by Daniel Bell
The onset of a communal society, combined with the transformation of personal morality, brings with it a new “cross-over” of political and cultural roles for the regulative mechanisms of society. In the nineteenth century there was economic freedom and the social regulation of the person. In the economic market, individuals and corporations were largely free to pursue goals, so much so that when the state of New York once sought to regulate the conditions of hazardous work, the Supreme Court, in Lochner vs. New York (1905), struck down the statute, leading Justice Holmes to say, in a dissenting opinion, that the Court was seeking to write Herbert Spencer’s “social statics” into the law of the land. But in the realm of personal conduct, various “blue laws” severely limited what could be printed, or performed on the stage; and, with Prohibition, what could be drunk. One could say that the lack of a regulatory ethic in economics was over-compensated for in the sphere of morality.
Today there is personal freedom and economic regulation. The location of industry is subject to community check, the design of cars is subordinated to government-imposed safety standards, the pollution of the environment is restrained by government penalties, the hiring of individuals (particularly minorities) must follow government guidelines, and, extraordinary for a peace-time economy, wage and price increases are limited by government commission. Yet in the cultural sphere, nudity is common in the movies, pornography on the newsstands, and group sex a subject for attentive media discussion. Almost anything goes. The change has been so great that cultural issues are transformed into political issues as women press for the repeal of anti-abortion laws, young people for the legalization of marijuana, and sexual deviants for the end of discrimination—all of these issues featured in the Democratic National Convention of 1972. The paradox is that in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries we had, in America, individualism in the economy and regulation in morals; today we have regulation in the economy and individualism in morals.
Inevitably, the politicization of decision-making—in the economy and in the culture—invites more and more group conflict. The crucial problem for the communal society is whether there is a common framework of values that can guide the setting of political policy. The one major impulse at the moment is that of redress—providing for the disadvantaged and seeking some redistribution of the income shares in the society. To some extent, this may satisfy one criterion of justice—as fairness. But it does not create any positive ideal of the kind of individual a society wishes to have. The simplistic notion that one should be “free” to follow one’s individual impulse comes into conflict with the increasing pressure for communities to regulate the material conditions of life—including the development of recreation, of access to beaches or wild lands, or the multifarious ways in which the increasing interdependence of life forces each individual to subordinate his desires because they have an adverse effect on others. Politically, there may be a communal society coming into being; but is there a communal ethic? And is one possible?
THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
The concept of post-industrial society is an analytical construct, not a picture of a specific or concrete society. It is a paradigm or social framework that identifies new axes of social organization and new axes of social stratification in advanced Western society. Social structures do not change overnight, and it may often take a century for a complete revolution to take place. Any specific society is a combination of many diverse social forms—mixes in the character of the economy, different kinds of political structures, and the like —and this is why one needs multi-conceptual prisms to show, from different standpoints, the analytical frameworks, and their weights, embedded in any society. As a social system, post-industrial society does not “succeed” capitalism or socialism but, like bureaucratization, cuts across both. It is a specification of new dimensions in the social structure which the polity has to manage.
By the end of the century, the United States, Japan, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union will take on aspects of the post-industrial society and have to confront the management of these new dimensions. How this is done will vary from country to country. The organization of science, the character of education, the positions and privileges of the new technical elites, the balance of meritocracy and equality necessarily will be handled within the framework of the different political structures of these countries—the respective ideologies, the amount of resources available, the strength of competing groups, the degree of openness and flexibility of these societies. What a venture in social forecasting can do is to pose an agenda of questions, not a panoply of answers.
In political terms, the problems, in principle, are no different than the kinds of challenges—urbanization, the claims of a working class, mass education—which the new capitalist and industrial nations faced in the hundred years between 1850 and 1950. And yet by the end of the twentieth century one major new feature will have intervened to change the character of the answers—the increased interdependence of the world economy and the rise, with new telecommunications and jet transport, of the world business corporation. The context of all decisions today is truly international.
There are today about 300 colossal multi-national corporations whose production of goods and services adds up to about $300 billion a year, a figure higher than the gross national product of every country except the United States. If one takes the IOO largest economic units in the world, only 50 of them are nation-states; the other 50 are the largest of these 300 multi-national companies.
Of the 300 multi-national corporations, 187 are American; half of the remaining third are British and Dutch, and the other half European and Japanese.142 The majority of these American giants do more than a half-billion dollars in sales a year. General Motors, the largest, has total annual sales of $25 billion, which exceeds the net national income of all but a dozen countries.
But it is not size and income alone which are important, but the change in the control pattern of the “product cycle.” In the past, countries found that once a new product or technique had been created, its initial advantage was overtaken by other countries which, with cheaper labor or newer machinery, could turn out the product cheaper and thus undersell the original country. The textiles industry is perhaps the classic case in point. But the multi-national corporation not only transfers capital and managerial know-how abroad; it has become an organizational mechanism for the transfer of manufacturing production to low-wage countries and its managerial techniques and technology to the advancing industrial countries while retaining control—and earnings—at both ends. In the last five years, overall employment in electronics in the United States declined by some 219,000 jobs as American firms located their new plants in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mexico. In the nature of the product cycle, more and more manufacturing of the standardized sort will move to the poorer sections of the world while the post-industrial societies concentrate on knowledge-creating and knowledge-processing industries. But the control of the product, in many industries, will remain with the multi-national corporation.
For the United States the salient fact is that the multinational corporations are now increasingly dependent on earnings abroad, a factor completely new in American economic history. A study by Forbes magazine of fifty major U.S. corporations showed that, on the average, 40 percent of their total revenue comes from overseas. In the case of Standard Oil of New Jersey, 52 percent of whose net income comes from foreign operations, the dependence on foreign oil is understandable. In the case of IBM, which also earned 50 percent of its net income from worldwide operations, its technological lead gives it an advantage. But one finds that standard manufacturing companies are also heavily dependent on operations outside the United States. Goodyear Tire and Rubber, a $3.6-billion corporation, operates plants in twenty-four countries and earns one-third of its net income from overseas operations. Firestone Tire and Rubber earns 39 percent abroad, and Uniroyal 75 percent. The same is true of processing companies. H. J. Heinz receives 44
percent of its income from worldwide operations, Colgate-Palmolive does 55 percent of its business abroad, chemical and drug companies such as Dow, Pfizer, and Union Carbide do between 30 and 55 percent of their business abroad. Even the largest U. S. manufacturing giants have become increasingly dependent: General Electric receives 20 percent of its profits, Ford 24 percent (excluding Canada), and General Motors 19 percent (excluding Canada) from overseas operations.143 The headquarters and staff operations remain in the United States, as directing and service facilities, while manufacture and operations are extended abroad.
In short, what is happening as a post-industrial cycle within the national economy is repeating itself on the larger stage of the world economy. New York, in relation to the rest of the American economy, is a headquarters city. More than a third of the largest 500 corporations in the country have their headquarters there, or in the environs, and the concentration of financial, legal, advertising, and marketing services provides the basis of the white-collar employment in the city. But as American management and capital find their most efficient use abroad, and the employment of foreign labor for manufacturing, the United States, too, as Paul Samuelson points out, might become a “headquarters economy.”
In the future, it would be normal for the United States to enjoy an unfavorable balance of merchandise trade, but this deficit would be financed by the “invisible” items of interest, dividends, repatriated profits and royalties. In such a situation two political problems would rise. Though total American GNP might be larger, because of this mobile flow of capital and investment, the competitive share of property income flow (i.e. profits, dividends, etc.) would rise at the expense of labor’s share, and pose a domestic problem for the welfare state—the greater need to expand tax and transfer programs for the redistribution of income. But the larger question is the new relation of the United States to the rest of the world. As Samuelson writes: “Suppose that economic equilibrium did dictate our becoming a service economy, living like any rentier on investment earnings abroad. ... Can one really believe that in the last three decades of the twentieth century the rest of the world can be counted on to permit the continuing flow of dividends, repatriation of earnings and royalties to large corporations owned here? “144
We thus find the paradox of the spread of a world capitalist economy as in each nation-state the economic order becomes more subordinate to the wider context of political decision.
But this problem is set in a wider context, the relation between the advanced industrial societies and the rest of the world. Estimates of the disparities between rich and poor vary, and such statistics are notoriously inexact. Yet it has been roughly estimated that the gross value of world production in 1971 was about $3,875 billion. Assuming a world population of 3,600 million, the average income in the world was thus about $1,075 a head. But if one takes the polar cases, the United States produced a trillion-dollar GNP (almost a fourth of the world’s total), which, for its 200 million persons, meant an income of $5,000 per capita. The poor countries of the world, whose population numbers 2,300 million, produced 500 billion GNP (or half the production of United States alone) for an income of $212.50 per capita.145
Arnold Toynbee once wrote of the rise of an “external proletariat,” the poor perimeter of the world encircling the central heartland of the rich. It was a theme sounded ominously in 1965 by Lin Piao, Mao Tse-tung’s former Number Two man, when he warned that the “class struggles” of the end of the twentieth century would be between nations rather than within them.146 Given the pattern of economic development, such a “class struggle,” if it ever develops, might become a color struggle as well. But that is the outer limit of our trajectory—a problem for the twenty-first century.
Conclusion
The post-industrial society, as I have emphasized several times, is primarily a change in the character of social structure—in a dimension, not the total configuration of society. It is an “ideal type,” a construct, put together by the social analyst, of diverse changes in the society which, when assembled, becomes more or less coherent when contrasted with other conceptual constructs. In descriptive terms, there are three components: in the economic sector, it is a shift from manufacturing to services; in technology, it is the centrality of the new science-based industries; in sociological terms, it is the rise of new technical elites and the advent of a new principle of stratification. From this terrain, one can step back and say more generally that the post-industrial society means the rise of new axial structures and axial principles: a changeover from a goods-producing society to an information or knowledge society; and, in the modes of knowledge, a change in the axis of abstraction from empiricism or trial-and-error tinkering to theory and the codification of theoretical knowledge for directing innovation and the formulation of policy. Any massive set of social changes poses new problems of social management, and in this Coda I have attempted to suggest the agenda of issues which emerges with the onset of post-industrial society: the new hierarchies of technical elites and the bureaucratization of science; meritocracy and equality; the antinomian thrust of an adversary culture, the communal society and the difficulty of consensus. These run the gamut from ethos and values to politics and social organization.
Yet, in an intangible way, there may be more—a change in consciousness and cosmology, the dark tinge of which has always been present at the edges of man’s conception of himself and the world, which now moves to the phenomenological center.
In existentialist terminology, man is “thrown” into the world, confronting alien and hostile powers which he seeks to understand and master. The first confrontation was with nature, and for most of the thousands of years of man’s existence, life has been a game against nature. to find shelter from the elements, to ride the waters and the wind, to wrest food and sustenance from the soil, the waters, and other creatures. The coding of much of man’s behavior has been shaped by his adaptability to the vicissitudes of nature. In the nature of societal design, most of the world’s societies still live in this game against nature.
Man as homo faber sought to make things, and in making things he dreamt of remaking nature. To be dependent on nature was to bend to its caprices and acknowledge its tyrannies and diminishing returns. To rework nature, to make fabricated things, was to enhance man’s powers. The industrial revolution was, at bottom, an effort to substitute a technical order for the natural order, an engineering conception of function and rationality for the haphazard ecological distributions of resources and climates. In the industrial society, the cosmological vision was the game against fabricated nature.
The post-industrial society turns its back on both. In the salient experience of work, men live more and more outside nature, and less and less with machinery and things; they live with and encounter one another. The problem of group life, of course, is one of the oldest difficulties of human civilization, going back to the cave and the clan. But of necessity the context has changed. The oldest forms of group life were within the context of nature, and the overcoming of nature gave an external purpose to the lives of men. The group life that was hitched to things gave men a huge sense of power as they created mechanical artifacts to transform the world. But now these older contexts have been routinized, indeed have almost disappeared from men’s view. In the daily round of work, men no longer confront nature, as either alien or beneficent, and fewer now handle artifacts and things. The post-industrial society is essentially a game between persons.
Will this changed experience create a change in consciousness and sensibility? For most of human history, reality was nature, and in poetry and imagination men sought to relate the self to the natural world. Then reality became technics, tools and things made by men yet given an independent existence outside himself, the reified world. Now reality is primarily the social world—neither nature nor things, only men—experienced through the reciprocal consciousness of self and other. Society itself becomes a web of consciousness, a form of imagination to be
realized as a social construction. Inevitably, a post-industrial society gives rise to a new Utopianism, both engineering and psychedelic. Men can be remade or released, their behavior conditioned or their consciousness altered. The constraints of the past vanish with the end of nature and things.
But what does not vanish is the duplex nature of man himself—the murderous aggression, from primal impulse, to tear apart and destroy; and the search for order, in art and life, as the bending of will to harmonious shape. It is this ineradicable tension which defines the social world and which permits a view of Utopia that is perhaps more realistic than the here-and-now millennium on earth that modern man has sought. Utopia has always been conceived as a design of harmony and perfection in the relations between men. In the wisdom of the ancients, Utopia was a fruitful impossibility, a conception of the desirable which men should always strive to attain but which, in the nature of things, could not be achieved. And yet, by its very idea, Utopia would serve as a standard of judgment on men, an ideal by which to measure the real. The modern hubris has sought to cross that gap and embody the ideal in the real; and in the effort the perspective of the ideal has become diminished and the idea of Utopia has become tarnished. Perhaps it would be wiser to return to the classic conception.
Men in their imagination will always seek to make society a work of art; that remains an ideal. Given the tasks that have to be solved, it is enough to engage in the sober construction of social reality.
