by Daniel Bell
Communist theoreticians had held that a socially homogeneous society would emerge in the Soviet Union. But this idea—at least for the present—has been abandoned by almost all serious Soviet sociologists, and various Western ideas of stratification, based on occupational divisions, are now being admitted. At Minsk, in 1966, some Soviet sociologists declared that Lenin’s definition of class does not apply to present-day Soviet society and participants at the conference presented various criteria for reshaping the official views. Some even argued that those who are professionally engaged in administrative functions constitute a separate social group. And some have even viewed the Party, not in the original Leninist terms, as the vanguard of the working class, but as an instrument for resolving conflicts of interest among different social groups.81
Although Soviet sociologists have documented the expansion of a new stratum, most have shied away from exploring the consequences of this change for Party doctrine and ideological dogma. If there is a growth of a distinct intelligentsia and a relative shrinkage of the working class, what, then, is the role of the Communist Party as the vanguard of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” On the official level, no contradictions are admitted. V. Afanasyev writes fatuously: “The Soviet intelligentsia ... is a genuine people’s intelligentsia with its roots in the working class and the peasantry. Having come from the people it serves them with devotion and dedication.” 82 Bestuzhev-Lada, in a popular article on “Utopias of Bourgeois Futurology” in New Times, a popular weekly for foreign consumption, discusses the post-industrial society and admits that the number of persons employed in agriculture and “some industries” is falling, while the proportion of persons “employed in the service of industries and research and development is rising.” But this does not mean, he claims, the disappearance of the working class. “The working class has been and remains the principal, decisive social force of modern times, the mainstay of modern production. ...” 83
On a more serious level, sophisticated young ideologists such as Eduard Arab-Ogly argue that the nature of the scientific and technical revolution is creating a “new” working class of highly skilled or technical workers, especially in such industries as chemical, atomic energy, and machine tools, and that a new category of “worker-intelligentsia” is coming to the fore to replace the old manual worker.84 But the larger sociological questions posed by Trotsky and popularized by Djilas are, themselves, never confronted.
The Czech View of the Future
In the East European communist world outside the Soviet Union, the period after the death of Stalin in 1953, the Khrushchev disclosures in 1956, and the Polish Thaw and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956–1957, were times of extraordinary intellectual as well as political ferment. Old practices were sharply debated: the adequacy of the Leninist model of the Party, the merits of collectivization, the drawbacks of centralized planning. Traditional doctrine was challenged: historical materialism, the theory of class, the nature of alienation. Meaningless ideological dogmas were quietly discarded: the rigid conceptions of dialectical materialism, the theory of the interest rate as exploitative, the view of science as part of the “superstructure” of society.85
In all this ferment, there was, curiously, little extended discussion of the vision of the “future society” and what the changing nature of industrial social structure portended for the traditional communist view. Only in the early 1960s did some discussion of these problems begin and then, because of the reintroduction of ideological discipline, much of this discussion was aborted.86
The most important document to come out of these latter inquiries was the remarkable study by Radovan Richta and a research team of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science, entitled Civilization at the Crossroads: Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution, which appeared in 1967. The Czech and Slovak editions of 50,000 copies were quickly sold out. An English translation was printed in Czechoslovakia in October 1968, and is available through an American distributor, but curiously it has received little notice in the West. Yet the document, “conceived in an atmosphere of critical, radical searching and intensive discussion on the way forward for a society that has reached industrial maturity while passing through a phase of far-reaching socialist transformation” is of major importance for the discussion of the changing social structures of communists and Western society.87
The starting point of the discussion is the “scientific technological revolution” which has become the new hope of communist ideologists. But unlike the Russians, the Richta group see this as a process that includes Western society as well (most of the Russians shy away from discussing this question since it would challenge some of the assumptions about capitalism, and open the door to the concepts of industrial and post-industrial society), and more important, they do not burke the issue of the new class structure, and the rise of a new dominating class, which such a development portends.
The inquiry begins by posing “an analytical contrast between the industrial revolution and the scientific and technological revolution,” and asserts that the consequence of this change is the transformation not just of labor but of all productive forces into a continuous, mechanized production process in which man now stands “alongside” the production process where formerly “he was its chief agent.” In effect, not labor power (and the working class) but science (and knowledge classes) is the “decisive factor” in the growth of the productive forces of society (pp. 27–28):
In place of simple, fragmented work, which has so far been the basis of production, we now have the entry of science and its application in the guise of technology, organization, skills, etc. The sphere that used to be separated from industry and was merely brought in now and then from without in small doses is now penetrating the heart of production and the entire life of the community. This sphere, which not so long ago engaged a few hundreds of thousands of people, is growing into a vast material force comprising, alongside its wide technical basis, an army of over three-and-a-half million specialists and 11 million associated workers throughout the world. Some experts estimate that in an historically short span.of time (by the next century) 20 percent of the total labor force will be employed in science and research.
In other words, science is emerging as the leading variable in the national economy and the vital dimension in the growth of civilization. There are signs of a new (“post-industrial”) type of growth with a new dynamic stemming from continuing structural changes in the productive forces, with the amount of means of production and manpower becoming less important than their changing quality and degree of utilization. Herein lie the intensive elements of growth, the acceleration intimately linked with the onset of scientific and technological revolution.
At a certain stage in the course of the technological revolution and of the changes in growth models evoked by it, all the laws and proportions of society’s development appear in a new light. This is primarily true of the relationship between science, technology and production proper; one may say that a divide is reached beyond which these relationships assume a role as vital as that occupied between Departments I and II of the production proper in the age of industrialization [i.e. the schemes outlined by Marx in Capital]. In the circumstances of the scientific and technological revolution, growth of the productive forces follows a law of higher priority, that is, the precedence of science over technology and of technology over industry.
The distinction the authors accept between the industrial society and the post-industrial, or scientific-technological society, means, in effect, that some simplified Marxian categories no longer hold. The most important, clearly, is that of the leading role of the working class: An entirely new phenomenon, demonstrating the disparity between the scientific and technological revolution and industrialization, is the turn to a relative decline in the amount of labor absorbed by industry and associated activities—accompanied by a strong shift from the traditional branches to the progressive within industry. Th
is tendency clearly refutes the standpoint giving absolute validity to the industrialization process and the structure of “the industrial society” ...(p. 120).
In general, we can assume that in the course of the scientific and technological revolution the volume of “services” will grow to the point of occupying 40–60 percent of national labor in coming decades, with a still bigger share in the long term. The civilization to which we are advancing might accordingly quite well be called “post-industrial civilization,” “tertiary civilization,” “services civilization,” etc. (pp. 121–122).88
The most striking effect is, however, induced by the growing numbers of technical and professional personnel in all sectors of the economy outside immediate production. In the fifties and sixties this group outpaced all others in the United States in its rate of growth, which was twice that for clerical workers (the category that held the lead in the forties) and seven times more than the overall rate for workers.
But, perhaps, most important of all, the older Marxist conception of “laws of social development” is no longer valid:
The laws by which society develops are not predestined, they follow no set scheme. Flowing always from the matter of history, from the motion of society itself, they change with every turn in this essential substratum. The profound intervention in the civilization base of human life signified by the scientific and technological revolution in its entirety—viewing it in its intrinsic correlation with the whole complex of social revolution of our day—cannot fail to impinge on the elementary laws of history. In many respects the course of civilization acquires a new logic and time scale.
At least in the long view, we would then be led to expect history to lose the aspect of a natural process which in the traditional industrial civilization has obscured the unchallenged course of events, interrupted only from time to time by a convergence of change in civilization. 89
Even the ideas of planning, and the time cycle of planning, based as these were on the rhythms of capital formation and the turnover of capital, now comes into question.
The rhythm of civilization is always determined by the decisive subjects of its development. Time was when the natural reproduction of the primitive community set the tone and to this day the natural yearly cycle of subsistence in these enclosed units provides the dominant time scale over a great part of the world. In the classical industrial civilization, the period of capital turnover in the process of expanded reproduction is known to have been the starting point for all surmises about the future and for speculations usually calculated some years ahead. Similarly the five- or seven-year planning terms of socialism—although not often based on an awareness of the connection—correspond to the overall turnover period of social labor, of the assets concerned. Once science and its application start to determine growth, these outlooks based on the determinate subjectivity of stable economic relations are inevitably found wanting, although almost all practical perspectives continue to be drawn from them.
Science itself has a distinct character which is different from other modes of activity, including labor; it is this character that sets apart a society based on science from industry:
Science owes its new status primarily to its exceptional power of generalization. In contrast to other products, a scientific finding is not consumed by use, on the contrary it is improved on—and then “it costs nothing.” Moreover, science possesses a peculiar growth potential. Every finding is both a result and then a starting point for further research; the more we know, the more we can find out. This intrinsically exponential quality distinguishes science sharply from all traditional activities of the industrial type.
From all this, three crucial sociological problems emerge; first, since the scientific and technological revolution cannot be led by the working class, what, then, is the role of the working class in the future society; second, the stratification system of the new society inevitably will emphasize the dominance of the professional and technical classes; and third, if the production and maintenance of the scientific mastery of the future society requires the presence of a highly trained research elite, supported by a large technical staff, does not all this define the attributes of a new potential ruling class?
Richta and his associates write:
Every revolution in production—including the industrial revolution —has hitherto been the work of the class that was instrumental in promoting it and which replaced another class in this role, carrying out the whole process at the expense of the class that represented the majority. If the model we have constructed of the scientific and technological revolution corresponds to reality, we should assume that, as a specific universal revolution in the productive forces, its progress will be impracticable—at least on the whole front—without the positive, independent participation of the majority, and ultimately of all members of the society.
As the class structure under socialism changes ... the dominant feature in the social stratification starts to be differentiation primarily according to the content of work. The long-term existence of two distinct strata working side by side—people performing exacting creative work and others occupied in simple operative jobs—will then have to be foreseen as a serious problem. ...
So long as advances in science and technology are not rationally controlled in all their social and human implications, we shall be faced with a cleavage between the professional and democratic aspects. It may find expression in technocratic tendencies, which do not, however, stem from science and technology as such, but rather from conditions that heighten certain group and class interests to which science and technology are subordinated. The fact is that at the start of the scientific and technological revolution, the actual practice of management passes in many capitalist countries to a trained managerial elite, which under state monopoly acquires some degree of independence at least in relation to traditional capitalist groupings—although its status is still essentially one of servitude to capital (pp. 249–250). 90
Under socialism this cleavage between professional elite and the mass will arise because the working class is not the leader of the new society:
Faced by the cleavage that industrial civilization has bestowed on us, one is led to the conclusion that even under socialism the working people will not be brought overnight into active participation in the scientific and technological revolution. The appropriate forms were lacking in previous social systems, and we cannot expect that the process will now be automatic and without problems, as indeed no stage of revolution has ever been.
The problem of social differentiation will arise anew because of the new scientific and technical elites that might be created, and the efforts of these elites to consolidate their positions of privilege:
There is nothing to be gained by shutting our eyes to the fact that an acute problem of our age will be to close the profound cleavage in industrial civilization which, as Einstein realized with such alarm, places the fate of the defenseless mass in the hands of an educated elite, who wield the power of science and technology. Possibly this will be among the most complex undertakings facing socialism. With science and technology essential to the common good, circumstances place their advance primarily in the hands of the conscious, progressive agents of this movement—the professionals, scientists, technicians and organizers and skilled workers. And even under socialism we may find tendencies to elitism, a monopoly of educational opportunities, exaggerated claims on higher living standards and the like; these groups may forget that the emancipation of the part is always bound up with the emancipation of the whole.
The age-old socialist dream of a harmonious new society, thus, is doomed to frustration. Instead, the new society itself will generate new conflicts and new struggles not necessarily along the old lines of class and power, but of attitudes to change and to science itself:
In confrontation with the scientific and technological revolution all visions of a future free of conflict and struggle are doomed to disappointment. The i
dea that with socialism humanity will enter an epoch in which personal strain and individual effort will no longer be required, where society will care for all wants, is one of those Illusions of industrial life that simply abstract from the two-edged manipulatory power of the industrial mechanism. ... Frictions may emerge among the most varied groups of people, primarily—probably in their most persistent form—engendered by differences in work content and the resultant disagreement in ideas on life apart from work. ... There may equally be a sharpening of misunderstandings among the generations, evoked by the widening gap between modes of life in the course of two to three decades.
The signs are that society will undergo a repeated and ever stronger polarization between progressive and conservative attitudes. This throws into relief the role of social conditions under which this divergence of forces and opening up of paths for progressive trends are linked with an inexorable lifelong division of people by attributes of class, property and power, where, moreover, irreconcilable antagonisms no longer breed ruthless struggles. This calls for conditions allowing this divergence to assume mobile, functional forms adequate to the actual dialectic of conflict. The drama of pioneering efforts by individuals and groups will, of course, involve risk, genuine collisions, with real victors and losers—although arbitrary power for the victors and humiliation for the defeated can and must disappear from the scene. And, indeed, the historic mission of socialism lies just there—in meeting such opening and closing of social splits that are not founded in conflicts among classes with a system of new, appropriate forms of motion, while employing for this purpose all suitable instruments of former social forms—economic instruments, democratic, social and political institutions, etc. (pp. 257–258).
