No More Learning

Let us return, now, to the big corporation.
The management is the soul of any corporation. Without good management--that is, the rational application of unsentimental business principles as rigorously as possible in an imperfect world--the best corporation is bound to lose ground steadily to demonic rivals. And the importance of management is recognized in the many university courses and books and periodicals devoted to it. Management, in fact, is governance, rule. And within the modern corporation one finds the most rational and usually judicious application of rule in history, although for ends often extraneous to the general welfare. Corporate management fries its own fish and makes the best terms it can with cloudy public opinion and with government that is, with pubpols. The men who run these corporate fiefdoms, managers, are actually rulers of vast domains, corp-pols. Although comparatively most of them are not extremely rich, the corp-pols are indispensable to the rich. Some become very rich.
A good management of a corporation is the equivalent of a John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Company and performs a similar general role. As pristine Rockefellers are hard to find growing naturally, it is necessary to train them up. This uptraining is done on the chain of command, from the junior executives onward. Along this chain of command many are called, few ultimately chosen; some are dropped along the way, some shunted into corporation dead ends or cul-de-sacs, some lost to rivals. The hard, sharp, rational, dominant, smart and highly acquisitive are moved upward under the incentives of higher pay, more and more public deference and elevated social status. Emerging as executive vice president and president, a man is known to be a crashing success within the system. He is somebody to be reckoned with. He is a corp-pol, as powerful in his way as any senator, sometimes more powerful. As chairman he becomes something of an Elder Statesman, ready to tell congressional committees what is, and what is not, sound. For these are all, with few exceptions, sound men. They know the inner workings of affairs as many large stockholders do not.
What critics of the abstraction called capitalism rarely see is the impersonality of the actual system, allowing few involved in it to experience it in its fullness. Thus, owners in this system, unless they are also managers, have only remote impersonal relation to it. Absentees, they are seldom directly touched by it. As far as knowing precisely what goes on, most of them are as ignorant as the common man. Some do not wish to be put to the inconvenience of knowing, in which case the system also serves them well. Capitalists, at any rate, are rarely close students of capitalism and the way it works. All most of them know is that they are getting only what they believe they are in all plain justice cosmically entitled to, and this holds of many inheritors who never soiled a finger as well as of the self-erected. The courts agree to the hilt.
As to harsh characterizations of the rich as special hard types, it is easy to show that they are false. As Lampman showed, 40 per cent of the owners of taxable estates are women. As Professor James Smith showed, women predominate among the owners of estates exceeding $10 million, a figure more recently verified by Herman P. Miller, special assistant to the director of the Census Bureau. As of 1958, millionaires by sex and average age, Miller found, were as follows: 10
Amount
(in millions)
Total
$1-2
2-3 3-5
Men Age
22,024 61
16,336 59
3,156 62
1,124 68
Women Age
17,630 58
11,063 60
3,048 56
1,320 63
5-10 1,073 63 541 67
10 and over 335 58 1,658 40
The predominant number of very big holders, then (five to one), are women of an average age of forty, who are in this category either as heirs, widows or as a consequence of estate splitting by older men, usually husbands. Most such female holdings, of course, are under the direction of male investment managers, lawyers, trustees, husbands or fathers. As far as that is concerned, some of the richest people are minors, children.
While some of the women are as dividend-hungry as any man, and some hungrier, by and large they are not hard types; nobody at all has ever suggested they are. At worst what one could say of most of them is that they are foolish, uninformed, self-centered, inexperienced, possibly insensitive, often childishly arrogant. Many of the men, given sheltered rearing under tutors and in hothouse schools, are as temperamentally detached from the workings of monopoly capitalism as the women. Usually products of the Ivy League, they are in all ways gentlemen, often highly civilized. They collect modern art, give money to universities and libraries, support unquestionably worthy causes and even give privately off the record for laudable ends.
The absurd self-image of at least some of these women, many of whom appear to consider critics of their forebears as guilty at least of le`se majeste? , was publicly projected recently by Helen Clay Frick, the seventy-seven-year-old spinster daughter of the harsh ironmaster, partner of Carnegie, who died in 1919. Miss Frick in 1965 brought suit for libel against Dr. , Sylvester K. Stevens, executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, for some unusually mild depreciative characterizations of the deceased Henry Clay Frick in Stevens's Pennsylvania: Birthplace of a Nation. In what must be considered the extreme of understatement he suggested that the rapacious Frick was hardly a model Christian gentleman but was rude and autocratic.
Frick, during and after his lifetime, had steadily been depicted by many writers as the prototype of a ruthless nineteenth-century Robber Baron, overreaching and ignorant, but Miss Frick, in bringing suit, denied ever having heard any of this, claimed to be shocked at the besmirching of her sire's reputation by a scholar and asserted that he had been libeled and she had been caused great anguish of spirit. Waiving damages, she asked that the book be suppressed and the record corrected.
After carefully listening to a great deal of testimony from both sides judge Clinton R. Weidner of the Cumberland County (Pennsylvania) Court of Common Pleas, handed down a masterly fifty-one-page opinion that could have been written by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The court's opinion was far more critical of Frick than the book had been. Not only were the alleged defamatory statements completely true, said the learned jurist, but they were milder than were warranted by the facts. Frick himself, in view of his stance as a lone wolf against the world, would have been proud of them.
As the Times pointed out, the judge's opinion, ventured in the face of as many as four plaintiffs lawyers at one time in the courtroom itself, "came close to calling her suit frivolous. " Scolding the plaintiff, the court said she knew nothing whatever about her father's affairs and wanted nobody else to know about them.
"Dr. Stevens has written what he believes to be true and what the court believes to be true," said the court firmly.
In the ordinary case, this would have been the end. But some two and a half months later, upon the withdrawal of the baseless case by stipulation, Miss Frick reopened it and thereby suddenly found herself in the role of defendant. She reopened it by absurdly
expressing "delight" at the author's "retraction of false statements. " Dr. Stevens at once characterized this statement of hers as "positively vicious and face-saving. " He went on to say: "This whole thing, on the very day she has admitted her suit was groundless, is designed to make it look as though I am retracting something and Miss Frick is graciously consenting to withdraw. "
The stipulation withdrawing the case was made "with prejudice," which meant that she lost the option of reopening her complaint. As the Times pointed out, the stipulation was signed by her attorney with the knowledge that subsequent editions of the book, after changes in two trivial references to fact, one being the suppression of the word "coal," would contain some new language sharply critical of her father.
Charging "deception" and "bad faith," attorneys for Dr. Stevens asked the court to revoke the dismissal of her suit and thrash out her claim that there had been a retraction of false statements. There the matter rests at this writing. 11
What was of general interest about this case was the way it showed one of the reserve powers of the wealthy to harass in costly and timewasting legal actions writers who comment critically on their public actions, even on those dead. It was knowledge of such powers that led attorneys for the publisher of Professor Edwin Sutherland's White Collar Crime to require that the names of companies that had been repeatedly convicted of violating the law not be mentioned. Individuals who have been convicted of violating the law, especially in the commission of felonies, can be and are thereafter often for the rest of their lives referred to as "criminals. " Any scribbler can refer to anyone of such as "ex cons. " Although it might seem that one should by the same token be able to refer to a convicted corporation as a criminal corporation, the publishers attorneys in the Sutherland case thought it the better part of prudence not to mention their names.
The situation is this: Can the Super-Cosmos Corporation, convicted in open court many times of felonies and thereupon subjected to penalties and restraining orders backed by sanctions, be referred to as a criminal corporation? Lawyers, as we have seen, advise against it, knowing that their client may soon be served by a summons sworn out by the law firm of King, Lord, Duke and Pontiff of 1 Wall Street. Hardly any judge in Anglo-Saxondom would dream of even entertaining a motion to dismiss an action brought by this pontifical firm, whose members look with basilisk eyes even upon Lowells and Cabots. The offender will surely be forced to prove that crime is crime.
Even individuals, always lower class, who have never been convicted of anything are open to unpleasant characterizations in the press. Persons frequently arrested by the police, or questioned, are thereafter often referred to as "police characters. " By this token at least the top 1,000, and probably more, leading corporations are police characters; for they are constantly having run-ins with the authorities, are constantly being questioned about alleged violations, sometimes convicted. Yet to refer to any of them as police characters or as suspected outlaws might be costly. If not themselves sovereign they are so tightly interlaced with sovereignty that one is indeed guilty of le`se majeste? , in impugning them to the slightest degree. Like a king, they are hedged by divinity.
Beyond this there are "undesirable characters," rather degage? , unaesthetic types the police do not enjoy seeing lounge about in central city districts, with newspapers often concurring in the appellation. What, now, about composing a list of undesirable corporations, opening with whiskey and cigarette companies?
Yet, most of the rich today are not a demonic crowd. They are not ordinarily fanatics. Often quite "democratic," they will bandy pleasant words with almost anyone over
drinks, will probably mildly fault their severer critics as persons who unaccountably "come on too strong. " Some of this, of course, may be simple evasiveness.
Again, they are sufficiently numerous, random products, so that the law of large numbers applies to them. They range over the whole bell-shaped spectrum of the law of probability so that for every one with some unlovely characteristic there is a balancing personality with, the opposite characteristic. There are not only Miss Fricks but diametrically opposite types. In the middle range of 50 per cent one finds more similarities, usually acceptably decorous along average lines neither great nor odious.
As I said, most of the rich, except possibly some of the self-erected, are not hard types.
The hard types in the system, the ones who make the system work like an automatic mouse-trap for the largely unconscious benefit of the rich, are, first, the corp-pols, and, second, a plain majority of the pubpols. These upward-striving intermediaries are selected hard types in the same sense that a surgeon or a commando soldier is a hard type. They are decision makers, and the decisions they make are invariably devoid of sentiment. A surgeon does not refrain from cutting because it will draw blood, possibly induce death or leave a scar; a commando does not refrain from slitting a throat because he will be dispatching some kind mother's son, some worthy wife's husband, some innocent child's father. By training and temperament these are indeed special types, not subject within their group to the law of probability as to their functional characteristics. With each one it is possible to predict almost certainly how he will act in given circumstances.
The big stockholding rich, largely absentees, to a considerable extent women, have little direct contact with the corp-pols, their plantation overseers. Such little functional contact as there is takes place, if at all, through boards of directors; on these, however, many of the very rich do not sit.
The social meeting ground for them all--big male stockholders, finpols, and corp- pols--is the metropolitan club, where there is on the whole a rather desultory mingling. Although glad to be present as evidence of their puissance, many of the intermediary corp-pols in this milieu look with some reserve, possibly even disdain, on some of the big stockholders and finpols. For the corp-pols are usually different, and know it, in that they for the most part came up the long, hard way. They feel pretty much as battle- hardened veterans do in the presence of inexperienced though superior officers. Many of the rich they no doubt look upon as pampered nonrealists. Some of the corp-pols did not finish high school because their families were too poor; others went to Jerkwater College--or to business college.
The human drive in the system clearly comes, for the most part, from the corp-pols and pubpols, men from comparatively deprived backgrounds hungry for position, money and deference. The system would work perfectly well if all the big stockholders were playboys and playgirls. The system does not really need the big stockholders who are, as it were, wards of the courts.
True, many of the rich no doubt see the situation pretty much as do the corp-pols and pubpols. They recognize that there should be money incentives and that "success," not public sustenance, is the proper goal. Whether they do or not, however, makes little difference as long as they keep hands off smoothly running operations. Difficulties are best handled by the highly paid corp-pols in concert with the pubpols, most of each category commando types.
Little is known of the direct relations between corporate managers and the big owners. "To what degree do these richest families or groups use their voting power to influence
the operations of 'their' companies? " asks Robert Heilbroner. "We do not know. There exists a shroud of secrecy over the relation between the centers of inherited wealth and the determination of working policy in capitalism. " 12
Here, one must note, top management officers even after their retirement never produce revelatory memoirs of inner company affairs as do men who have served a stint in government. The latter, even high military officers, often finally "tell all," sparing nobody up to the president of the United States and his wife. Perhaps a reason such inner revelations about the corporations never appear is that the qualified writers are still on the payroll, drawing large retirement pay. By telling what went on they might be kicking the bottom out of their own boat. Thus the system automatically covers its most significant inner traces.
We are not, however, without some clues that the big hereditary owners have some direct influence in their corporations. One clue, as we have noticed, exists in the anti- Semitism of the metropolitan clubs, introduced there by rough-house nineteenth-century tycoons and echoed today in the personnel policies of the large corporations and the memberships of country clubs. In their respective outlooks, then, the big owners and the corp-pols are not strangers to each other. Somebody must initiate such a policy at the top, somebody must enforce it. The Founding Fathers were not anti-Semitic. Other policies may similarly be left-handedly, indirectly, imposed. Yet in this quarter all is very shadowy.
Nor, one may infer, are the very rich merely accidental beneficiaries of the one-sided tax laws. Parties of interest must have asked, sub rosa, for such preferential treatment. The pubpols could not have written such laws without some prompting. Had they done so they would be in the creative class of Franz Kafka.
What is probably true of many or most of the special benefits enjoyed by the rich is that at different times some one or a few of the rich utilized leverage available to them with amiable key pubpols and exerted their will with respect to some facet of the law. Whatever was of benefit to one then became of benefit to all in that category. As many at different times busied themselves with different facets of the laws, the result was a tremendously wide range of special benefits made available to a broad upper-income class. While the full range of the benefits looks as though it could only have resulted from a common conspiracy, each individual benefit was obtained by some individual go-getter exerting his political leverage. There is, then, nothing like a central moneybund calling all the shots, only individual go-getters exerting power through stooges that brings unsought benefits to others. Naturally, nobody objects to features of the law that he finds give him a favored outcome. This is only what is known in popular parlance as "getting the breaks. " The rich get many such "breaks," for many of which most of them never asked. For most of them it is all pure serendipity.
Where the dominant rich enter the system most openly is through patronage, political and cultural. The political patronage comes from the rich directly in the form of campaign contributions and indirectly from their corporations that hand out largess through their overpaid officers in the form of campaign contributions and direct payments in the form of money from lobbyists and corporate retainers for political law firms. For sources of campaign funds, see Alexander Heard, The Costs of Democracy, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1960. Cultural patronage is exercised through the foundations and, sometimes, the trustee-controlled universities directly. Scholars and scientists whose work either contributes to the well-being of the existing establishment or provides justification and rationalization for it are supported with lavish grants and cushy appointments. Others, either critical or producing unwelcome or unusable findings, are not. It is as simple as that.
This sort of foundation patronage produces a double advantage for the donors for it is publicly designated not as patronage but as philanthropy. In some cases philanthropy may be truly involved; over the entire foundation panorama, as we have seen, it is not. The foundations serve many ulterior purposes, the very least of them philanthropic.
There is, too, the general patronage in the form of rich corporate advertising placements in the mass media, serving to keep these firmly on the side of the existing establishment at all times when the chips go down.
As far as the Establishment is concerned, there is convenient scholarship and inconvenient scholarship. Inconvenient scholarship, while tolerated is simply neither supported nor promoted. Scholarship that validates the American Celebration, however, showing Uncle Sam ueber alles, is heavily supported.
What this amounts to, quite simply, is patronage, impersonally conferred.
Basically, what gains befuddled acceptance for the system generally, it will be noticed, is verbiage--political, social, economic and cultural. Elaborate quasi- metaphysical arguments are ready at every point to prove that the existing state of affairs is exactly as it inevitably should be--all factors, of course, taken into consideration. Everybody, in other words, is right where he ought to be in the social scale, including the foundation-supported professors who excel at such arguments. Anybody who says differently is a deviant, a kook, unsound, far out in left field and probably infected by some un-American ideology. The horror of horrors is for an academic to be an avowed Marxist, as Richard Nixon showed in campaigning rabidly up and down the state of New Jersey in 1965 to have a Marxist school teacher cashiered. The obtuse Nixon lost, probably because his intended victim bore a politically potent Italian name.
It would be extraordinary if the winners in the system did not believe, after the way they had obeyed its rigorous rules (including those of inheritance), that everything was as it properly ought to be. And it is the winners who monopolize the stage in evaluating the system.
The Role of the People
But neither overreaching nor patronage would get very far unless they were practiced within a population that was emotionally simple and not in possession of sound knowledge and realistic judgment. Most of the population, whatever one may say on its behalf, is of this order, is quite uninformed and readily susceptible of being emotionally worked upon, distracted.
A Harris poll, for example, has shown that 40 per cent of American Catholics believe that whenever the pope delivers himself of an opinion it has the status of a law, a bizarre claim that the Catholic Church itself is far from making. 13 Just as large a percentage of non-Catholics, if not larger, are under similar misapprehensions about facts relating to the Catholic and perhaps their own ecclesiastical establishments.
A vast majority of the white population south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and large numbers, probably a majority elsewhere, are firmly of the belief that Negroes are subhuman or only semihuman, despite the positive assertions of biology and anthropology to the contrary. Merely to argue the scientific findings in many quarters is to risk being assaulted by righteously indignant citizens who consider the speaker erotically irregular, a "nigger-lover. "
A Louis Harris poll in 1966 showed that whereas 78 per cent of the more affluent and educated sections of the population believed Negroes are unfairly discriminated against, only 46 per cent of lower-income people thought so. "Almost three out of every four
whites who earn less than $5,000 a year and never went beyond the eighth grade in school think the education available to Negroes is as good as that available to whites," said Mr. Harris. "What is more, about half of this group thinks Negroes are not discriminated against in general and that housing for Negroes is as good as it is for whites. " 14
Careful sociological studies have shown that the masses are poorly informed on vital topics despite a plethora of accurate information available and that they are politically illiberal and withdrawn in their attitudes. Astrology flourishes.
As noted earlier, the further one moves down the social scale the more authoritarian and illiberal become the individuals.
Professor Robert E. Lane on the basis of a comprehensive study concluded that:
The lesser degree of political participation and interest in lower status groups is partly accountable by the following factors: (1) Lower-strata women (but not men) have less leisure available for political activity. (2) Lower status persons have less economic security, and, partly for that reason, feel less of a sense of control over their (political) environment. (3) The threat of deprivation of upper-strata groups present in the politics of the welfare state provides greater motivation than the promise of reward to the lower- status groups.
The relation of public policy to the group stakes at issue in that policy is made more visible to upper-status groups than to lower-status groups.
Lower-status individuals can influence and benefit from governmental action only socially, by group activity and membership, while upper-class persons can influence and benefit from such action individually. Therefore, upper-class persons have a higher incentive to participate.
Lower-status people, feeling at a disadvantage compared to upper-class people, tend to avoid social contact in mixed groups, withdraw interest, defer to others in "difficult" matters, and generally reveal a lack of self-confidence. Actually, lack of experience and influence combined with pressures to be "opinionated" leads to unrealistic participation in some instances.
Child-rearing practices in the lower-status groups tend to provide a less adequate personality basis for appropriately self-assertive social participation.
The social norms and roles in the lower-status group tend to emphasize political participation less than do the norms and roles of the upper-status groups. There is a tendency for these political roles to be concentrated in middle-class rather than upper- class or working-class groups. . . .
Lower-status persons experience greater cross pressures with respect to (a) ethnic versus class identifications, (b) divergent political appeals of the media to which they are exposed, and conflict between media and status identification, (c) community leadership and own-group leadership, and (d) subjective versus objective class identification.
Lower-status persons belong to fewer formal organizations and have fewer intimate personal friends. However, union membership tends to modify this pattern.
Lower-status persons have less capacity to deal with abstract issues and less awareness of their larger social environment.
Lower-status persons are less satisfied with their lives and communities, leading, in a minimally class conscious society, to withdrawal from civic activities, or, alternatively, to participation in deviant politics.
Inter-class mobility tends to weaken the forces for political participation, a tendency modified by identification with upper-status (participant) norms by both upwardly mobile and downwardly mobile groups. 15
None of this, however, accounts for greater lower-class response when politicians promise authoritarian repression of some segment of the populace. The promise by such as Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace that heads are going to roll never fails to galvanize the lower orders politically.
The lower-status groups--that is, those below the middle class--are, in other words, confused. And it is this element, peasantlike in outlook, that constitutes most of the electorate, accounting for the easy nomination and election of so many persons who in medical parlance would be designated as quacks or unqualified practitioners. Public office in the United States--and elsewhere--is full of them: quacks.
Politics, contrary to roaring democratic theory, is not something that can be readily practiced with proper success by anybody. Politics, like any other discipline, requires qualified specialists.
Here a note seems in order. There is theoretical as well as practical politics. The multi- vocal structure of theoretical politics is laid out in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant and many similar savants. A formal exercise in practical politics, based on actual political maneuver, is Machiavelli's The Prince. Biographies abound with additional material. Formally qualified people in career politics ought to be thoroughly acquainted with this whole literature and to be broadly grounded as well in logic, semantics, linguistics, epistemology, scientific methods, the social studies and the humanities. Simply by laying down such formal requirements I have disqualified practically every working politician on the American scene. But I have no hesitancy in saying that those who, do not have some approach to such preparation are at the very least quacks. Quackery is of the very essence of being a politician on the American scene, a leader of the booboisie into fetid blind alleys.
This quackery shows itself most blatantly in the wild abuse of language by routine career politicians. Language in routine American politics is not used to inform, or to analyze problems but to manipulate emotions and to obfuscate. Purely whimsical bandying of language, as in the case of Senator Everett Dirksen, can alone make one a national character in the eyes of the press. But the more sober use of language by politicians not given to the devious Dirksen's fanciful flights of bombinating rhetoric is equally misleading so that the nation literally, under President Johnson, fell into the position of the polity of George Orwell's 1984 where peace means war, defense means aggression, the Great Society means the Shabby Society, prosperity means recession and a "war on poverty" means befuddlement of the poor and the perpetration of financial skulduggery.
Few politicians use language warrantably. In a well-known dictum, they use it to conceal thought. The gobbledegook of endless government reports and political speeches furnishes proof without end. The Congressional Record is full of the stuff. Madison Avenue and the politicians are as one in this respect. Such use of language stamps the user an arrant quack, on a par with a healer who professes to cure disease with electric belts and charms.
The United States Senate no doubt contains the greatest concentration of professional political intelligence in the nation. Yet, leaving aside terms such as liberal, moderate and conservative and applying the loosest criteria possible, it is difficult to exempt more than a bare third of it from the rubric of quack. The House of Representatives is far more meagerly equipped, and in the state legislatures it is often a case of 100 per cent quackery among their various member lawyers, real estate and insurance brokers, loan
sharks, undertakers and small-time dealers. The executive offices are for the most part filled by similar quacks, fugitives from anything resembling culture. Ghost writers fill the breach.
Still, the average officeholder is of a capability far superior to the average of the peasantlike populace he serves. The politician is not, as often supposed, of an inferior order comparatively. There is not the slightest doubt that Senators Stennis and Eastland, for example, are people superior in ability and drive to the population average in Mississippi. And the same holds true elsewhere. Again, officeholders, whatever one may say of them, meet the criteria of the broad electorate. They have what it takes to gain acceptance by the boobs. The "pork barrel," for which the politicos are castigated, is what gains them votes out in the spiritually barren home districts.
As Professor Lane remarks:
Most of the current criticism of popular rule does not emanate from the enemies of democracy, but rather from its saddened friends. It deals in part with the capacities of the people to make wise decisions in their own interest, the strength of their desire to participate in government, and the nature of the benefits they derive therefrom. On the basis of clinical research and public opinion polls, students of democratic government have concluded that the electorate is wanting both in vital information and in rational pursuit of enduring self-interest; the tasks have exceeded the capacities of the public to perform them. Thus, Walter Lippmann, continuing a line of argument he began so brilliantly in Public Opinion some thirty-five years ago, states that a central cause for the breakdown of democratic governments in modern times has been that "the assemblies and the mass electorates have acquired the monopoly of effective powers" and do not know how to use them. . . .
Erich Fromm, although he favors widespread social participation, has cast doubt upon men's desire for the burdens which such participation implies. Freedom implies choice, participation implies responsibility, and under stress the majority of the people may find choice painful and responsibility too weighty a load. Apathy, withdrawal, conformity, "pseudo-willing," result. . . .
It is said that the masses have not gained through their new political power because the sources of their trouble are not political but economic. Democracy is a mask for plutocracy, and the plutocrats remain entrenched in power. Thus the long struggle to enfranchise the masses of men has, so far, come to no avail; the franchise is useful only as it offers leverage to attack the real citadel of power.
[Commenting here, Lane says:] This idea is curiously at the confluence of three streams of thought. The first, liberal democracy, is illustrated by [Carl L. ] Becker who says that "economic forces . . . brought about an increasing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the fortunate few, and thereby nullified, for the majority of people, many of those essential liberties which provide both the theoretical justification and the necessary conditions for the practical success of democratic institutions. " The second element in this confluence is contributed by Mosca and Pareto, both of whom identify democracy with plutocracy. And the third element, of coarse, is the Marxian interpretation of bourgeois democracy as a complex of institutions manipulated by the capitalist class. 16
That the universal franchise and the wide open consumer market are on the basis of their experience with it, now fully acceptable to the dominate orders has been seen in the massive and costly efforts of the Johnson Administration to force them upon the Vietnamese at the point of firepower. In the Johnsonian view even people to whom the idea of voting is bewildering, contra-cultural and perhaps repugnant, are to be forced to vote. This, the American Way, it is held, will lead to their liberation. Yet neither voting
nor the open consumer market has led to the liberation of the masses in the United States; rather have they delivered them into the pincers of ignorance, poverty or near poverty and emotional deprivation. The masses are, literally, stupefied by the "opportunities" open to them.
Voting, unless there is ground-up, knowledge-based participation, cannot lead to popular deliverance. Only if the assumption were true that each participant is of fairly equal capability could the process work. But people simply are not of equal capability and motivation, contrary to the dream of the early democrats. They must lose out in the electoral game for a multitude of reasons, some of which have been cited. The shrewd manipulators--the pubpols, corp-pols, finpols, admen and scholpols--must come out on top every time just as the heavyweight champion must easily defeat every amateur who steps into the ring with him.
Democrats, liberals and radicals, have wasted millions of words and hours of their time trying to arouse the people in their own interests either to electoral or to revolutionary assault, and always without avail. Marx predicted, erroneously, that factory operatives, the workers, would take the lead in an assault on the owners; such an assault has never taken place in any industrial country. Marxist parties have taken power only under conditions of war-induced general social collapse, as in agricultural Russia and China, with only the most meager of Marxist proletarian support. Non-Marxist peasants in both cases were the revolutionary instrument. (Marx, inter alia, detested the peasantry, which he saw as reactionary. )
Nor have popular causes been more successful in the electoral arena, where splinter parties have long failed to gain even a foot-hold. For the mass does not vote for its objective interests; it always votes for some fantasy.
From Lincoln onward no more than two out of nineteen presidents are argued by anybody to have been oriented toward the popular interest and even those two are rejected by some experts as true paladins of the people. The people, very obviously, are not capable of wielding the electoral sword, thus accounting for the success of institutionalized overreaching and patronage. The rich, in plain fact, are rich because they cannot help it. They are playing marbles for big stakes against blind men, cannot help winning with little effort.
To the Marxists all these presidents were tools of the capitalist Establishment; but not to the people, to whom the Marxists look vainly as the instrument of social reconstruction. As to this, say the Marxists, the people are fooled by the mass media; but it is of the essence of politics, as of military affairs, not to be fooled. To be fooled in politics is to be conquered. In losing out so consistently by means of open elections the people, clearly, are being hoist by their own petard. They have not the least inkling what the elections are all about.
It would be difficult for any set of men, however qualified, to run so complexly ponderous a country as the United States really well. As it is, the United States is very, very poorly run, year after year, by the quacks, overreachers and patrons, as the accumulation and multiplication of social problems attest. At the same time, propagandic apologists continually bellow how well the country is run. Nothing, though, ever seems to get any better; everything gets demonstrably worse and worse, converging toward some awesome future crisis, some catastrophic reckoning. Apre`s nous, le deluge.
So really bad is the situation that American sociologists have gradually developed a forbidding branch of their discipline labeled, simply, Social Problems, the equivalent of pathology in medicine. To this melancholy subject scores of textbooks are devoted, dealing with crime, its causes and its steady increase; rigging of courts and elections;
poverty; racial and religious conflict; curtailments of civil rights; prison brutality; ill health and inadequate and profit-perverted medical care; mal-education, non-education and illiteracy; the prevalence of divorce and desertion; the excesses of pressure groups; faulty mass transportation; child mistreatment and abandonment; personal anomy; inadequate housing; social disorganization; widespread psychic disorder; slums, overcrowding and overpopulation in relation to available facilities; advertising and propaganda; unattended mental illness; commercialized alcoholism; gambling; drug addiction; traffic tangles; prostitution; pathological deviancies; war, etc. , etc. 17 All of this bespeaks a very sick society, a poor political system.
What is most remarkable about all these problems is that despite the reports and recommendations of one public commission after the other none ever appears to be solved or even made more tractable. Each appears to be growing greater and new ones, such as water and air pollution and air traffic, are constantly being added. As the sociologists report, many causes are discernible but a general cause seldom mentioned is simple political neglect. Forthright confrontation of the problems is prevented by the various forms of political blockage at which the pubpols are most adept. Again, as much of the brains of the country are in the service of overreaching in the market place and political arena in pursuit of the dollar there are few competent people left in circulation to deal adequately with the problems. Money for social problem-solving, of course, is kept to a minimum as the public coffers are opened wide for the purchase of multi- redundant military hardware and space rockets to the moon: Over-kill.
Lavish in the money rewards given to corp-pols and pubpols, as we have seen, the going system becomes niggardly in the pay scales adopted for supportive personnel such as teachers, social workers, scientists, counselors, aides, nurses, engineers and the like. As a way of obtaining money and forthright action with respect to these problems the proper method would appear to place them all under the jurisdiction of the Defense Department, where they seem to belong. For what is the value of keeping the nation muscular on the outer frontiers while it is eroding at the core? In view of the rising tide of unsolved, gingerly tended social problems, what is it, precisely, that is being defended?
The Final Reckoning
Where will it all end? What will be the historical outcome of the concentration of wealth and power in the United States?
Although all answers to such questions must be speculative we have recently been provided with a brilliantly suggestive study along these precise lines by Robert L. Heilbroner in The Limits of American Capitalism. 18
Heilbroner, in harmony with details laid out earlier in this text, is well aware of corporate dominance in American affairs. He notes that, out of some eleven million separate economic enterprises down to single newsstands, about a million companies do approximately 85 per cent of the business, and a half million corporations do 98 per cent of all corporate business and 75 per cent of all business. In turn, 1/10th of 1 per cent of the biggest industrial corporations, the 500 at the top, do about 33 per cent of all business in the corporate field. Furthermore, the top 50 industrial companies have sales as great as the next 450 while the profits of the top 10 are equal to those of almost half of the remaining 490. The 500th on the annual Fortune list has total sales of only $97 million, which is less than the profits of any of 26 of the 50 largest. 19
By 1975, according to Willard Mueller, chief economist of the Federal Trade Commission, 200 corporations will own two-thirds of all American manufacturing assets compared with the same proportion owned by 500 corporations in 1962. The
reason for this further concentration, it was indicated, is the renewed, Administration- sanctioned merger movement. 20
We are confronted, in short, by corporate giantism. The backbone of political support comes from this corporate world.
A single company, AT&T, holds nearly 5 per cent of all nonbank corporate assets.
If only the top 150 companies with assets or sales at $1 billion or more were suddenly to stop doing business the entire economy would collapse. These companies compromise 50 industrials, 40 banks, 20 insurance companies, 10 merchandisers, 10 transportation lines and 20 public utilities. 21
While the 100 top industrial corporations owned 25 per cent of all business assets in 1929, they owned 31 per cent in 1960. In 1963 they accounted for 53. 8 per cent of total national income compared with 55. 8 per cent in 1955.
Contrary to misleading propaganda about widespread ownership, in the 100 largest corporations the directors alone owned or controlled at least 10 per cent of the voting stock.
"Among the 150 super-corporations, there are perhaps as many as 1,500 or 2,000 operational top managers, but as few as 200 to 300 families own blocks of stock that ultimately control these corporations. " 22
Heilbroner, unlike Karl Marx, does not see the corporate system terminating in revolution although, sensitively aware of the vagaries of history, he does not absolutely rule out transitional phases of violence. Rather does he see the system very gradually and slowly changing just as the feudal manorial system was transformed gradually to the system of the open cash market, the citadel of bourgeois capitalism.
This being the probability, "Under the limits imposed by the present reach of business thought, the prospect is still for a society of narrow ambitions and small achievements, a society in which we belatedly repair old social ills and ungenerously attend to new
ones . " 23
Although the present system is one, like feudalism, of lopsided privilege, Heilbroner in a keen insight points out that the legal basis of privilege now is screened as such even from the beneficiaries, who are not aware that they are privileged. This basis consists of the laws that permit private benefit to be derived from huge-scale production and allows free and untrammeled use of the national and international market place for private enrichment.
Therefore, "privilege under capitalism is much less 'visible,' especially to the favored groups, than privilege under other systems. " 24 Under feudalism, the privileges were harshly evident and explicitly known to all participants.
Instead of resisting encroachments upon privilege forthrightly, those who are privileged unconsciously resort to ideology, befuddling all but the well informed. Thus, attempts to deal with the periodic vast malfunctionings and slumps of individualistic capitalism by means of national planning (in place of egocentric planning on the part of huge corporations) are vociferously cried down as encroachments upon an abstraction called Freedom.
Because the system is now too deeply rooted and generally accepted it could not be violently or arbitrarily uprooted without enveloping the nation in prolonged chaos, as Heilbroner fully recognizes; and no responsible thinker any longer seriously proposes that it be uprooted.
How then, will it change, as all things involved in history do change?
The long-run threat to monopolistic capitalism, as Heilbroner sees it, is similar to the original threat to feudalism in that it is subtle and seemingly harmless. The manorial economy of feudalism was undermined by what was originally a cloud no larger than a man's hand: the cash market that established itself right in the shadow of the manorial walls. This cash market brought into being a new social type: the businessman. In his first guise the businessman was looked upon by the lords of the manor much as we today look upon a pushcart peddler--as a person of no economic, social or political consequence, at worst a mere nuisance. From this tiny seed, however, were to come the future original Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Du Pont, Woolworth, Mellon, Ford et al. These men in their various ways were all pushcart peddlers grown to giant size under favoring conditions and laws.
The intangible, subversive threat to capitalism, as the cash market was to feudalism, Heilbroner sees as science and technology, without which modern capitalism cannot function but with which it cannot make its peace because it is constantly thrown into deep inner turmoil and confusion by them. For one thing, the composition of the labor force is constantly radically altered by technological change, first by the introduction of new machinery that converted agricultural workers into urbanized factory workers and more recently by automation which displaces factory workers into rising service industries, dumps them on the unemployment rolls or wastes them in huge and militarily unnecessary peacetime standing armies. Technology has even displaced the traditional foot soldier and cavalryman for all but relatively small-scale anti- insurrectionary operations, brush-fire wars, and replaced them by higher functional types like aviators, astronauts, rocketmen and a horde of advanced technicians. Warfare has been transformed into a vast engineering operation by which entire populations are exterminated. There is no longer, actually, much fighting in war. It has become mass slaughter. The mass destruction is the inverse of mass production.
The alteration in the labor force shows itself most spectacularly in the emergence of new elites, rising to share influence and authority with the business elite of finpols and corp-pols.
These new elites in Heilbroner's view consist of the new military policy-makers (milpols), the professional expert from the academic world in the form particularly of specialists in the social and natural sciences, the highly trained new type of government administrator and possibly the administrators that have come into view with the emergence of the big labor unions. These labor administrators are of a type quite different from the old-line ward-boss variety of labor leader.
While few if any of these men are hostile to the existing system of monopoly capitalism, Heilbroner believes (in which belief I concur) that in the long run, over a span of 50 to 150 years, the differences in background, method and objectives of these elites from those of the business elite will generate frictions between them, as frictions were generated between the feudal lords and the rising business classes. The business elite has a single-minded objective: profit. Although the new elites are not opposed, now, to corporate profit aims, in part because they are accustomed to these aims as assumptions of the established system, what will be their reaction when, as and if the plans of the profiteers seriously conflict with their plans?
It should be pointed out that the members of the new--and indispensable--elites share a characteristic in common not shared with the business elite.
They are all problem-oriented and are, in fine, problem-solvers over a widely inclusive range of problems. Name almost any problem and one may be sure that at least one of them nurtures it as a pet project.
If it is argued that the corp-pols, and finpols, too, are problem-solvers (which may indeed be the case), it is evident at once that they are concerned with a single overriding problem: profits. Such a single overriding aim is not to be found among any of the new elites who, although not men of the broad reach of the major philosophers or of diverse talents like Renaissance men, are nevertheless basically and incontrovertibly reflective intellectuals of some sort. They are all thoroughly infected by pervasive rationality, which in the long run seems of ill omen to the freewheeling corporation.
There is already low-grade although tolerable friction in some quarters between some of these new types and members of the business elite. Unless big business radically alters some of its characteristic orientations it seems that one may expect increasing friction, with dominance no longer guaranteed to the business elite. The inherent social irrationality of the system of production chiefly for private profit, utilizing for the short run the increasingly powerful tools of science and technology, practically guarantees the long-run end of such dominance.
Marx saw socialism as something to be soon ushered into developed capitalist societies by revolution carried out by the new class of factory workers, led by history- conscious intellectuals. Heilbroner sees something very akin to socialism, or production-for-use in a rationally aspiring society, ushered in by a new class consisting of these intellectual elites. The revolutionary potential, in sum, resides in the intellectual middle classes, not in the passive, dependent proletariat, who have no "historical task. "
I see one possible flaw in Heilbroner's reasoning, which to my somewhat skeptical eyes is tinged with historical optimism. History, contrary to the devotees of the idea of progress, rarely produces solutions in accord with ideal aims, a lamentable fact. Historical solutions are, somehow, always flawed.
The fly I discern in this particular mixture is the presence of the new military elite who, although men of a different order from the old-time military spit-and-polish drillmasters, are nevertheless military men. And the military in any instance that comes to mind have never allied themselves with a New Order as opposed to an Old Order. Military people are usually essentially conservative if not reactionary and are usually socially naive. Professor Morris Janowitz of the University of Chicago, who directed two large-scale studies, the first of 465 American generals appointed between 1898 and 1940 and the second of 761 Army, Navy and Air Force general and flag officers appointed between 1910 and 1950, found that as of 1954 only 5 per cent of the generals identified themselves as "liberals" but 68 per cent declared they were "a little on the conservative side or plain "conservatives. " "Such a finding win startle no one familiar with the published political views of retired generals," as one writer observed. 25 It may be that such characteristics do not inhere in the new computer-automation jet-propulsion type of military person, who may indeed be above and beyond the authoritarian master- servant, mentality of the traditional military personality. If so, my doubts are beside the point.
But if the new military elite is anything like the old one it would, in any great crisis, tend to side with the Old Order and defend the status quo, if necessary, by force.
In the words of the standard police bulletin known to all radio listeners, "These men are armed--they may be dangerous. "
Historically, the established military have always fought and thrown their influence against all rising new social orders, whether capitalist or socialist, and have always been strong supporters of reaction. Where they have retained influence after any revolution, peaceful or violent, they have been Bonapartists. Like all conservatives, they take a pessimistic view of the human enterprise, are partial to the heavy hand. Devotees of
applied force, habituated to organizing their entire experience around its use, they are rarely men of peaceful persuasion and evolutionary transition.
As I freely admit, I may be wrong in thus looking at the new military elite, which by reason of the experience-broadening complex technology it now commands may be of an entirely new historical stripe. If it is, and no available evidence supports such a view, then Heilbroner's vision may be more penetrating than my own tentative doubts allow me to concede.
In any event, it cannot be denied that science and technology are already injecting much uncertainty into the demonic corporate thrust for profits. Allowed unrestrained and continued free play, that thrust cannot but disrupt the entire social system to an extent greater than yet ever seen.
Yet, as Heilbroner sees it, it is not the immediate needs of science and capitalism that are in conflict so much as a basic divergence of intent--of science to impose the human will on society and of capitalism to allow society to function by happenstance as if it were not subject to the will. Whereas science is socially active capitalism is socially passive and "In the end capitalism is weighed in the scale of science and found wanting, not alone as a system but as a philosophy. " 26
Savior of the World
American politicos, swelling with fatuous misbegotten pride, have increasingly taken to presenting the United States and the American people as the major guarantors of what remains of civilization in a world torn by shabby power struggles on every band. Whatever else the foregoing pages may portend, they should suggest that anyone looking to the United States for the solution to world problems is depending on a huge but weak reed.