust busting" of the turn of the century was a protest against what seemed to be excesses in an otherwise normal system, not a protest against the system itself. Even in recent dec- ades, as business has grown in power until it has become a jostling giant, democracy has largely failed to recognize its political sig- nificance. The world was large and its wealth seemingly unlimited, and if business was growing bigger and more noisily insistent, this was viewed as but a surface manifestation of rugged growth. Down, to the First World War abroad, and until 1929 in the United States,
what businessmen did was regarded as primarily their own busi- ness. Since the fruit of their activities slopped over in taxes, wages, and dividends, it was manifestly contributing to general welfare.
But this nominal division of powers could not be maintained within the structure of capitalist nationalism. As industrialization has spread over the world and competition has increased, the recip- rocal relation between state power and economic power has be- come more apparent. The fundamental import of what has been happening at a quickening tempo since the Russian Revolution of
1917 is the abandonment of the liberal fiction of the separateness of these two kinds of power. Organized business enterprise is less and less willing to tolerate checks on its activities by the state; more and more it needs the state as active ally; and the national state, in turn, having delivered itself over by accepting the definition of its wel- fare as synonymous with the welfare of its business system, needs increasingly the utmost of aggressive efficiency from its business- men. Business is in politics and the state is in business. The state political apparatus can tolerate only the most efficient management of the economic system, since it depends directly upon the latter for national power in foreign relations; whereas the economy must have the political power to extend control, as the Nazis have demon- strated, to the regulation of the social sphere, "not to gratify
? FOREWORD XI
lower-class maudlinness or rapacity but to secure national concord and efficiency" as an essential aid to foreign economic competition. The result is an unmistakable trend toward the monolithic power structure of the totalitarian state.
And the public does not know what to do about this merging of powers up aloft over its head. As business has organized and has begun to state cogently and lavishly the case for its version of such an "ordered society," the popular challenge expressed earlier in the campaign to curb bigness by governmental action has become con- fused and blunted. Big business has carefully disseminated to the little man at the grass roots enthusiasm and pride as an American in the superefficiency of the marvelous assembly lines and other paraphernalia of giant technology that produces his automobiles and other daily conveniences. The little man is puzzled, hypnotized into inaction: if he is not to oppose bigness itself, the bigness of Henry Ford, Du Pont, and the other great corporations that makes these characteristically American things possible, what is he to oppose about big business? The technique of dazzling, confusing, and dividing the opposition, used by Hitler, has been skillfully practiced by the propagandists for big business.
The rapidly spreading web of interindustry organization of this business power is the immediate focus of Dr. Brady's book. We live in an era in which only organization counts; values and causes with unorganized or only vaguely organized backing were never so im- potent. The rapidity of current change creates the need for quick decisions, which puts the organized minority that knows what it wants at a thumping advantage over the scattered and wistful ma- jority. In fact, it is able, as the Nazis have demonstrated, to exploit majority confusions ruthlessly in the name of majority values to minority ends.
One of the most striking conclusions from Dr. Brady's book con- cerns the similarity in type and function of the organization of busi- ness interests from nation to nation, despite seemingly widely dis- similar national backgrounds. This is due primarily to the inner common tendencies within capitalist-controlled technology wher- ever it operates. But it is also due in part to the fact that men oper- ating across the world from each other learn organizational and other tricks of their trade as rapidly as these appear. Major changes
? xii FOREWORD
in the way men live and work together under industrial conditions no longer happen in one industry or one country and then spread at a pace to be measured in decades or generations. Inventions have shrunk physical space and organization has diminished social space. World competition sees to it that a profitable technical or organi- zational device runs around the world of organized interest before common folk in the country of origin are generally aware that it has been developed.
Social organization around functional concerns is normal to hu- man beings. Western liberalism, imputing freedom and rationality to the individual, washed its hands of the problem of securing posi- tive organization; it proceeded on the assumption that, wherever organization was socially desirable, men would recognize the need and forthwith organize themselves. Such a theory not only misread human nature but it failed to take account of the momentum de- veloped within such a cultural complex as machine technology owned and exploited within a legally buttressed system of private property rights. Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organi- zation of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield economic power; and that this relentless warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by "bad" or "good" men and more and more an imper- sonal web of coercions dictated by the need to keep "the system" running. These coercions cumulate themselves to ends that even the organizing leaders of big business may fail to foresee, as step by step they grapple with the next immediate issue, and the next, and the next. Fantastic as it may sound, this course may end by the business leaders of the United States coming to feel, in the welter of their hurrying perplexities, that survival depends on precisely
the kind of thing Germany's big business wants: the liquidation of labor and other popular dissent at home, and a "peace" more vin- dicative than the Versailles Treaty, that will seek to stabilize an Anglo-American feudal monopoly control over the entire world.
Liberal democracy likewise never solved the problem of bigness; but it alternately fought and condoned it in a confusion of incon- sistent policies. A cultural system drenched with the artisan spirit
? FOREWORD xiii
of small enterprise found difficulty in accepting the facts that mod- ern machinery demands integration and that productive enterprise, released from making a pair of shoes for a known local customer and set to making standard goods for an impersonal and theoreti- cally unlimited "market," likewise demands organization. Hence the recurrent efforts to curb bigness. But both bigness and monop- oly are normal antecedents to the stage of planned provision for the needs of society which we are now entering, and there is no longer any point in attacking either. The only relevant questions today are: Who controls these productive facilities, and to what ends? and How effectively are they organized to achieve these ends? Or, stated in another way: Will democratic political power absorb and use economic resources, bigness and all, to serve its ends, or will big economic power take over state power?
The modern phase of business as a system of organized power began with the spread of the corporate organization of industry after the i86o's. The world of 1870 did not speculate much about the grip which corporate business was to have on the lives of all of us a half-century later. Corporate organization, like the monop- olies it made possible, was viewed as the exception, unadapted to general business. The precise significance of Dr. Brady's book is that he takes this same organizational tendency within industrial society--now become the rule rather than the exception and moved
along to its contemporary stage of organized inter-monopoly con- trol--and shows us where the logic of such a centrally organized system of power is carrying us. For synchronized monopoly directed by a peak all-industry strategy board is but corporate business come of age. The difference between the early and the mature stages is that, whereas corporate organization completed the taking of the instruments of production out of the hands of the laborer and strengthened economic power in its challenge to democratic politi- cal power, the mature stage Dr. Brady describes is moving on to wrest even the formal political means of curbing economic power from the hands of the citizens of democracy. Corporate organiza-
tion pocketed production; its giant offspring is pocketing the na- tion, including the entire lives of its citizens. And organized busi- ness is extending this anti-democratic web of power in the name of the people's own values, with billboards proclaiming "What's Good
? ^^
1
xiv FOREWORD
for Industry Is Good for Your Family," and deftly selling itself to a harassed people as "trustees," "guardians," "the people's man- agers" of the public interest.
The large identities in problem and in organizational form to meet these problems in nation after nation suggest with startling emphasis that we in the United States are caught in the same major coercions that industrial capitalist nations everywhere face. We, too, have no choice as to whether economic and state power shall be merged; for there will be no survival for nations that seek to perpetuate the economic wastes and frictions and the social anarchy entailed in the operation of state power and economic power as
^rivals. The sheer fact of the emergence of the phenomenon of ef- fectively planned nations has, because of the logic of organization inherent in modern technology, outmoded at a stroke the old sys- tem under which all our American national life has been lived. In the United States, the present stage of organized, centralized busi- ness power, already reaching out in control of schools, media of communication, public opinion, and government itself, provides more than a broad hint of the direction events will take, if present tendencies remain unchecked. In England, longer in the war than ourselves and closer to the choice that must be made, the same power tendencies are at work, despite optimistic reports of surface democratic manifestations. As this is written, the London New Statesman and Nation for August 15, 1942, carries a review of a book by an English businessman, N. E. H. Davenport. "He shows, in effect," says the review, "that what has happened is that the vested interests of monopoly capitalism have, for all practical pur- poses, taken over the government of the country. Behind the facade of political democracy they are preparing the economic founda- tions of the corporate State; and, to no small extent, they are being aided and abetted in this task by the powerful trade unions. . . .
[Mr. Davenport] has made it clear beyond discussion that unless we are able very soon to persuade or compel the Prime Minister to swift and profound changes in his economic policy, we shall de- feat Hitler only to be delivered into the hands of the same type of men for whom a Hitler is a necessary instrument. "
In this really desperate predicament, American democracy is un- prepared fully to assert itself. We are organizing--belatedly--to
? FOREWORD XV
fight a war for "democracy," but we are rendered gullible by our traditions as regards the precise thing for which to fight. We speak vaguely of "the Four Freedoms," and yet we do not go on to give these war aims, at home and abroad, the full-blooded, realistic con- tent so essential if men are really to be quickened to fight for de- mocracy. Such muting of democratic objectives creates the blurred confusion which can provide the perfect setting for the strong men who know what they want. Born as a nation coincidentally with the upsurge of the Industrial Revolution, situated in a rich continent which we have built up with the bodies of cheap foreign labor, protected by the accident of location during the years of our fum- bling growth, we have through all our national life been borne for- ward by a favoring tail wind. This past we view, quite characteristi- cally, not as a stroke of luck but as the vindication of the superior rightness of "the American way"; and this makes for complacency. Growing out of this is our blindness to any way of conceiving our national future other than in terms of the simple extension of our expansive past. Our national naivete about organization is disas- trous in the present crisis. We are called "a nation of joiners," but the individual still holds the focus of our national imagination. With all the flotsam and jetsam of our "joining," we have little pop- ular belief in or experience of the hard-bitten type of relentless organization for power ends; and where we see it, for instance, in the Tammany type of politics, we deplore it even as we condone it as a special case and a somehow necessary evil. Of all the Western industrial nations, we are the least class-stratified psychologically and the only one without an active labor party or its equivalent in our national political life. And, again, this is not because "the American way" is fundamentally different, but primarily because the American ideology as regards capitalism is less sophisticated than is that of any other Western nation.
Thus our traditions conspire to make us unable to read the mean- ings behind the organization Dr. Brady describes. We are opaque to the political import of this massing of business power, and we still insist on regarding it as primarily a concern only of the busi- nessmen. Meanwhile, the lawyers with their convenient conception of the role of the law, the public-relations men, the press, and all the other pliant agents of organized business go busily about on cat
? xvi FOREWORD
feet as they spread the net and tighten the noose for those so abun- dantly able to make it "worth their while. " Burnham's plausible thesis of the "managerial revolution" has been seized upon by busi- ness, and a powerful medium like Fortune proclaims itself in its new editorial policy as the organ "for the managers of America. " But behind the fiction of the "manager class" so conveniently steri- lized from the taint of special interest stands the same old power. "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. "
If the American rank and file--the upwards of four fifths of the nation who are working-class and small-business folk--are thus illiterate in the language of contemporary power, the case is almost as bad with those experts, the professional social scientists, whom society supports because they profess to know about men's institu- tions. It is no accident that, as Dr. Brady points out, a world of scientists who comb their fields for important problems for research have left the problem of the power organization and politics of big business so largely unexplored. For the most part, contemporary social scientists still exhibit toward the changing business world the encouraging moral optimism of Alfred Marshall. Nor are we helped by the fact that the crucial science of economics derives its data within the assumptions and concepts of a system conceived not in terms of such things as "power" but of blander processes such as the automatic balancing of the market.
American public opinion tends to reject out of hand any answer to the question "Where are we going? " that is not couched in the familiar optimistic terms. As we fight the present war, involving an unparalleled tangle of ideological inconsistencies, the popular mood encouraged by government and sedulously sponsored by bus- iness is to ignore controversial questions and to concentrate on win- ning the war. But the First World War gave interindustry coordi- nation of big business rapid acceleration; post-war conditions gave it its opportunity and successful foreign precedents; and the man- agement of the present war has been taken over by representatives of big business. And this time they may be in Washington for keeps. We shall emerge from this war well on our way to having a per- manently planned and managed economy; and if business controls the goals of that planning, that will mean management also, from top to bottom and from center to circumference, of all relevant so-
? FOREWORD xvii
cial and cultural life. The fresh, growing shoots of new life in our American culture will either be destroyed or ruthlessly grafted to the main trunk.
The thing we do not realize, or are prevented from realizing, is that we are building the structure and accompanying animus of the post-war world by the manner in which we fight the war. The al- ready half-accepted formula that "You can't fight this war demo- cratically" is both factually incorrect and a one-way ticket to Amer- ican fascism. If democracy is suspended now, it will not reappear at the peace conference. If during the war we avoid the develop- ment of genuine democratic organization and participation, if we curtail the partial organization of labor we now have instead of moving forward to its thoroughgoing democratic extension, we can know for certain fact that democratic people's organizations will be similarly frustrated after the war. Both during the war and after,
the issue is identical: Who controls, and to what ends? An answer to that question has been preparing in the organization Dr. Brady describes, and it is crystallizing in the staffing and manner of opera- tion of current wartime controls in Washington.
As things stand, the fight is not an equal one. On the one side is abundant good will but lack of organization and channels of com- munication, some suspicion of the way business is fencing in the war for itself, divided counsels in organized labor and middle-class suspicion of labor, large confusion as to the issues, and a tendency to trust that "they" in Washington will somehow bring us through the war and then everything will be all right again. On the other side, effective organization and the crisis nature of the present, re- quiring quick decisions and encouraging decision in terms of blunt short-run objectives, favor those who seek to exploit the war to make the United States safe for big business. The de facto power of big business is reflected in the fact that the Government itself is, for
the most part, timid and afraid of what big business will do if the war is not made "worth its while. "
One stout weapon remains in the hands of the little people at the grass roots of democracy: no one dares to challenge in frontal attack the basic democratic thesis. (If an American version of fas- cism comes, it will have to come disguised in the full outward trap- pings of democracy. ) The people can seize this remaining weapon
? xviii FOREWORD
and use it offensively and defensively as the price for their participa- tion step by step in the war effort. We live in a heroic time. And democracy will either throw off its lethargy and rise insistently to the stature of the times--or it will cease to exist.
New York City October, 1942
Robert S. Lynd
? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK is the first direct product of an extensive and con- tinuing study of the rise of bureaucratic centralism which was begun in 1 934 with the aid of a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The original subsidy, which underwrote basic travel and research expenses, was supplemented by a more recent grant which makes possible prompt publication of this book by the Columbia University Press. I am deeply grateful not only for the financial assistance given by the Foundation, but also for the keen and sustained interest of Dr. Frederick Keppel and his associates
in the work as it has been developed.
So much assistance has been given me in the research, writing
and final preparation for publication that I cannot hope to cata- logue my full indebtedness without fear of serious omissions. Special mention should be made, however, of the assistance given by several experts in the chapters dealing with the development of the "peak associations" in the various countries examined: Dr. Franz Neumann on the German material; Dr. Carl Schmidt on the Italian; Dr. Louis Launay and Mr. Robert Valeur on the French; Dr. William Taylor and Mr. Harry Oshima on the Japa- nese; and Major Leonard Urwick on the British; and various officials of the LaFollette Committee and the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice on the American. I am further indebted to Dr. Neumann for his reading of the entire manuscript.
Copyright 1943
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK
Foreign Agents: Oxford University Press, Humphrey milford, AMEN house, LONDON, E. C. 4, ENGLAND, AND B. I. BUILDING, NICOL ROAD, BOMBAY, INDIA
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
This Study was made possible in part by funds granted by Carnegie Corporation of New York. That Corporation is not, however, the author, owner, publisher, or proprietor of this publication, and is not to be understood as approving by virtue of its grant any of the statements made or views expressed therein.
? To
WESLEY CLAIR MITCHELL
who, without knowing it, has had much to do with the writing of this book
? FOREWORD
MEN HAVE ALWAYS EXPERIENCED difficulty in pcrcciving the thrust of deeper tendencies beneath the surface phenomena of their day. Particularly when long-established institutional sys- tems have been breaking up under them have they tended to mis- take symptom for cause and to greet predictions of major change with incredulity and aversion. In the main, they wrestle with ob- vious immediacies in familiar terms; for the rest, the deeper tend- encies, they prefer to wait and see. If such a policy has seemed to be not without some justification in more leisurely eras of change, it is today nothing less than disastrous. For we are living through one of the great climactic eras of history, a major faulting of the institutional crust. A symptom of the extent of current change is the extreme ideological confusion. Fascist monopoly capitalism adopts "National Socialism"; organized industry opposes organized labor in the name of "democracy"; and ideological opposites fight side by side for goals that sound alike only because they are left vague. In such a time, when men and their most cherished concerns are being dragged headlong at the heels of confused events, the one chance for constructive recovery of control lies in the diagnosis of
underlying causes.
In this book Dr. Brady cuts through to the central problem dis-
rupting our world, the most dangerous issue democracy faces. This problem is not basically created by Adolf Hitler and the Axis na- tions, but by the organized economic power backing the Hitlers in nation after nation over the industrial world as a device for shoring up for yet a while longer a disintegrating economic system. And while this war against the immediate Axis Hitlers must be fought and won as a necessary step in the reestablishment of a democratic world, we citizens of the United States and of other democratic na- tions would better learn, and quickly, to focus our strategy on the fact that the war is an episode in the world-wide counter-revolution
? viii FOREWORD
against democracy; for, win, lose, or draw in the military war, democracy will be lost unless it also wins, even as it fights the Axis nations, its internal political conflict.
This is a book about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism. The charac- teristic thing about democracy is its diffusion of power among the people. That men have recurrently had to have recourse to revolu- tions in order to assert such a pattern of power attests the inveterate presence within society of a contrary tendency. Power is no less "political" for being labeled "economic" power; for politics is but the science of "who gets what, when, and how. " Alexander Hamil- ton advocated and Jefferson opposed the effort of clotted economic power to substitute concentrated minority class power for diffused power. Lincoln referred to this same tendency when he wrote in
i860, "Soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation"; and he went on to speak of "the miners and sappers of returning despotism" engaged in undercutting democracy. The preponderant weight of economic power in the Constitutional Convention, while conceding the out- ward forms of political democracy, went on at once to curb the exercise of the very power it had just granted; it crippled the force of democratic power at the source by parceling up this power by a marvelously dexterous system of barriers to its expression. Thus political equality under the ballot was granted on the unstated but factually double-locked assumption that the people must refrain from seeking the extension of that equality to the economic sphere. In short, the attempted harmonious marriage of democracy to cap- italism doomed genuinely popular control from the start. And all down through our national life the continuance of the union has depended upon the unstated condition that the dominant member, capital, continue to provide returns to all elements in democratic society sufficient to disguise the underlying conflict in interests. A crisis within the economic relations of capitalism was bound to precipitate a crisis in the democratic political system.
Democracy in the era of economic liberalism has viewed power as a thing to be feared, rather than used; and this disposition, coupled with the checks on democratic action written into the Con- stitution, has prompted American democracy to state the problem
? FOREWORD IX
of power negatively. It has been casual, to the point of recklessness, about the positive development of its own authority. Formally, de- mocracy has held all xhe aces. But actually, as Laski has pointed out, "The disproportion in America between the actual economic con- trol and the formal political power is almost fantastic. " Despite intermittent guerilla warfare between state power and private eco- nomic power through all our national life, democracy has slurred over the challenge to its very existence inherent in growing eco- nomic power. This has been due to a number of factors, (i) The fact that the issue between the two types of power has been so heavily cloaked under the sectional issue between the agrarian and the
Eastern industrial states has diverted attention from the fact that capitalist economic power constitutes a direct, continuous, and fundamental threat to the whole structure of democratic authority everywhere and always. (2) The appearance of the Industrial Revo- lution simultaneously with political democracy distracted men's at- tention from the perennially unfinished task of building democ- racy. Equipped with a new and marvelously growing technology and with a raw continent beckoning to be exploited, Americans turned their attention all down through the nineteenth century to
the grand adventure of getting rich. Democracy was taken for granted as substantially achieved, or at most requiring only to be defended. And a naive and dangerous popular faith has grown, notably since the Civil War, that democracy and capitalist enter- prise are two aspects of the same thing, so that the progress mani- festly occurring in industry must also be happening in the demo- cratic political system. Since democracy itself thus failed to throw constantly new goals ahead to catch the imagination and to evoke
the energy of its citizens, men thus deprived of anything bigger to work for have in the main vindicated the cynical view that they are motivated only by selfish personal interests. Under such a distorted view of democracy, in which the state and society are nothing and the individual everything, democracy has become increasingly identified with the protection of one's personal affairs; and this has steadily sapped its vitality. (3) Because this "American way" has worked so seemingly opulently, and because of man's need in the
rough and tumble of an increasingly insecure world to feel im- mutable security somehow back of him. American citizens, preoc-
? X FOREWORD
cupied with everything but the affairs of democracy, have increas- ingly imputed to the Constitution, the central symbol of American democracy, an extravagant finality. If this great and mysterious It were but defended, democracy remained unchallenged.
In such an environment, democracy has been largely tolerant of the businessman, for the most part encouraging him with a lavish hand; for upon his restless enterprise the public welfare was con- ceived to rest. The "trust busting" of the turn of the century was a protest against what seemed to be excesses in an otherwise normal system, not a protest against the system itself. Even in recent dec- ades, as business has grown in power until it has become a jostling giant, democracy has largely failed to recognize its political sig- nificance. The world was large and its wealth seemingly unlimited, and if business was growing bigger and more noisily insistent, this was viewed as but a surface manifestation of rugged growth. Down, to the First World War abroad, and until 1929 in the United States,
what businessmen did was regarded as primarily their own busi- ness. Since the fruit of their activities slopped over in taxes, wages, and dividends, it was manifestly contributing to general welfare.
But this nominal division of powers could not be maintained within the structure of capitalist nationalism. As industrialization has spread over the world and competition has increased, the recip- rocal relation between state power and economic power has be- come more apparent. The fundamental import of what has been happening at a quickening tempo since the Russian Revolution of
1917 is the abandonment of the liberal fiction of the separateness of these two kinds of power. Organized business enterprise is less and less willing to tolerate checks on its activities by the state; more and more it needs the state as active ally; and the national state, in turn, having delivered itself over by accepting the definition of its wel- fare as synonymous with the welfare of its business system, needs increasingly the utmost of aggressive efficiency from its business- men. Business is in politics and the state is in business. The state political apparatus can tolerate only the most efficient management of the economic system, since it depends directly upon the latter for national power in foreign relations; whereas the economy must have the political power to extend control, as the Nazis have demon- strated, to the regulation of the social sphere, "not to gratify
? FOREWORD XI
lower-class maudlinness or rapacity but to secure national concord and efficiency" as an essential aid to foreign economic competition. The result is an unmistakable trend toward the monolithic power structure of the totalitarian state.
And the public does not know what to do about this merging of powers up aloft over its head. As business has organized and has begun to state cogently and lavishly the case for its version of such an "ordered society," the popular challenge expressed earlier in the campaign to curb bigness by governmental action has become con- fused and blunted. Big business has carefully disseminated to the little man at the grass roots enthusiasm and pride as an American in the superefficiency of the marvelous assembly lines and other paraphernalia of giant technology that produces his automobiles and other daily conveniences. The little man is puzzled, hypnotized into inaction: if he is not to oppose bigness itself, the bigness of Henry Ford, Du Pont, and the other great corporations that makes these characteristically American things possible, what is he to oppose about big business? The technique of dazzling, confusing, and dividing the opposition, used by Hitler, has been skillfully practiced by the propagandists for big business.
The rapidly spreading web of interindustry organization of this business power is the immediate focus of Dr. Brady's book. We live in an era in which only organization counts; values and causes with unorganized or only vaguely organized backing were never so im- potent. The rapidity of current change creates the need for quick decisions, which puts the organized minority that knows what it wants at a thumping advantage over the scattered and wistful ma- jority. In fact, it is able, as the Nazis have demonstrated, to exploit majority confusions ruthlessly in the name of majority values to minority ends.
One of the most striking conclusions from Dr. Brady's book con- cerns the similarity in type and function of the organization of busi- ness interests from nation to nation, despite seemingly widely dis- similar national backgrounds. This is due primarily to the inner common tendencies within capitalist-controlled technology wher- ever it operates. But it is also due in part to the fact that men oper- ating across the world from each other learn organizational and other tricks of their trade as rapidly as these appear. Major changes
? xii FOREWORD
in the way men live and work together under industrial conditions no longer happen in one industry or one country and then spread at a pace to be measured in decades or generations. Inventions have shrunk physical space and organization has diminished social space. World competition sees to it that a profitable technical or organi- zational device runs around the world of organized interest before common folk in the country of origin are generally aware that it has been developed.
Social organization around functional concerns is normal to hu- man beings. Western liberalism, imputing freedom and rationality to the individual, washed its hands of the problem of securing posi- tive organization; it proceeded on the assumption that, wherever organization was socially desirable, men would recognize the need and forthwith organize themselves. Such a theory not only misread human nature but it failed to take account of the momentum de- veloped within such a cultural complex as machine technology owned and exploited within a legally buttressed system of private property rights. Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organi- zation of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield economic power; and that this relentless warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by "bad" or "good" men and more and more an imper- sonal web of coercions dictated by the need to keep "the system" running. These coercions cumulate themselves to ends that even the organizing leaders of big business may fail to foresee, as step by step they grapple with the next immediate issue, and the next, and the next. Fantastic as it may sound, this course may end by the business leaders of the United States coming to feel, in the welter of their hurrying perplexities, that survival depends on precisely
the kind of thing Germany's big business wants: the liquidation of labor and other popular dissent at home, and a "peace" more vin- dicative than the Versailles Treaty, that will seek to stabilize an Anglo-American feudal monopoly control over the entire world.
Liberal democracy likewise never solved the problem of bigness; but it alternately fought and condoned it in a confusion of incon- sistent policies. A cultural system drenched with the artisan spirit
? FOREWORD xiii
of small enterprise found difficulty in accepting the facts that mod- ern machinery demands integration and that productive enterprise, released from making a pair of shoes for a known local customer and set to making standard goods for an impersonal and theoreti- cally unlimited "market," likewise demands organization. Hence the recurrent efforts to curb bigness. But both bigness and monop- oly are normal antecedents to the stage of planned provision for the needs of society which we are now entering, and there is no longer any point in attacking either. The only relevant questions today are: Who controls these productive facilities, and to what ends? and How effectively are they organized to achieve these ends? Or, stated in another way: Will democratic political power absorb and use economic resources, bigness and all, to serve its ends, or will big economic power take over state power?
The modern phase of business as a system of organized power began with the spread of the corporate organization of industry after the i86o's. The world of 1870 did not speculate much about the grip which corporate business was to have on the lives of all of us a half-century later. Corporate organization, like the monop- olies it made possible, was viewed as the exception, unadapted to general business. The precise significance of Dr. Brady's book is that he takes this same organizational tendency within industrial society--now become the rule rather than the exception and moved
along to its contemporary stage of organized inter-monopoly con- trol--and shows us where the logic of such a centrally organized system of power is carrying us. For synchronized monopoly directed by a peak all-industry strategy board is but corporate business come of age. The difference between the early and the mature stages is that, whereas corporate organization completed the taking of the instruments of production out of the hands of the laborer and strengthened economic power in its challenge to democratic politi- cal power, the mature stage Dr. Brady describes is moving on to wrest even the formal political means of curbing economic power from the hands of the citizens of democracy. Corporate organiza-
tion pocketed production; its giant offspring is pocketing the na- tion, including the entire lives of its citizens. And organized busi- ness is extending this anti-democratic web of power in the name of the people's own values, with billboards proclaiming "What's Good
? ^^
1
xiv FOREWORD
for Industry Is Good for Your Family," and deftly selling itself to a harassed people as "trustees," "guardians," "the people's man- agers" of the public interest.
The large identities in problem and in organizational form to meet these problems in nation after nation suggest with startling emphasis that we in the United States are caught in the same major coercions that industrial capitalist nations everywhere face. We, too, have no choice as to whether economic and state power shall be merged; for there will be no survival for nations that seek to perpetuate the economic wastes and frictions and the social anarchy entailed in the operation of state power and economic power as
^rivals. The sheer fact of the emergence of the phenomenon of ef- fectively planned nations has, because of the logic of organization inherent in modern technology, outmoded at a stroke the old sys- tem under which all our American national life has been lived. In the United States, the present stage of organized, centralized busi- ness power, already reaching out in control of schools, media of communication, public opinion, and government itself, provides more than a broad hint of the direction events will take, if present tendencies remain unchecked. In England, longer in the war than ourselves and closer to the choice that must be made, the same power tendencies are at work, despite optimistic reports of surface democratic manifestations. As this is written, the London New Statesman and Nation for August 15, 1942, carries a review of a book by an English businessman, N. E. H. Davenport. "He shows, in effect," says the review, "that what has happened is that the vested interests of monopoly capitalism have, for all practical pur- poses, taken over the government of the country. Behind the facade of political democracy they are preparing the economic founda- tions of the corporate State; and, to no small extent, they are being aided and abetted in this task by the powerful trade unions. . . .
[Mr. Davenport] has made it clear beyond discussion that unless we are able very soon to persuade or compel the Prime Minister to swift and profound changes in his economic policy, we shall de- feat Hitler only to be delivered into the hands of the same type of men for whom a Hitler is a necessary instrument. "
In this really desperate predicament, American democracy is un- prepared fully to assert itself. We are organizing--belatedly--to
? FOREWORD XV
fight a war for "democracy," but we are rendered gullible by our traditions as regards the precise thing for which to fight. We speak vaguely of "the Four Freedoms," and yet we do not go on to give these war aims, at home and abroad, the full-blooded, realistic con- tent so essential if men are really to be quickened to fight for de- mocracy. Such muting of democratic objectives creates the blurred confusion which can provide the perfect setting for the strong men who know what they want. Born as a nation coincidentally with the upsurge of the Industrial Revolution, situated in a rich continent which we have built up with the bodies of cheap foreign labor, protected by the accident of location during the years of our fum- bling growth, we have through all our national life been borne for- ward by a favoring tail wind. This past we view, quite characteristi- cally, not as a stroke of luck but as the vindication of the superior rightness of "the American way"; and this makes for complacency. Growing out of this is our blindness to any way of conceiving our national future other than in terms of the simple extension of our expansive past. Our national naivete about organization is disas- trous in the present crisis. We are called "a nation of joiners," but the individual still holds the focus of our national imagination. With all the flotsam and jetsam of our "joining," we have little pop- ular belief in or experience of the hard-bitten type of relentless organization for power ends; and where we see it, for instance, in the Tammany type of politics, we deplore it even as we condone it as a special case and a somehow necessary evil. Of all the Western industrial nations, we are the least class-stratified psychologically and the only one without an active labor party or its equivalent in our national political life. And, again, this is not because "the American way" is fundamentally different, but primarily because the American ideology as regards capitalism is less sophisticated than is that of any other Western nation.
Thus our traditions conspire to make us unable to read the mean- ings behind the organization Dr. Brady describes. We are opaque to the political import of this massing of business power, and we still insist on regarding it as primarily a concern only of the busi- nessmen. Meanwhile, the lawyers with their convenient conception of the role of the law, the public-relations men, the press, and all the other pliant agents of organized business go busily about on cat
? xvi FOREWORD
feet as they spread the net and tighten the noose for those so abun- dantly able to make it "worth their while. " Burnham's plausible thesis of the "managerial revolution" has been seized upon by busi- ness, and a powerful medium like Fortune proclaims itself in its new editorial policy as the organ "for the managers of America. " But behind the fiction of the "manager class" so conveniently steri- lized from the taint of special interest stands the same old power. "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. "
If the American rank and file--the upwards of four fifths of the nation who are working-class and small-business folk--are thus illiterate in the language of contemporary power, the case is almost as bad with those experts, the professional social scientists, whom society supports because they profess to know about men's institu- tions. It is no accident that, as Dr. Brady points out, a world of scientists who comb their fields for important problems for research have left the problem of the power organization and politics of big business so largely unexplored. For the most part, contemporary social scientists still exhibit toward the changing business world the encouraging moral optimism of Alfred Marshall. Nor are we helped by the fact that the crucial science of economics derives its data within the assumptions and concepts of a system conceived not in terms of such things as "power" but of blander processes such as the automatic balancing of the market.
American public opinion tends to reject out of hand any answer to the question "Where are we going? " that is not couched in the familiar optimistic terms. As we fight the present war, involving an unparalleled tangle of ideological inconsistencies, the popular mood encouraged by government and sedulously sponsored by bus- iness is to ignore controversial questions and to concentrate on win- ning the war. But the First World War gave interindustry coordi- nation of big business rapid acceleration; post-war conditions gave it its opportunity and successful foreign precedents; and the man- agement of the present war has been taken over by representatives of big business. And this time they may be in Washington for keeps. We shall emerge from this war well on our way to having a per- manently planned and managed economy; and if business controls the goals of that planning, that will mean management also, from top to bottom and from center to circumference, of all relevant so-
? FOREWORD xvii
cial and cultural life. The fresh, growing shoots of new life in our American culture will either be destroyed or ruthlessly grafted to the main trunk.
The thing we do not realize, or are prevented from realizing, is that we are building the structure and accompanying animus of the post-war world by the manner in which we fight the war. The al- ready half-accepted formula that "You can't fight this war demo- cratically" is both factually incorrect and a one-way ticket to Amer- ican fascism. If democracy is suspended now, it will not reappear at the peace conference. If during the war we avoid the develop- ment of genuine democratic organization and participation, if we curtail the partial organization of labor we now have instead of moving forward to its thoroughgoing democratic extension, we can know for certain fact that democratic people's organizations will be similarly frustrated after the war. Both during the war and after,
the issue is identical: Who controls, and to what ends? An answer to that question has been preparing in the organization Dr. Brady describes, and it is crystallizing in the staffing and manner of opera- tion of current wartime controls in Washington.
As things stand, the fight is not an equal one. On the one side is abundant good will but lack of organization and channels of com- munication, some suspicion of the way business is fencing in the war for itself, divided counsels in organized labor and middle-class suspicion of labor, large confusion as to the issues, and a tendency to trust that "they" in Washington will somehow bring us through the war and then everything will be all right again. On the other side, effective organization and the crisis nature of the present, re- quiring quick decisions and encouraging decision in terms of blunt short-run objectives, favor those who seek to exploit the war to make the United States safe for big business. The de facto power of big business is reflected in the fact that the Government itself is, for
the most part, timid and afraid of what big business will do if the war is not made "worth its while. "
One stout weapon remains in the hands of the little people at the grass roots of democracy: no one dares to challenge in frontal attack the basic democratic thesis. (If an American version of fas- cism comes, it will have to come disguised in the full outward trap- pings of democracy. ) The people can seize this remaining weapon
? xviii FOREWORD
and use it offensively and defensively as the price for their participa- tion step by step in the war effort. We live in a heroic time. And democracy will either throw off its lethargy and rise insistently to the stature of the times--or it will cease to exist.
New York City October, 1942
Robert S. Lynd
? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK is the first direct product of an extensive and con- tinuing study of the rise of bureaucratic centralism which was begun in 1 934 with the aid of a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The original subsidy, which underwrote basic travel and research expenses, was supplemented by a more recent grant which makes possible prompt publication of this book by the Columbia University Press. I am deeply grateful not only for the financial assistance given by the Foundation, but also for the keen and sustained interest of Dr. Frederick Keppel and his associates
in the work as it has been developed.
So much assistance has been given me in the research, writing
and final preparation for publication that I cannot hope to cata- logue my full indebtedness without fear of serious omissions. Special mention should be made, however, of the assistance given by several experts in the chapters dealing with the development of the "peak associations" in the various countries examined: Dr. Franz Neumann on the German material; Dr. Carl Schmidt on the Italian; Dr. Louis Launay and Mr. Robert Valeur on the French; Dr. William Taylor and Mr. Harry Oshima on the Japa- nese; and Major Leonard Urwick on the British; and various officials of the LaFollette Committee and the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice on the American. I am further indebted to Dr. Neumann for his reading of the entire manuscript.
In the later stages of the work, I gained immeasurably from an infinity of suggestions and criticisms, major and minor, contributed by Professor Robert Lynd; from the laborious task of checking sources performed by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Phillips; and from the assistance of Mr. Maynard Gertler, who, at considerable expense of time and effort, has checked detail with the editorial staff of the Columbia University Press from beginning to end. Special mention should also be made of the staff of the Columbia University Press,
? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
who have managed somehow to turn the otherwise harrowing task of preparing a book for publication into a pleasant and profitable experience for the author.
I wish also to thank the authors and publishers cited for per- mission to quote from their works. For permission to reproduce, with minor alterations, material which previously appeared as arti- cles in their pages, I am indebted to the following: Pacific Affairs, September, 1940 (for Chapter III); the Political Science Quarterly, June-December, 1941 (for Chapters VII and IX); and the Journal of Political Economy, February, 1942 (for Chapter I).
Finally, I wish to acknowledge with thanks the countless aids of my most severe and relentless critic, Mildred Edie.
Whatever merits the book may possess are largely traceable to sources such as these; the faults, I need scarcely add, are mine alone.
XX
Kansas City, Mo. July 15, 1942
Robert A.
^ Prelinger
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? REVIEW JAN I
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? Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2006 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation
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? BUSINESS AS A SYSTEM OF POWER
? BUSINESS AS A SYSTEM OF POWER
By ROBERT A. BRADY
New York : Momlngslde Heights COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 1943
? Copyright 1943
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK
Foreign Agents: Oxford University Press, Humphrey milford, AMEN house, LONDON, E. C. 4, ENGLAND, AND B. I. BUILDING, NICOL ROAD, BOMBAY, INDIA
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
This Study was made possible in part by funds granted by Carnegie Corporation of New York. That Corporation is not, however, the author, owner, publisher, or proprietor of this publication, and is not to be understood as approving by virtue of its grant any of the statements made or views expressed therein.
? To
WESLEY CLAIR MITCHELL
who, without knowing it, has had much to do with the writing of this book
? FOREWORD
MEN HAVE ALWAYS EXPERIENCED difficulty in pcrcciving the thrust of deeper tendencies beneath the surface phenomena of their day. Particularly when long-established institutional sys- tems have been breaking up under them have they tended to mis- take symptom for cause and to greet predictions of major change with incredulity and aversion. In the main, they wrestle with ob- vious immediacies in familiar terms; for the rest, the deeper tend- encies, they prefer to wait and see. If such a policy has seemed to be not without some justification in more leisurely eras of change, it is today nothing less than disastrous. For we are living through one of the great climactic eras of history, a major faulting of the institutional crust. A symptom of the extent of current change is the extreme ideological confusion. Fascist monopoly capitalism adopts "National Socialism"; organized industry opposes organized labor in the name of "democracy"; and ideological opposites fight side by side for goals that sound alike only because they are left vague. In such a time, when men and their most cherished concerns are being dragged headlong at the heels of confused events, the one chance for constructive recovery of control lies in the diagnosis of
underlying causes.
In this book Dr. Brady cuts through to the central problem dis-
rupting our world, the most dangerous issue democracy faces. This problem is not basically created by Adolf Hitler and the Axis na- tions, but by the organized economic power backing the Hitlers in nation after nation over the industrial world as a device for shoring up for yet a while longer a disintegrating economic system. And while this war against the immediate Axis Hitlers must be fought and won as a necessary step in the reestablishment of a democratic world, we citizens of the United States and of other democratic na- tions would better learn, and quickly, to focus our strategy on the fact that the war is an episode in the world-wide counter-revolution
? viii FOREWORD
against democracy; for, win, lose, or draw in the military war, democracy will be lost unless it also wins, even as it fights the Axis nations, its internal political conflict.
This is a book about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism. The charac- teristic thing about democracy is its diffusion of power among the people. That men have recurrently had to have recourse to revolu- tions in order to assert such a pattern of power attests the inveterate presence within society of a contrary tendency. Power is no less "political" for being labeled "economic" power; for politics is but the science of "who gets what, when, and how. " Alexander Hamil- ton advocated and Jefferson opposed the effort of clotted economic power to substitute concentrated minority class power for diffused power. Lincoln referred to this same tendency when he wrote in
i860, "Soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation"; and he went on to speak of "the miners and sappers of returning despotism" engaged in undercutting democracy. The preponderant weight of economic power in the Constitutional Convention, while conceding the out- ward forms of political democracy, went on at once to curb the exercise of the very power it had just granted; it crippled the force of democratic power at the source by parceling up this power by a marvelously dexterous system of barriers to its expression. Thus political equality under the ballot was granted on the unstated but factually double-locked assumption that the people must refrain from seeking the extension of that equality to the economic sphere. In short, the attempted harmonious marriage of democracy to cap- italism doomed genuinely popular control from the start. And all down through our national life the continuance of the union has depended upon the unstated condition that the dominant member, capital, continue to provide returns to all elements in democratic society sufficient to disguise the underlying conflict in interests. A crisis within the economic relations of capitalism was bound to precipitate a crisis in the democratic political system.
Democracy in the era of economic liberalism has viewed power as a thing to be feared, rather than used; and this disposition, coupled with the checks on democratic action written into the Con- stitution, has prompted American democracy to state the problem
? FOREWORD IX
of power negatively. It has been casual, to the point of recklessness, about the positive development of its own authority. Formally, de- mocracy has held all xhe aces. But actually, as Laski has pointed out, "The disproportion in America between the actual economic con- trol and the formal political power is almost fantastic. " Despite intermittent guerilla warfare between state power and private eco- nomic power through all our national life, democracy has slurred over the challenge to its very existence inherent in growing eco- nomic power. This has been due to a number of factors, (i) The fact that the issue between the two types of power has been so heavily cloaked under the sectional issue between the agrarian and the
Eastern industrial states has diverted attention from the fact that capitalist economic power constitutes a direct, continuous, and fundamental threat to the whole structure of democratic authority everywhere and always. (2) The appearance of the Industrial Revo- lution simultaneously with political democracy distracted men's at- tention from the perennially unfinished task of building democ- racy. Equipped with a new and marvelously growing technology and with a raw continent beckoning to be exploited, Americans turned their attention all down through the nineteenth century to
the grand adventure of getting rich. Democracy was taken for granted as substantially achieved, or at most requiring only to be defended. And a naive and dangerous popular faith has grown, notably since the Civil War, that democracy and capitalist enter- prise are two aspects of the same thing, so that the progress mani- festly occurring in industry must also be happening in the demo- cratic political system. Since democracy itself thus failed to throw constantly new goals ahead to catch the imagination and to evoke
the energy of its citizens, men thus deprived of anything bigger to work for have in the main vindicated the cynical view that they are motivated only by selfish personal interests. Under such a distorted view of democracy, in which the state and society are nothing and the individual everything, democracy has become increasingly identified with the protection of one's personal affairs; and this has steadily sapped its vitality. (3) Because this "American way" has worked so seemingly opulently, and because of man's need in the
rough and tumble of an increasingly insecure world to feel im- mutable security somehow back of him. American citizens, preoc-
? X FOREWORD
cupied with everything but the affairs of democracy, have increas- ingly imputed to the Constitution, the central symbol of American democracy, an extravagant finality. If this great and mysterious It were but defended, democracy remained unchallenged.
In such an environment, democracy has been largely tolerant of the businessman, for the most part encouraging him with a lavish hand; for upon his restless enterprise the public welfare was con- ceived to rest. The "trust busting" of the turn of the century was a protest against what seemed to be excesses in an otherwise normal system, not a protest against the system itself. Even in recent dec- ades, as business has grown in power until it has become a jostling giant, democracy has largely failed to recognize its political sig- nificance. The world was large and its wealth seemingly unlimited, and if business was growing bigger and more noisily insistent, this was viewed as but a surface manifestation of rugged growth. Down, to the First World War abroad, and until 1929 in the United States,
what businessmen did was regarded as primarily their own busi- ness. Since the fruit of their activities slopped over in taxes, wages, and dividends, it was manifestly contributing to general welfare.
But this nominal division of powers could not be maintained within the structure of capitalist nationalism. As industrialization has spread over the world and competition has increased, the recip- rocal relation between state power and economic power has be- come more apparent. The fundamental import of what has been happening at a quickening tempo since the Russian Revolution of
1917 is the abandonment of the liberal fiction of the separateness of these two kinds of power. Organized business enterprise is less and less willing to tolerate checks on its activities by the state; more and more it needs the state as active ally; and the national state, in turn, having delivered itself over by accepting the definition of its wel- fare as synonymous with the welfare of its business system, needs increasingly the utmost of aggressive efficiency from its business- men. Business is in politics and the state is in business. The state political apparatus can tolerate only the most efficient management of the economic system, since it depends directly upon the latter for national power in foreign relations; whereas the economy must have the political power to extend control, as the Nazis have demon- strated, to the regulation of the social sphere, "not to gratify
? FOREWORD XI
lower-class maudlinness or rapacity but to secure national concord and efficiency" as an essential aid to foreign economic competition. The result is an unmistakable trend toward the monolithic power structure of the totalitarian state.
And the public does not know what to do about this merging of powers up aloft over its head. As business has organized and has begun to state cogently and lavishly the case for its version of such an "ordered society," the popular challenge expressed earlier in the campaign to curb bigness by governmental action has become con- fused and blunted. Big business has carefully disseminated to the little man at the grass roots enthusiasm and pride as an American in the superefficiency of the marvelous assembly lines and other paraphernalia of giant technology that produces his automobiles and other daily conveniences. The little man is puzzled, hypnotized into inaction: if he is not to oppose bigness itself, the bigness of Henry Ford, Du Pont, and the other great corporations that makes these characteristically American things possible, what is he to oppose about big business? The technique of dazzling, confusing, and dividing the opposition, used by Hitler, has been skillfully practiced by the propagandists for big business.
The rapidly spreading web of interindustry organization of this business power is the immediate focus of Dr. Brady's book. We live in an era in which only organization counts; values and causes with unorganized or only vaguely organized backing were never so im- potent. The rapidity of current change creates the need for quick decisions, which puts the organized minority that knows what it wants at a thumping advantage over the scattered and wistful ma- jority. In fact, it is able, as the Nazis have demonstrated, to exploit majority confusions ruthlessly in the name of majority values to minority ends.
One of the most striking conclusions from Dr. Brady's book con- cerns the similarity in type and function of the organization of busi- ness interests from nation to nation, despite seemingly widely dis- similar national backgrounds. This is due primarily to the inner common tendencies within capitalist-controlled technology wher- ever it operates. But it is also due in part to the fact that men oper- ating across the world from each other learn organizational and other tricks of their trade as rapidly as these appear. Major changes
? xii FOREWORD
in the way men live and work together under industrial conditions no longer happen in one industry or one country and then spread at a pace to be measured in decades or generations. Inventions have shrunk physical space and organization has diminished social space. World competition sees to it that a profitable technical or organi- zational device runs around the world of organized interest before common folk in the country of origin are generally aware that it has been developed.
Social organization around functional concerns is normal to hu- man beings. Western liberalism, imputing freedom and rationality to the individual, washed its hands of the problem of securing posi- tive organization; it proceeded on the assumption that, wherever organization was socially desirable, men would recognize the need and forthwith organize themselves. Such a theory not only misread human nature but it failed to take account of the momentum de- veloped within such a cultural complex as machine technology owned and exploited within a legally buttressed system of private property rights. Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organi- zation of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield economic power; and that this relentless warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by "bad" or "good" men and more and more an imper- sonal web of coercions dictated by the need to keep "the system" running. These coercions cumulate themselves to ends that even the organizing leaders of big business may fail to foresee, as step by step they grapple with the next immediate issue, and the next, and the next. Fantastic as it may sound, this course may end by the business leaders of the United States coming to feel, in the welter of their hurrying perplexities, that survival depends on precisely
the kind of thing Germany's big business wants: the liquidation of labor and other popular dissent at home, and a "peace" more vin- dicative than the Versailles Treaty, that will seek to stabilize an Anglo-American feudal monopoly control over the entire world.
Liberal democracy likewise never solved the problem of bigness; but it alternately fought and condoned it in a confusion of incon- sistent policies. A cultural system drenched with the artisan spirit
? FOREWORD xiii
of small enterprise found difficulty in accepting the facts that mod- ern machinery demands integration and that productive enterprise, released from making a pair of shoes for a known local customer and set to making standard goods for an impersonal and theoreti- cally unlimited "market," likewise demands organization. Hence the recurrent efforts to curb bigness. But both bigness and monop- oly are normal antecedents to the stage of planned provision for the needs of society which we are now entering, and there is no longer any point in attacking either. The only relevant questions today are: Who controls these productive facilities, and to what ends? and How effectively are they organized to achieve these ends? Or, stated in another way: Will democratic political power absorb and use economic resources, bigness and all, to serve its ends, or will big economic power take over state power?
The modern phase of business as a system of organized power began with the spread of the corporate organization of industry after the i86o's. The world of 1870 did not speculate much about the grip which corporate business was to have on the lives of all of us a half-century later. Corporate organization, like the monop- olies it made possible, was viewed as the exception, unadapted to general business. The precise significance of Dr. Brady's book is that he takes this same organizational tendency within industrial society--now become the rule rather than the exception and moved
along to its contemporary stage of organized inter-monopoly con- trol--and shows us where the logic of such a centrally organized system of power is carrying us. For synchronized monopoly directed by a peak all-industry strategy board is but corporate business come of age. The difference between the early and the mature stages is that, whereas corporate organization completed the taking of the instruments of production out of the hands of the laborer and strengthened economic power in its challenge to democratic politi- cal power, the mature stage Dr. Brady describes is moving on to wrest even the formal political means of curbing economic power from the hands of the citizens of democracy. Corporate organiza-
tion pocketed production; its giant offspring is pocketing the na- tion, including the entire lives of its citizens. And organized busi- ness is extending this anti-democratic web of power in the name of the people's own values, with billboards proclaiming "What's Good
? ^^
1
xiv FOREWORD
for Industry Is Good for Your Family," and deftly selling itself to a harassed people as "trustees," "guardians," "the people's man- agers" of the public interest.
The large identities in problem and in organizational form to meet these problems in nation after nation suggest with startling emphasis that we in the United States are caught in the same major coercions that industrial capitalist nations everywhere face. We, too, have no choice as to whether economic and state power shall be merged; for there will be no survival for nations that seek to perpetuate the economic wastes and frictions and the social anarchy entailed in the operation of state power and economic power as
^rivals. The sheer fact of the emergence of the phenomenon of ef- fectively planned nations has, because of the logic of organization inherent in modern technology, outmoded at a stroke the old sys- tem under which all our American national life has been lived. In the United States, the present stage of organized, centralized busi- ness power, already reaching out in control of schools, media of communication, public opinion, and government itself, provides more than a broad hint of the direction events will take, if present tendencies remain unchecked. In England, longer in the war than ourselves and closer to the choice that must be made, the same power tendencies are at work, despite optimistic reports of surface democratic manifestations. As this is written, the London New Statesman and Nation for August 15, 1942, carries a review of a book by an English businessman, N. E. H. Davenport. "He shows, in effect," says the review, "that what has happened is that the vested interests of monopoly capitalism have, for all practical pur- poses, taken over the government of the country. Behind the facade of political democracy they are preparing the economic founda- tions of the corporate State; and, to no small extent, they are being aided and abetted in this task by the powerful trade unions. . . .
[Mr. Davenport] has made it clear beyond discussion that unless we are able very soon to persuade or compel the Prime Minister to swift and profound changes in his economic policy, we shall de- feat Hitler only to be delivered into the hands of the same type of men for whom a Hitler is a necessary instrument. "
In this really desperate predicament, American democracy is un- prepared fully to assert itself. We are organizing--belatedly--to
? FOREWORD XV
fight a war for "democracy," but we are rendered gullible by our traditions as regards the precise thing for which to fight. We speak vaguely of "the Four Freedoms," and yet we do not go on to give these war aims, at home and abroad, the full-blooded, realistic con- tent so essential if men are really to be quickened to fight for de- mocracy. Such muting of democratic objectives creates the blurred confusion which can provide the perfect setting for the strong men who know what they want. Born as a nation coincidentally with the upsurge of the Industrial Revolution, situated in a rich continent which we have built up with the bodies of cheap foreign labor, protected by the accident of location during the years of our fum- bling growth, we have through all our national life been borne for- ward by a favoring tail wind. This past we view, quite characteristi- cally, not as a stroke of luck but as the vindication of the superior rightness of "the American way"; and this makes for complacency. Growing out of this is our blindness to any way of conceiving our national future other than in terms of the simple extension of our expansive past. Our national naivete about organization is disas- trous in the present crisis. We are called "a nation of joiners," but the individual still holds the focus of our national imagination. With all the flotsam and jetsam of our "joining," we have little pop- ular belief in or experience of the hard-bitten type of relentless organization for power ends; and where we see it, for instance, in the Tammany type of politics, we deplore it even as we condone it as a special case and a somehow necessary evil. Of all the Western industrial nations, we are the least class-stratified psychologically and the only one without an active labor party or its equivalent in our national political life. And, again, this is not because "the American way" is fundamentally different, but primarily because the American ideology as regards capitalism is less sophisticated than is that of any other Western nation.
Thus our traditions conspire to make us unable to read the mean- ings behind the organization Dr. Brady describes. We are opaque to the political import of this massing of business power, and we still insist on regarding it as primarily a concern only of the busi- nessmen. Meanwhile, the lawyers with their convenient conception of the role of the law, the public-relations men, the press, and all the other pliant agents of organized business go busily about on cat
? xvi FOREWORD
feet as they spread the net and tighten the noose for those so abun- dantly able to make it "worth their while. " Burnham's plausible thesis of the "managerial revolution" has been seized upon by busi- ness, and a powerful medium like Fortune proclaims itself in its new editorial policy as the organ "for the managers of America. " But behind the fiction of the "manager class" so conveniently steri- lized from the taint of special interest stands the same old power. "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. "
If the American rank and file--the upwards of four fifths of the nation who are working-class and small-business folk--are thus illiterate in the language of contemporary power, the case is almost as bad with those experts, the professional social scientists, whom society supports because they profess to know about men's institu- tions. It is no accident that, as Dr. Brady points out, a world of scientists who comb their fields for important problems for research have left the problem of the power organization and politics of big business so largely unexplored. For the most part, contemporary social scientists still exhibit toward the changing business world the encouraging moral optimism of Alfred Marshall. Nor are we helped by the fact that the crucial science of economics derives its data within the assumptions and concepts of a system conceived not in terms of such things as "power" but of blander processes such as the automatic balancing of the market.
American public opinion tends to reject out of hand any answer to the question "Where are we going? " that is not couched in the familiar optimistic terms. As we fight the present war, involving an unparalleled tangle of ideological inconsistencies, the popular mood encouraged by government and sedulously sponsored by bus- iness is to ignore controversial questions and to concentrate on win- ning the war. But the First World War gave interindustry coordi- nation of big business rapid acceleration; post-war conditions gave it its opportunity and successful foreign precedents; and the man- agement of the present war has been taken over by representatives of big business. And this time they may be in Washington for keeps. We shall emerge from this war well on our way to having a per- manently planned and managed economy; and if business controls the goals of that planning, that will mean management also, from top to bottom and from center to circumference, of all relevant so-
? FOREWORD xvii
cial and cultural life. The fresh, growing shoots of new life in our American culture will either be destroyed or ruthlessly grafted to the main trunk.
The thing we do not realize, or are prevented from realizing, is that we are building the structure and accompanying animus of the post-war world by the manner in which we fight the war. The al- ready half-accepted formula that "You can't fight this war demo- cratically" is both factually incorrect and a one-way ticket to Amer- ican fascism. If democracy is suspended now, it will not reappear at the peace conference. If during the war we avoid the develop- ment of genuine democratic organization and participation, if we curtail the partial organization of labor we now have instead of moving forward to its thoroughgoing democratic extension, we can know for certain fact that democratic people's organizations will be similarly frustrated after the war. Both during the war and after,
the issue is identical: Who controls, and to what ends? An answer to that question has been preparing in the organization Dr. Brady describes, and it is crystallizing in the staffing and manner of opera- tion of current wartime controls in Washington.
As things stand, the fight is not an equal one. On the one side is abundant good will but lack of organization and channels of com- munication, some suspicion of the way business is fencing in the war for itself, divided counsels in organized labor and middle-class suspicion of labor, large confusion as to the issues, and a tendency to trust that "they" in Washington will somehow bring us through the war and then everything will be all right again. On the other side, effective organization and the crisis nature of the present, re- quiring quick decisions and encouraging decision in terms of blunt short-run objectives, favor those who seek to exploit the war to make the United States safe for big business. The de facto power of big business is reflected in the fact that the Government itself is, for
the most part, timid and afraid of what big business will do if the war is not made "worth its while. "
One stout weapon remains in the hands of the little people at the grass roots of democracy: no one dares to challenge in frontal attack the basic democratic thesis. (If an American version of fas- cism comes, it will have to come disguised in the full outward trap- pings of democracy. ) The people can seize this remaining weapon
? xviii FOREWORD
and use it offensively and defensively as the price for their participa- tion step by step in the war effort. We live in a heroic time. And democracy will either throw off its lethargy and rise insistently to the stature of the times--or it will cease to exist.
New York City October, 1942
Robert S. Lynd
? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK is the first direct product of an extensive and con- tinuing study of the rise of bureaucratic centralism which was begun in 1 934 with the aid of a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The original subsidy, which underwrote basic travel and research expenses, was supplemented by a more recent grant which makes possible prompt publication of this book by the Columbia University Press. I am deeply grateful not only for the financial assistance given by the Foundation, but also for the keen and sustained interest of Dr. Frederick Keppel and his associates
in the work as it has been developed.
So much assistance has been given me in the research, writing
and final preparation for publication that I cannot hope to cata- logue my full indebtedness without fear of serious omissions. Special mention should be made, however, of the assistance given by several experts in the chapters dealing with the development of the "peak associations" in the various countries examined: Dr. Franz Neumann on the German material; Dr. Carl Schmidt on the Italian; Dr. Louis Launay and Mr. Robert Valeur on the French; Dr. William Taylor and Mr. Harry Oshima on the Japa- nese; and Major Leonard Urwick on the British; and various officials of the LaFollette Committee and the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice on the American. I am further indebted to Dr. Neumann for his reading of the entire manuscript.
Copyright 1943
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW YORK
Foreign Agents: Oxford University Press, Humphrey milford, AMEN house, LONDON, E. C. 4, ENGLAND, AND B. I. BUILDING, NICOL ROAD, BOMBAY, INDIA
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
This Study was made possible in part by funds granted by Carnegie Corporation of New York. That Corporation is not, however, the author, owner, publisher, or proprietor of this publication, and is not to be understood as approving by virtue of its grant any of the statements made or views expressed therein.
? To
WESLEY CLAIR MITCHELL
who, without knowing it, has had much to do with the writing of this book
? FOREWORD
MEN HAVE ALWAYS EXPERIENCED difficulty in pcrcciving the thrust of deeper tendencies beneath the surface phenomena of their day. Particularly when long-established institutional sys- tems have been breaking up under them have they tended to mis- take symptom for cause and to greet predictions of major change with incredulity and aversion. In the main, they wrestle with ob- vious immediacies in familiar terms; for the rest, the deeper tend- encies, they prefer to wait and see. If such a policy has seemed to be not without some justification in more leisurely eras of change, it is today nothing less than disastrous. For we are living through one of the great climactic eras of history, a major faulting of the institutional crust. A symptom of the extent of current change is the extreme ideological confusion. Fascist monopoly capitalism adopts "National Socialism"; organized industry opposes organized labor in the name of "democracy"; and ideological opposites fight side by side for goals that sound alike only because they are left vague. In such a time, when men and their most cherished concerns are being dragged headlong at the heels of confused events, the one chance for constructive recovery of control lies in the diagnosis of
underlying causes.
In this book Dr. Brady cuts through to the central problem dis-
rupting our world, the most dangerous issue democracy faces. This problem is not basically created by Adolf Hitler and the Axis na- tions, but by the organized economic power backing the Hitlers in nation after nation over the industrial world as a device for shoring up for yet a while longer a disintegrating economic system. And while this war against the immediate Axis Hitlers must be fought and won as a necessary step in the reestablishment of a democratic world, we citizens of the United States and of other democratic na- tions would better learn, and quickly, to focus our strategy on the fact that the war is an episode in the world-wide counter-revolution
? viii FOREWORD
against democracy; for, win, lose, or draw in the military war, democracy will be lost unless it also wins, even as it fights the Axis nations, its internal political conflict.
This is a book about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism. The charac- teristic thing about democracy is its diffusion of power among the people. That men have recurrently had to have recourse to revolu- tions in order to assert such a pattern of power attests the inveterate presence within society of a contrary tendency. Power is no less "political" for being labeled "economic" power; for politics is but the science of "who gets what, when, and how. " Alexander Hamil- ton advocated and Jefferson opposed the effort of clotted economic power to substitute concentrated minority class power for diffused power. Lincoln referred to this same tendency when he wrote in
i860, "Soberly, it is now no child's play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation"; and he went on to speak of "the miners and sappers of returning despotism" engaged in undercutting democracy. The preponderant weight of economic power in the Constitutional Convention, while conceding the out- ward forms of political democracy, went on at once to curb the exercise of the very power it had just granted; it crippled the force of democratic power at the source by parceling up this power by a marvelously dexterous system of barriers to its expression. Thus political equality under the ballot was granted on the unstated but factually double-locked assumption that the people must refrain from seeking the extension of that equality to the economic sphere. In short, the attempted harmonious marriage of democracy to cap- italism doomed genuinely popular control from the start. And all down through our national life the continuance of the union has depended upon the unstated condition that the dominant member, capital, continue to provide returns to all elements in democratic society sufficient to disguise the underlying conflict in interests. A crisis within the economic relations of capitalism was bound to precipitate a crisis in the democratic political system.
Democracy in the era of economic liberalism has viewed power as a thing to be feared, rather than used; and this disposition, coupled with the checks on democratic action written into the Con- stitution, has prompted American democracy to state the problem
? FOREWORD IX
of power negatively. It has been casual, to the point of recklessness, about the positive development of its own authority. Formally, de- mocracy has held all xhe aces. But actually, as Laski has pointed out, "The disproportion in America between the actual economic con- trol and the formal political power is almost fantastic. " Despite intermittent guerilla warfare between state power and private eco- nomic power through all our national life, democracy has slurred over the challenge to its very existence inherent in growing eco- nomic power. This has been due to a number of factors, (i) The fact that the issue between the two types of power has been so heavily cloaked under the sectional issue between the agrarian and the
Eastern industrial states has diverted attention from the fact that capitalist economic power constitutes a direct, continuous, and fundamental threat to the whole structure of democratic authority everywhere and always. (2) The appearance of the Industrial Revo- lution simultaneously with political democracy distracted men's at- tention from the perennially unfinished task of building democ- racy. Equipped with a new and marvelously growing technology and with a raw continent beckoning to be exploited, Americans turned their attention all down through the nineteenth century to
the grand adventure of getting rich. Democracy was taken for granted as substantially achieved, or at most requiring only to be defended. And a naive and dangerous popular faith has grown, notably since the Civil War, that democracy and capitalist enter- prise are two aspects of the same thing, so that the progress mani- festly occurring in industry must also be happening in the demo- cratic political system. Since democracy itself thus failed to throw constantly new goals ahead to catch the imagination and to evoke
the energy of its citizens, men thus deprived of anything bigger to work for have in the main vindicated the cynical view that they are motivated only by selfish personal interests. Under such a distorted view of democracy, in which the state and society are nothing and the individual everything, democracy has become increasingly identified with the protection of one's personal affairs; and this has steadily sapped its vitality. (3) Because this "American way" has worked so seemingly opulently, and because of man's need in the
rough and tumble of an increasingly insecure world to feel im- mutable security somehow back of him. American citizens, preoc-
? X FOREWORD
cupied with everything but the affairs of democracy, have increas- ingly imputed to the Constitution, the central symbol of American democracy, an extravagant finality. If this great and mysterious It were but defended, democracy remained unchallenged.
In such an environment, democracy has been largely tolerant of the businessman, for the most part encouraging him with a lavish hand; for upon his restless enterprise the public welfare was con- ceived to rest. The "trust busting" of the turn of the century was a protest against what seemed to be excesses in an otherwise normal system, not a protest against the system itself. Even in recent dec- ades, as business has grown in power until it has become a jostling giant, democracy has largely failed to recognize its political sig- nificance. The world was large and its wealth seemingly unlimited, and if business was growing bigger and more noisily insistent, this was viewed as but a surface manifestation of rugged growth. Down, to the First World War abroad, and until 1929 in the United States,
what businessmen did was regarded as primarily their own busi- ness. Since the fruit of their activities slopped over in taxes, wages, and dividends, it was manifestly contributing to general welfare.
But this nominal division of powers could not be maintained within the structure of capitalist nationalism. As industrialization has spread over the world and competition has increased, the recip- rocal relation between state power and economic power has be- come more apparent. The fundamental import of what has been happening at a quickening tempo since the Russian Revolution of
1917 is the abandonment of the liberal fiction of the separateness of these two kinds of power. Organized business enterprise is less and less willing to tolerate checks on its activities by the state; more and more it needs the state as active ally; and the national state, in turn, having delivered itself over by accepting the definition of its wel- fare as synonymous with the welfare of its business system, needs increasingly the utmost of aggressive efficiency from its business- men. Business is in politics and the state is in business. The state political apparatus can tolerate only the most efficient management of the economic system, since it depends directly upon the latter for national power in foreign relations; whereas the economy must have the political power to extend control, as the Nazis have demon- strated, to the regulation of the social sphere, "not to gratify
? FOREWORD XI
lower-class maudlinness or rapacity but to secure national concord and efficiency" as an essential aid to foreign economic competition. The result is an unmistakable trend toward the monolithic power structure of the totalitarian state.
And the public does not know what to do about this merging of powers up aloft over its head. As business has organized and has begun to state cogently and lavishly the case for its version of such an "ordered society," the popular challenge expressed earlier in the campaign to curb bigness by governmental action has become con- fused and blunted. Big business has carefully disseminated to the little man at the grass roots enthusiasm and pride as an American in the superefficiency of the marvelous assembly lines and other paraphernalia of giant technology that produces his automobiles and other daily conveniences. The little man is puzzled, hypnotized into inaction: if he is not to oppose bigness itself, the bigness of Henry Ford, Du Pont, and the other great corporations that makes these characteristically American things possible, what is he to oppose about big business? The technique of dazzling, confusing, and dividing the opposition, used by Hitler, has been skillfully practiced by the propagandists for big business.
The rapidly spreading web of interindustry organization of this business power is the immediate focus of Dr. Brady's book. We live in an era in which only organization counts; values and causes with unorganized or only vaguely organized backing were never so im- potent. The rapidity of current change creates the need for quick decisions, which puts the organized minority that knows what it wants at a thumping advantage over the scattered and wistful ma- jority. In fact, it is able, as the Nazis have demonstrated, to exploit majority confusions ruthlessly in the name of majority values to minority ends.
One of the most striking conclusions from Dr. Brady's book con- cerns the similarity in type and function of the organization of busi- ness interests from nation to nation, despite seemingly widely dis- similar national backgrounds. This is due primarily to the inner common tendencies within capitalist-controlled technology wher- ever it operates. But it is also due in part to the fact that men oper- ating across the world from each other learn organizational and other tricks of their trade as rapidly as these appear. Major changes
? xii FOREWORD
in the way men live and work together under industrial conditions no longer happen in one industry or one country and then spread at a pace to be measured in decades or generations. Inventions have shrunk physical space and organization has diminished social space. World competition sees to it that a profitable technical or organi- zational device runs around the world of organized interest before common folk in the country of origin are generally aware that it has been developed.
Social organization around functional concerns is normal to hu- man beings. Western liberalism, imputing freedom and rationality to the individual, washed its hands of the problem of securing posi- tive organization; it proceeded on the assumption that, wherever organization was socially desirable, men would recognize the need and forthwith organize themselves. Such a theory not only misread human nature but it failed to take account of the momentum de- veloped within such a cultural complex as machine technology owned and exploited within a legally buttressed system of private property rights. Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organi- zation of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield economic power; and that this relentless warping of men's lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by "bad" or "good" men and more and more an imper- sonal web of coercions dictated by the need to keep "the system" running. These coercions cumulate themselves to ends that even the organizing leaders of big business may fail to foresee, as step by step they grapple with the next immediate issue, and the next, and the next. Fantastic as it may sound, this course may end by the business leaders of the United States coming to feel, in the welter of their hurrying perplexities, that survival depends on precisely
the kind of thing Germany's big business wants: the liquidation of labor and other popular dissent at home, and a "peace" more vin- dicative than the Versailles Treaty, that will seek to stabilize an Anglo-American feudal monopoly control over the entire world.
Liberal democracy likewise never solved the problem of bigness; but it alternately fought and condoned it in a confusion of incon- sistent policies. A cultural system drenched with the artisan spirit
? FOREWORD xiii
of small enterprise found difficulty in accepting the facts that mod- ern machinery demands integration and that productive enterprise, released from making a pair of shoes for a known local customer and set to making standard goods for an impersonal and theoreti- cally unlimited "market," likewise demands organization. Hence the recurrent efforts to curb bigness. But both bigness and monop- oly are normal antecedents to the stage of planned provision for the needs of society which we are now entering, and there is no longer any point in attacking either. The only relevant questions today are: Who controls these productive facilities, and to what ends? and How effectively are they organized to achieve these ends? Or, stated in another way: Will democratic political power absorb and use economic resources, bigness and all, to serve its ends, or will big economic power take over state power?
The modern phase of business as a system of organized power began with the spread of the corporate organization of industry after the i86o's. The world of 1870 did not speculate much about the grip which corporate business was to have on the lives of all of us a half-century later. Corporate organization, like the monop- olies it made possible, was viewed as the exception, unadapted to general business. The precise significance of Dr. Brady's book is that he takes this same organizational tendency within industrial society--now become the rule rather than the exception and moved
along to its contemporary stage of organized inter-monopoly con- trol--and shows us where the logic of such a centrally organized system of power is carrying us. For synchronized monopoly directed by a peak all-industry strategy board is but corporate business come of age. The difference between the early and the mature stages is that, whereas corporate organization completed the taking of the instruments of production out of the hands of the laborer and strengthened economic power in its challenge to democratic politi- cal power, the mature stage Dr. Brady describes is moving on to wrest even the formal political means of curbing economic power from the hands of the citizens of democracy. Corporate organiza-
tion pocketed production; its giant offspring is pocketing the na- tion, including the entire lives of its citizens. And organized busi- ness is extending this anti-democratic web of power in the name of the people's own values, with billboards proclaiming "What's Good
? ^^
1
xiv FOREWORD
for Industry Is Good for Your Family," and deftly selling itself to a harassed people as "trustees," "guardians," "the people's man- agers" of the public interest.
The large identities in problem and in organizational form to meet these problems in nation after nation suggest with startling emphasis that we in the United States are caught in the same major coercions that industrial capitalist nations everywhere face. We, too, have no choice as to whether economic and state power shall be merged; for there will be no survival for nations that seek to perpetuate the economic wastes and frictions and the social anarchy entailed in the operation of state power and economic power as
^rivals. The sheer fact of the emergence of the phenomenon of ef- fectively planned nations has, because of the logic of organization inherent in modern technology, outmoded at a stroke the old sys- tem under which all our American national life has been lived. In the United States, the present stage of organized, centralized busi- ness power, already reaching out in control of schools, media of communication, public opinion, and government itself, provides more than a broad hint of the direction events will take, if present tendencies remain unchecked. In England, longer in the war than ourselves and closer to the choice that must be made, the same power tendencies are at work, despite optimistic reports of surface democratic manifestations. As this is written, the London New Statesman and Nation for August 15, 1942, carries a review of a book by an English businessman, N. E. H. Davenport. "He shows, in effect," says the review, "that what has happened is that the vested interests of monopoly capitalism have, for all practical pur- poses, taken over the government of the country. Behind the facade of political democracy they are preparing the economic founda- tions of the corporate State; and, to no small extent, they are being aided and abetted in this task by the powerful trade unions. . . .
[Mr. Davenport] has made it clear beyond discussion that unless we are able very soon to persuade or compel the Prime Minister to swift and profound changes in his economic policy, we shall de- feat Hitler only to be delivered into the hands of the same type of men for whom a Hitler is a necessary instrument. "
In this really desperate predicament, American democracy is un- prepared fully to assert itself. We are organizing--belatedly--to
? FOREWORD XV
fight a war for "democracy," but we are rendered gullible by our traditions as regards the precise thing for which to fight. We speak vaguely of "the Four Freedoms," and yet we do not go on to give these war aims, at home and abroad, the full-blooded, realistic con- tent so essential if men are really to be quickened to fight for de- mocracy. Such muting of democratic objectives creates the blurred confusion which can provide the perfect setting for the strong men who know what they want. Born as a nation coincidentally with the upsurge of the Industrial Revolution, situated in a rich continent which we have built up with the bodies of cheap foreign labor, protected by the accident of location during the years of our fum- bling growth, we have through all our national life been borne for- ward by a favoring tail wind. This past we view, quite characteristi- cally, not as a stroke of luck but as the vindication of the superior rightness of "the American way"; and this makes for complacency. Growing out of this is our blindness to any way of conceiving our national future other than in terms of the simple extension of our expansive past. Our national naivete about organization is disas- trous in the present crisis. We are called "a nation of joiners," but the individual still holds the focus of our national imagination. With all the flotsam and jetsam of our "joining," we have little pop- ular belief in or experience of the hard-bitten type of relentless organization for power ends; and where we see it, for instance, in the Tammany type of politics, we deplore it even as we condone it as a special case and a somehow necessary evil. Of all the Western industrial nations, we are the least class-stratified psychologically and the only one without an active labor party or its equivalent in our national political life. And, again, this is not because "the American way" is fundamentally different, but primarily because the American ideology as regards capitalism is less sophisticated than is that of any other Western nation.
Thus our traditions conspire to make us unable to read the mean- ings behind the organization Dr. Brady describes. We are opaque to the political import of this massing of business power, and we still insist on regarding it as primarily a concern only of the busi- nessmen. Meanwhile, the lawyers with their convenient conception of the role of the law, the public-relations men, the press, and all the other pliant agents of organized business go busily about on cat
? xvi FOREWORD
feet as they spread the net and tighten the noose for those so abun- dantly able to make it "worth their while. " Burnham's plausible thesis of the "managerial revolution" has been seized upon by busi- ness, and a powerful medium like Fortune proclaims itself in its new editorial policy as the organ "for the managers of America. " But behind the fiction of the "manager class" so conveniently steri- lized from the taint of special interest stands the same old power. "The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. "
If the American rank and file--the upwards of four fifths of the nation who are working-class and small-business folk--are thus illiterate in the language of contemporary power, the case is almost as bad with those experts, the professional social scientists, whom society supports because they profess to know about men's institu- tions. It is no accident that, as Dr. Brady points out, a world of scientists who comb their fields for important problems for research have left the problem of the power organization and politics of big business so largely unexplored. For the most part, contemporary social scientists still exhibit toward the changing business world the encouraging moral optimism of Alfred Marshall. Nor are we helped by the fact that the crucial science of economics derives its data within the assumptions and concepts of a system conceived not in terms of such things as "power" but of blander processes such as the automatic balancing of the market.
American public opinion tends to reject out of hand any answer to the question "Where are we going? " that is not couched in the familiar optimistic terms. As we fight the present war, involving an unparalleled tangle of ideological inconsistencies, the popular mood encouraged by government and sedulously sponsored by bus- iness is to ignore controversial questions and to concentrate on win- ning the war. But the First World War gave interindustry coordi- nation of big business rapid acceleration; post-war conditions gave it its opportunity and successful foreign precedents; and the man- agement of the present war has been taken over by representatives of big business. And this time they may be in Washington for keeps. We shall emerge from this war well on our way to having a per- manently planned and managed economy; and if business controls the goals of that planning, that will mean management also, from top to bottom and from center to circumference, of all relevant so-
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cial and cultural life. The fresh, growing shoots of new life in our American culture will either be destroyed or ruthlessly grafted to the main trunk.
The thing we do not realize, or are prevented from realizing, is that we are building the structure and accompanying animus of the post-war world by the manner in which we fight the war. The al- ready half-accepted formula that "You can't fight this war demo- cratically" is both factually incorrect and a one-way ticket to Amer- ican fascism. If democracy is suspended now, it will not reappear at the peace conference. If during the war we avoid the develop- ment of genuine democratic organization and participation, if we curtail the partial organization of labor we now have instead of moving forward to its thoroughgoing democratic extension, we can know for certain fact that democratic people's organizations will be similarly frustrated after the war. Both during the war and after,
the issue is identical: Who controls, and to what ends? An answer to that question has been preparing in the organization Dr. Brady describes, and it is crystallizing in the staffing and manner of opera- tion of current wartime controls in Washington.
As things stand, the fight is not an equal one. On the one side is abundant good will but lack of organization and channels of com- munication, some suspicion of the way business is fencing in the war for itself, divided counsels in organized labor and middle-class suspicion of labor, large confusion as to the issues, and a tendency to trust that "they" in Washington will somehow bring us through the war and then everything will be all right again. On the other side, effective organization and the crisis nature of the present, re- quiring quick decisions and encouraging decision in terms of blunt short-run objectives, favor those who seek to exploit the war to make the United States safe for big business. The de facto power of big business is reflected in the fact that the Government itself is, for
the most part, timid and afraid of what big business will do if the war is not made "worth its while. "
One stout weapon remains in the hands of the little people at the grass roots of democracy: no one dares to challenge in frontal attack the basic democratic thesis. (If an American version of fas- cism comes, it will have to come disguised in the full outward trap- pings of democracy. ) The people can seize this remaining weapon
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and use it offensively and defensively as the price for their participa- tion step by step in the war effort. We live in a heroic time. And democracy will either throw off its lethargy and rise insistently to the stature of the times--or it will cease to exist.
New York City October, 1942
Robert S. Lynd
? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK is the first direct product of an extensive and con- tinuing study of the rise of bureaucratic centralism which was begun in 1 934 with the aid of a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation. The original subsidy, which underwrote basic travel and research expenses, was supplemented by a more recent grant which makes possible prompt publication of this book by the Columbia University Press. I am deeply grateful not only for the financial assistance given by the Foundation, but also for the keen and sustained interest of Dr. Frederick Keppel and his associates
in the work as it has been developed.
So much assistance has been given me in the research, writing
and final preparation for publication that I cannot hope to cata- logue my full indebtedness without fear of serious omissions. Special mention should be made, however, of the assistance given by several experts in the chapters dealing with the development of the "peak associations" in the various countries examined: Dr. Franz Neumann on the German material; Dr. Carl Schmidt on the Italian; Dr. Louis Launay and Mr. Robert Valeur on the French; Dr. William Taylor and Mr. Harry Oshima on the Japa- nese; and Major Leonard Urwick on the British; and various officials of the LaFollette Committee and the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice on the American. I am further indebted to Dr. Neumann for his reading of the entire manuscript.
In the later stages of the work, I gained immeasurably from an infinity of suggestions and criticisms, major and minor, contributed by Professor Robert Lynd; from the laborious task of checking sources performed by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Phillips; and from the assistance of Mr. Maynard Gertler, who, at considerable expense of time and effort, has checked detail with the editorial staff of the Columbia University Press from beginning to end. Special mention should also be made of the staff of the Columbia University Press,
? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
who have managed somehow to turn the otherwise harrowing task of preparing a book for publication into a pleasant and profitable experience for the author.
I wish also to thank the authors and publishers cited for per- mission to quote from their works. For permission to reproduce, with minor alterations, material which previously appeared as arti- cles in their pages, I am indebted to the following: Pacific Affairs, September, 1940 (for Chapter III); the Political Science Quarterly, June-December, 1941 (for Chapters VII and IX); and the Journal of Political Economy, February, 1942 (for Chapter I).
Finally, I wish to acknowledge with thanks the countless aids of my most severe and relentless critic, Mildred Edie.
Whatever merits the book may possess are largely traceable to sources such as these; the faults, I need scarcely add, are mine alone.
XX
Kansas City, Mo. July 15, 1942
Robert A.
