New York: The New Press, 1994, pp. 546.
In Century of War, noted historian and foreign policy commentator Gabriel Kolko focuses on the effect of war on civilian populations, and the political consequences of those effects. Predictably it devotes considerable attention to writing history from the "bottom-up," not a new idea by any means (a hundred years ago, Peter Kropotkin was offering such a take on the events of 1789 in The Great French Revolution), but it remains the rarity--too rare, to go by the content of pop history, which is absolutely dominated by "great man history" and "gentlemen's history." Military history (a robust, if incomplete, critique of which can be found in Jeremy Black's study of the field) has been perhaps more wide-ranging, but has only rarely taken this tack.
Kolko is wary of offering general theories, and stresses the need to pay attention to the specifics of historical situations. Nonetheless, he identifies significant recurring patterns, not least of them the impact of domestic class structures on policymaking, and in particular that:
* The pursuit of concrete foreign and defense policy objectives of states necessarily interacts with the domestic (e.g., class) interests of national elites.
* Careerist pressures, and the socialization of decisionmakers more broadly, tend to weed out those capable of seeing the holes in the "conventional wisdom," and willing to call it, so as to sharply narrow the range of ideas and options regarded as "realistic" and "serious"-and to undermine any institutional learning processes, and lead to the repetition of the same mistakes.
* The remainder of society (e.g. the working classes) acquiesces to the lead of elites out of apathy (or risk-avoidance) at least as much as approval, their primary concern being their own private lives.
In the twentieth century, war has been the great accelerant of otherwise slow social processes, because it disrupts the day-to-day lives of the usually passive majority, frequently making politicization a matter of life or death, without which it is difficult to understand crucial developments in this period, such as the rise of fascism, or the wave of decolonization which followed the end of World War II. Kolko notes as particularly significant the effects of military mobilization, inflation-the great traumatizer of the middle class-and demographic shifts that may ensue as a result of related economic developments, or deliberate military action. He also points to the role that war has played in concentrating business, a process Kolko has long described as not simply a reflection of Marxist "laws of economics," but also of state action (as in his classic study of the Progressive era, The Triumph of Conservatism), the military build-ups involved leading to government-assisted consolidations of industrial enterprises and contributing powerfully to their accumulation of capital through government orders.
In Kolko's view these patterns have much to do with the nature of twentieth century warfare, and in particular its tendency to defy the expectations of leaders (typically exemplifying the worst of what Kolko describes in their socialization process, and frequently obsessed with their "credibility") planning on quick, cheap victory. Time and again those leaders instead find their countries embroiled in conflicts that escape their control--despite their increasingly developed technology and expanded firepower, which serve only to make war more expensive, more destructive and more brutal (as in its explicit targeting of civilians). The result is that not only do the wars started by such elites prove much more costly in economic, human and political terms than they imagined, but they drive the consensus within their societies to (and often beyond) the breaking point.
The revolutions that followed in the wake of these disasters (as with those in Russia, Germany, China and Vietnam, all examined in some depth) have tended to be less a matter of a group bringing down an order through its actions than the collapse of that order, following which a new group (typically that most capable of articulating the desires of their countrymen, and making fewer tactical and strategic mistakes than its rivals) steps in. They typically fail to deliver the changes they promise, however, because political movements such as these too draw their fair share of ambitious, self-serving, opportunist careerists; while Kolko also sees the elitism of the Leninist political model (centered on a small "vanguard party" of activists rather than really mass-based movements) as having been a poor foundation for deep, broad, progressive change.
Indeed, in his view they have been such a drag on these movements that where at this time Francis Fukuyama was proclaiming "the end of history" (essentially, the victory of capitalism-democracy over all other social models), Kolko, who went so far as to speculate that socialism may have had a better track record of success without the 1917 Russian Revolution, saw the "bankruptcy" of Marxism and Leninism at the end of the Cold War as clearing the way for a reconstruction of socialism along new lines.
It is putting it mildly to say that a great many readers will find that prognosis doubtful (more now, perhaps, than at the time of the book's writing). However, Kolko's book--which is meticulously researched and argued, combines great breadth with great attention to detail, and for all that is highly readable--still offers a great deal that should be of interest to readers of all ideological persuasions for its attention to the interactions between war and the rest of social, political and economic life. Those interested in Kolko's larger body of work will find this a particularly significant piece of his longstanding project of critiquing the Marxist legacy from the left.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Kolko conservatism. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Kolko conservatism. Sort by date Show all posts
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Review: Business Civilization in Decline, by Robert Heilbroner
New York: Norton, 1976, pp. 127.
As has been the case with most large, loaded terms in our political vocabulary, "capitalism" has eluded tidy definition. In Business Civilization in Decline Robert Heilbroner offered as a minimum the existence of private ownership of economic assets; the use of market competition as the primary method of income distribution; and the "structure of privilege" that permits widely differing gains at the top.1
Robert Heilbroner expected that in the half century after the time at which he was writing (the mid-1970s), that system, and the "business civilization" founded upon it, would come to an end. This was not, however, a Cold War-era prediction of Soviet triumph in the realm of power politics such as some anticipated at the time. Nor was it a Marxist-style prediction about the radicalization of the working class. (Heilbroner contended instead that as workers increasingly became white collar, they also became bourgeois in attitude, even when they lacked bourgeois privileges.)
Rather his position was that efforts to save capitalism from its vulnerabilities, rather than destroy or replace it, would bring about its end. Three such vulnerabilities seemed crucial to him, namely the capitalist system's tendency toward developing generalized disorders (like depression and inflation); the threat to the system as a whole from localized disorders, such as the failure of a large bank (increasing as the "economic mechanism became more tightly knit"); and the looming collision between the expansionary tendency of capitalism, and ecological constraints.2
All of this would make the sustenance of economic growth not only more difficult, but put an end to growth itself. This would, he argued, eliminate a crucial safety valve for the social tensions capitalism generated. Heilbroner pointed, too, to the "hollowness" of commercial culture, in the attitudes it fosters toward such matters as work and consumption, and the cynicism-inducing character of advertising, which he linked with the problem of continuing dissatisfaction in a world of rising affluence, and which make business civilization that much more vulnerable to challenge. At the same time, "social fatalism" - the traditional passive acceptance of misery - was becoming a thing of the past, a change "characterized by the assertion of political mastery," while political institutions and imperatives were gaining ascendancy over private economic interests, the long-running trend an extension of "public responsibility for the working of the system."3
Heilbroner predicted that these stresses would be exacerbated in the "middle range" of twenty-five to fifty years by still other problems, like the increasing difficulty of procuring labor for certain tasks ("jobs people just won't do") in conditions of rising affluence; the struggle between the owners of capital and the "technostructures" controlling the dominant firms, and the problem of private bureaucratization more broadly; and the regulatory challenges emerging out of new developments in science and technology (like genetic engineering and new possibilities of behavioral control).
All of these things taken individually, and certainly taken together, suggested increasing public planning of the economy, which he predicted would extend beyond prices and wages to incomes and profits, though he also predicted broader and deeper cultural changes. He specifically anticipated a more "statist" culture, more "religious" in the sense of its "elevation of the collective and communal destiny of man to the forefront of public consciousness, and the absolute subordination of private interests to public requirements." Heilbroner also thought it plausible that the private prerogatives regarding property and enterprise would come to "appear as archaic as the claims of royalty or nobility in the face of a democratic revolution," and that business would thus be transformed into "the civil service of the nation-state."4
This was, of course, a bold prediction at the time, and today it seems downright astonishing that such a noted economist could possibly have made it within the last half-century. This was, after all, exactly the moment at which economic thought and practice started a dramatic rightward shift - with private profit and the claims of property and privilege ascendant over claims about the public good, and government's hands increasingly perceived as tied by footloose business.
How did Heilbroner get things so wrong? One reason, it seems, is that he overestimated the extent to which government acted independently of business's influence, and the extent to which it would maintain its credibility to do so. Certainly he did not anticipate the extent to which the Keynesian consensus of the middle part of the century would be displaced by conservative ideas, despite their failure to establish a new consensus (a situation Heilbroner himself analyzed in his later The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought). Nor did he anticipate other events that reinforced the process, like the collapse of the Soviet Union, the stagnation of Japan, and the disappointing economic performance of major European states like France and Germany in the 1990s and 2000s, which appeared to discredit statist economic approaches. He also underestimated the intensity of neoliberal globalization.5
Nonetheless, as the combination of recession/depression, ecologically-driven shocks to the prices of food and energy, and financial instability seen in the last several years demonstrates, there has been little progress toward ameliorating the problems central to his thesis, which continue to plague us today. The response Heilbroner anticipated from society to those problems may be far from ideal, or even unattractive (Heilbroner himself was ambivalent about it, worrying about the fate of individual freedom in such a world), but the sort of boldness and imagination he brought to these issues is a reminder of just how much poorer this dialogue has become since his time.
1. This definition, notably, does not require the kind of business environment seen in the "classical" capitalism of the early nineteenth century, in which the prevalent form of organization was the small, owner-managed firm powerless over the larger market; and certainly does not exclude a substantial role for government inside a capitalist economy, which as he points out has historically been substantial in even the United States, from the country's earliest beginnings.
2. Heilbroner was writing in the wake of the publication of The Limits to Growth, which is discussed here.
3. In the earliest phase of U.S. history, government acted as a stimulus to growth (as with Federal investments in infrastructure, like canal-building); to regulating markets in the Progressive Era (when anti-trust action appeared on the agenda); to the use of Federal powers to achieve acceptable levels of growth, employment and welfare (as happened with the New Deal). Moreover, Heilbroner is quite clear on the point that this expansion of government's role was motivated by the support of business, rather than social reform, citing Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism (discussed here) - though he does take the position that government has functioned as an independent force rather than the mere servant of business.
4. Of course, the increasing profile and power of multinational corporations was a hot topic at the time, raising concerns that found pop cultural expression in films like Rollerball and novels like The Matarese Circle. However, Heilbroner pointedly dismissed this as an "ancient condition" unlikely to change the essential direction. Heilbroner was equally unpersuaded by claims that a "post-industrial" outlook would present obstacles to this vision. Given its connection with that "end of social fatalism," he thought it might actually be a contributing factor to the transformation he described.
5. Heilbroner did, however, expect that many of the changes he described would pose problems for Soviet-style socialist states, these being issues of industrial society rather than just capitalist society (as with ecological "limits to growth"). He also suggested that Western capitalist and Eastern socialist states would bring different combinations of strength and weakness to those challenges, with the West having the benefit of greater economic development, and the socialist states already further along the road to that "assertion of political mastery" over economic life.
As has been the case with most large, loaded terms in our political vocabulary, "capitalism" has eluded tidy definition. In Business Civilization in Decline Robert Heilbroner offered as a minimum the existence of private ownership of economic assets; the use of market competition as the primary method of income distribution; and the "structure of privilege" that permits widely differing gains at the top.1
Robert Heilbroner expected that in the half century after the time at which he was writing (the mid-1970s), that system, and the "business civilization" founded upon it, would come to an end. This was not, however, a Cold War-era prediction of Soviet triumph in the realm of power politics such as some anticipated at the time. Nor was it a Marxist-style prediction about the radicalization of the working class. (Heilbroner contended instead that as workers increasingly became white collar, they also became bourgeois in attitude, even when they lacked bourgeois privileges.)
Rather his position was that efforts to save capitalism from its vulnerabilities, rather than destroy or replace it, would bring about its end. Three such vulnerabilities seemed crucial to him, namely the capitalist system's tendency toward developing generalized disorders (like depression and inflation); the threat to the system as a whole from localized disorders, such as the failure of a large bank (increasing as the "economic mechanism became more tightly knit"); and the looming collision between the expansionary tendency of capitalism, and ecological constraints.2
All of this would make the sustenance of economic growth not only more difficult, but put an end to growth itself. This would, he argued, eliminate a crucial safety valve for the social tensions capitalism generated. Heilbroner pointed, too, to the "hollowness" of commercial culture, in the attitudes it fosters toward such matters as work and consumption, and the cynicism-inducing character of advertising, which he linked with the problem of continuing dissatisfaction in a world of rising affluence, and which make business civilization that much more vulnerable to challenge. At the same time, "social fatalism" - the traditional passive acceptance of misery - was becoming a thing of the past, a change "characterized by the assertion of political mastery," while political institutions and imperatives were gaining ascendancy over private economic interests, the long-running trend an extension of "public responsibility for the working of the system."3
Heilbroner predicted that these stresses would be exacerbated in the "middle range" of twenty-five to fifty years by still other problems, like the increasing difficulty of procuring labor for certain tasks ("jobs people just won't do") in conditions of rising affluence; the struggle between the owners of capital and the "technostructures" controlling the dominant firms, and the problem of private bureaucratization more broadly; and the regulatory challenges emerging out of new developments in science and technology (like genetic engineering and new possibilities of behavioral control).
All of these things taken individually, and certainly taken together, suggested increasing public planning of the economy, which he predicted would extend beyond prices and wages to incomes and profits, though he also predicted broader and deeper cultural changes. He specifically anticipated a more "statist" culture, more "religious" in the sense of its "elevation of the collective and communal destiny of man to the forefront of public consciousness, and the absolute subordination of private interests to public requirements." Heilbroner also thought it plausible that the private prerogatives regarding property and enterprise would come to "appear as archaic as the claims of royalty or nobility in the face of a democratic revolution," and that business would thus be transformed into "the civil service of the nation-state."4
This was, of course, a bold prediction at the time, and today it seems downright astonishing that such a noted economist could possibly have made it within the last half-century. This was, after all, exactly the moment at which economic thought and practice started a dramatic rightward shift - with private profit and the claims of property and privilege ascendant over claims about the public good, and government's hands increasingly perceived as tied by footloose business.
How did Heilbroner get things so wrong? One reason, it seems, is that he overestimated the extent to which government acted independently of business's influence, and the extent to which it would maintain its credibility to do so. Certainly he did not anticipate the extent to which the Keynesian consensus of the middle part of the century would be displaced by conservative ideas, despite their failure to establish a new consensus (a situation Heilbroner himself analyzed in his later The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought). Nor did he anticipate other events that reinforced the process, like the collapse of the Soviet Union, the stagnation of Japan, and the disappointing economic performance of major European states like France and Germany in the 1990s and 2000s, which appeared to discredit statist economic approaches. He also underestimated the intensity of neoliberal globalization.5
Nonetheless, as the combination of recession/depression, ecologically-driven shocks to the prices of food and energy, and financial instability seen in the last several years demonstrates, there has been little progress toward ameliorating the problems central to his thesis, which continue to plague us today. The response Heilbroner anticipated from society to those problems may be far from ideal, or even unattractive (Heilbroner himself was ambivalent about it, worrying about the fate of individual freedom in such a world), but the sort of boldness and imagination he brought to these issues is a reminder of just how much poorer this dialogue has become since his time.
1. This definition, notably, does not require the kind of business environment seen in the "classical" capitalism of the early nineteenth century, in which the prevalent form of organization was the small, owner-managed firm powerless over the larger market; and certainly does not exclude a substantial role for government inside a capitalist economy, which as he points out has historically been substantial in even the United States, from the country's earliest beginnings.
2. Heilbroner was writing in the wake of the publication of The Limits to Growth, which is discussed here.
3. In the earliest phase of U.S. history, government acted as a stimulus to growth (as with Federal investments in infrastructure, like canal-building); to regulating markets in the Progressive Era (when anti-trust action appeared on the agenda); to the use of Federal powers to achieve acceptable levels of growth, employment and welfare (as happened with the New Deal). Moreover, Heilbroner is quite clear on the point that this expansion of government's role was motivated by the support of business, rather than social reform, citing Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism (discussed here) - though he does take the position that government has functioned as an independent force rather than the mere servant of business.
4. Of course, the increasing profile and power of multinational corporations was a hot topic at the time, raising concerns that found pop cultural expression in films like Rollerball and novels like The Matarese Circle. However, Heilbroner pointedly dismissed this as an "ancient condition" unlikely to change the essential direction. Heilbroner was equally unpersuaded by claims that a "post-industrial" outlook would present obstacles to this vision. Given its connection with that "end of social fatalism," he thought it might actually be a contributing factor to the transformation he described.
5. Heilbroner did, however, expect that many of the changes he described would pose problems for Soviet-style socialist states, these being issues of industrial society rather than just capitalist society (as with ecological "limits to growth"). He also suggested that Western capitalist and Eastern socialist states would bring different combinations of strength and weakness to those challenges, with the West having the benefit of greater economic development, and the socialist states already further along the road to that "assertion of political mastery" over economic life.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Revisiting The Politics of Rich and Poor
As the 1980s drew to a close social critics across the political spectrum widely expressed expectations that the 1990s would redress the preceding decade's tilt in favor of business, wealth and free market pieties. Kevin Phillips, drawing on a theory about political cycles in American history which he had previously used to successfully predict the country's electoral realignment in the late '60s, certainly made that case in 1990's The Politics of Rich and Poor.
That theory identifies a pattern of twenty-eight to thirty-six year cycles in American history, each dominated by a particular party and its politics, which holds the White House and sets the tone for national politics through most of the period. Republican periods (1860-1896, 1896-1932, 1968-?) begin with the party taking a populist stance, typically against inflation and big government (as after the Civil War and World War I, and again by the late '60s), which gives way to a runaway enthusiasm for laissez-faire policy, attended by a worship of business and wealth, with a substantial element of Social Darwinism in the mix (as seen in the Gilded Age, the 1920s, the Reagan years). The less advantaged groups (typically those in rural areas, the interior, and primary industries, as well as labor and the poor generally) inevitably suffer, while the speculative excesses of an ever-more irresponsible financial sector lead to a general crisis. The result is a political backlash which comes to a head when the speculation brings on a crisis, leading to an era of more egalitarian attitudes and policies (the Progressive Era, the New Deal), and some downward redistribution of wealth.1
Of course, this last phase of the cycle never occurred in the '90s, or the 2000s, conservative policies continuing, with the expected effects: continuing deindustrialization and financialization, increasing speculation, debt, inequality. A possible explanation for this would seem that we ended up with two Republican cycles back to back again, just as we did between 1860 and 1932, but Phillips has not advanced such a theory in his later writings, and it is hard to see how he or anyone else could have. When this happened, it was the case that the Republicans were out of power when the crisis came to a head in 1893 (Democrat Grover Cleveland was President instead), permitting them to play the role of opposition, with the help of a more moderate line encompassing an element of economic populism (as with McKinley and Roosevelt). Nothing of the kind has been seen in the post-1968 cycle.
A more likely possibility is that Phillips may have been too quick to call the cycle over. After all, as of 1988, or even 1992, the Republican reign would have gone on only two decades, a rather shorter period than seen in the past - a run up to 2004 still plausible. One might imagine that the unusual circumstances of the War on Terror can account for the second Bush II administration. Yet, the Obama administration fell far short of a "New" New Deal, and might fairly be considered to have continued the cycle into an unprecedented fifth decade, even after the economic shock of 2008, while when running against Obama in 2012, the Republicans remained very much the party of Reagan, rather than taking a moderate line.
It seems quite plausible that if a pattern had indeed prevailed in American politics for the past two centuries, it has since been broken, with the proponents of conservative policies stronger than ever, and just as with the linearity evident in the differences among the Republican heydays, an entirely different analytical approach seems required to explain the fact.
Phillips' own analysis offers clues. One is in the pattern he has identified, which has Republicans and conservatives prevailing in three of the four last cycles. This electoral pattern hints that conservative Republicanism is the "default setting" of American politics, a reading reinforced by the limited extent to which the United States deviated from such policies at even the most liberal points in its history (by comparison with not just continental Western Europe, but even Britain and Canada). The backlashes against conservative policy frequently produced much more rhetoric than substantive change, the Progressive Era, notably, seeing very little action, and this generally in line with the interests of the country's economic elites, as Gabriel Kolko showed in his study of the period, The Triumph of Conservatism.2 One might, in fact, argue that the cycle was less about swings from left to right and vice-versa than swings within the right, from elitist right-wing politics to a somewhat more populist variant of the same (and that not usually for long), with the liberalism of the New Deal era exceptional rather than really representative of the dynamic, a function of the unusual circumstances of the Great Depression, World War II and the early Cold War.
The circumstances of the late twentieth century offered little reason to expect a repeat. Phillips did believe that declinist worry would be a significant source of pressure for reform. However, the stagnation of both Japan and (to a lesser extent) Western Europe, which removed that pressure, were a significant boost to American complacency in the '90s and after. At any rate, the fact remained that conservative policies were not confined to the United States, or even the English-speaking countries, but evident across the industrialized world - including Japan and West Germany. They were increasingly evident, too, in the old citadels of Communism, the Soviet Union and China, with the collapse of the one and the opening up of the other resulting in the whole world being swept up in the neoliberal wave. The extent to which neoliberal globalization actually limited the freedom of any one state to pursue heterodox economic policies may be debatable, but that it made them seem a much less viable path cannot be contested. Additionally, while, as Phillips notes, the late phases of conservative rule historically tend to see the Democrats swing rightward, it does seem to have been the case that American liberalism was in an especially poor position at the end of the twentieth century, considerably diminishing the pressure on the right to take a more populist position. The result is that meaningful redress of the issues raised by Phillips' book appears dismayingly unlikely nearly a quarter of a century later.
1. A fuller description of Phillips' theory can be found in my earlier review of the book.
2. In that book Kolko systematically examines the achievements of Progressive-era reformers to contend that these actually represented triumphs of business. The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, for instance, were a matter of making American agricultural exports acceptable to European importers; national insurance regulation was a way of enabling national insurance companies to escape the state regulation which provided shelter to the smaller, local firms against which they competed; and the Federal Reserve was created to guarantee the availability of the liquidity business desired.
That theory identifies a pattern of twenty-eight to thirty-six year cycles in American history, each dominated by a particular party and its politics, which holds the White House and sets the tone for national politics through most of the period. Republican periods (1860-1896, 1896-1932, 1968-?) begin with the party taking a populist stance, typically against inflation and big government (as after the Civil War and World War I, and again by the late '60s), which gives way to a runaway enthusiasm for laissez-faire policy, attended by a worship of business and wealth, with a substantial element of Social Darwinism in the mix (as seen in the Gilded Age, the 1920s, the Reagan years). The less advantaged groups (typically those in rural areas, the interior, and primary industries, as well as labor and the poor generally) inevitably suffer, while the speculative excesses of an ever-more irresponsible financial sector lead to a general crisis. The result is a political backlash which comes to a head when the speculation brings on a crisis, leading to an era of more egalitarian attitudes and policies (the Progressive Era, the New Deal), and some downward redistribution of wealth.1
Of course, this last phase of the cycle never occurred in the '90s, or the 2000s, conservative policies continuing, with the expected effects: continuing deindustrialization and financialization, increasing speculation, debt, inequality. A possible explanation for this would seem that we ended up with two Republican cycles back to back again, just as we did between 1860 and 1932, but Phillips has not advanced such a theory in his later writings, and it is hard to see how he or anyone else could have. When this happened, it was the case that the Republicans were out of power when the crisis came to a head in 1893 (Democrat Grover Cleveland was President instead), permitting them to play the role of opposition, with the help of a more moderate line encompassing an element of economic populism (as with McKinley and Roosevelt). Nothing of the kind has been seen in the post-1968 cycle.
A more likely possibility is that Phillips may have been too quick to call the cycle over. After all, as of 1988, or even 1992, the Republican reign would have gone on only two decades, a rather shorter period than seen in the past - a run up to 2004 still plausible. One might imagine that the unusual circumstances of the War on Terror can account for the second Bush II administration. Yet, the Obama administration fell far short of a "New" New Deal, and might fairly be considered to have continued the cycle into an unprecedented fifth decade, even after the economic shock of 2008, while when running against Obama in 2012, the Republicans remained very much the party of Reagan, rather than taking a moderate line.
It seems quite plausible that if a pattern had indeed prevailed in American politics for the past two centuries, it has since been broken, with the proponents of conservative policies stronger than ever, and just as with the linearity evident in the differences among the Republican heydays, an entirely different analytical approach seems required to explain the fact.
Phillips' own analysis offers clues. One is in the pattern he has identified, which has Republicans and conservatives prevailing in three of the four last cycles. This electoral pattern hints that conservative Republicanism is the "default setting" of American politics, a reading reinforced by the limited extent to which the United States deviated from such policies at even the most liberal points in its history (by comparison with not just continental Western Europe, but even Britain and Canada). The backlashes against conservative policy frequently produced much more rhetoric than substantive change, the Progressive Era, notably, seeing very little action, and this generally in line with the interests of the country's economic elites, as Gabriel Kolko showed in his study of the period, The Triumph of Conservatism.2 One might, in fact, argue that the cycle was less about swings from left to right and vice-versa than swings within the right, from elitist right-wing politics to a somewhat more populist variant of the same (and that not usually for long), with the liberalism of the New Deal era exceptional rather than really representative of the dynamic, a function of the unusual circumstances of the Great Depression, World War II and the early Cold War.
The circumstances of the late twentieth century offered little reason to expect a repeat. Phillips did believe that declinist worry would be a significant source of pressure for reform. However, the stagnation of both Japan and (to a lesser extent) Western Europe, which removed that pressure, were a significant boost to American complacency in the '90s and after. At any rate, the fact remained that conservative policies were not confined to the United States, or even the English-speaking countries, but evident across the industrialized world - including Japan and West Germany. They were increasingly evident, too, in the old citadels of Communism, the Soviet Union and China, with the collapse of the one and the opening up of the other resulting in the whole world being swept up in the neoliberal wave. The extent to which neoliberal globalization actually limited the freedom of any one state to pursue heterodox economic policies may be debatable, but that it made them seem a much less viable path cannot be contested. Additionally, while, as Phillips notes, the late phases of conservative rule historically tend to see the Democrats swing rightward, it does seem to have been the case that American liberalism was in an especially poor position at the end of the twentieth century, considerably diminishing the pressure on the right to take a more populist position. The result is that meaningful redress of the issues raised by Phillips' book appears dismayingly unlikely nearly a quarter of a century later.
1. A fuller description of Phillips' theory can be found in my earlier review of the book.
2. In that book Kolko systematically examines the achievements of Progressive-era reformers to contend that these actually represented triumphs of business. The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, for instance, were a matter of making American agricultural exports acceptable to European importers; national insurance regulation was a way of enabling national insurance companies to escape the state regulation which provided shelter to the smaller, local firms against which they competed; and the Federal Reserve was created to guarantee the availability of the liquidity business desired.
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Review: The Theory of Business Enterprise, by Thorstein Veblen
Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of Business Enterprise takes as the starting point of its analysis classical liberalism--specifically the doctrine of "natural rights" of absolute, individual property ownership (rooted in the ownership of the labor involved in making or at least appropriating that piece of property) and freedom of contract (on a one-to-one, personal basis) as the foundations of economic and social life. While he views the notion of natural rights as colored by a primitive "anthropomorphism," he regards the premise of such rights, and the view that they conduced to the greatest good, as plausible within an eighteenth century, pre-industrial context of small-scale, owner-managed enterprise and handicraft production, as represented by the independent artisan.
However, the Industrial Revolution centering on what he called the "machine process" fundamentally changed the character of both economic life, and culture. (By "machine process" he makes clear that he does not simply mean mechanical industry, but includes also such sectors as chemicals, the fundamental point being the replacement of individual craft by scientific precision and standardization.) What it eventually produced was a worldwide, high-technology economic system, extraordinarily productive but also extraordinarily delicate and susceptible to disruption. What had also happened was an increasing differentiation between production on the one hand, and "pecuniary management" on the other--"industry" on the one side, and "business" on the other--which he found problematic.
What seemed to best serve the needs of society was the uninterrupted, efficient functioning of the industrial system, for the sake of its maximum efficiency, and highest and most "serviceable" possible output. However, that system was ultimately controlled by business, a step removed from the object of production--its interest, instead, in the maximum of profit ("what the traffic will bear"), which might or might not be served by that maximum of efficiency and output. Indeed, with the rise of the business corporation and modern high finance trafficking in "vendible corporate capital" (stock) rather than "vendible goods," the controlling business interest was actually a second step removed from that concern with production--centering its "endeavors upon the discrepancy between the actual and the putative earning-capacity rather than upon the permanent efficiency of the concern," and even prepared to compromise the latter for the sake of the former (again, at the expense of the social good).
Veblen makes the case that this conflicting interest, combined with business dominance, leads to much business conduct that is "useless or detrimental" to society, and in fact a constant disruption of industrial output, and "parasitism" on what occurs. Anti-competitive practices aimed at destroying competitors rather than besting them in the marketplace (like railroad rate wars), and financial operations aimed at raising and lowering the valuation of firms for the sake of "tactical maneuvering" ("A convincing appearance of decline or disaster will lower the putative earning capacity of the concern below its real earning capacity and so will afford an advantageous opportunity for buying with a view to future advance or with a view to strategic control") are examples of such disruption. "Competitive selling" (entailing such activities as advertising) is in his view similarly parasitic, adding nothing to the stock of goods, and forcing every enterprise to engage in it simply because others are. There is also the duplication of effort and failure to realize efficiencies of scale (for example, consolidating the rail networks or Great Lakes region iron ore mining operations).
Finally there is the periodic, large-scale, systemic idling of workers and plant in the business downturns he explains as above all due to a "malady of the affections of the business men," laying out a theory of depressions that even more than all the rest is key to his reading of the system's long-term viability, and warrants commensurate discussion here. The affections of which he wrote were for rising financial valuations (businessmen being more concerned with nominal valuations than real valuations--"current dollars" rather than "constant dollars" because they falsely imagined currencies to be stable).1 These were increasingly based not on material capital but optimistic readings of "earning-capacity," based on the inclusion of "intangible assets" like the involvement of star entrepreneurs, and rising demand and prices. These led to what one might, to use a more contemporary phrase, call "irrationally exuberant" recapitalizations and commensurate credit extensions (boom times!), which led to overvaluations, tightening credit, firms going out of business and the redistribution of the associated property on an eventually systemic scale (hard times), clearing the way for a return to the beginning of the cycle (which, he claimed, seemed to alternate between ten to twelve year upturns and downturns in the 1816-1873 period). However, since the 1870s the deflationary effect of increasing productivity, which more than offset the effect of demand on price, prevented those price rises and recapitalizations from happening in the old manner, resulting in what he characterized as "chronic" depression for the last three decades, in his view the new tendency of the system.2
In short, the imperatives of business were getting in the way of the optimal functioning of the industrial system that had grown up under it. This, moreover, threw into question its legitimation in the eyes of population, not just its claims to efficiency, but in others as well--like the challenge that corporate stock presented to the idea of property. (As Veblen put it, "the general body of owners are necessary reduced to the practical status of pensioners dependent on the discretion of the great holders of immaterial wealth.") The same went for the matter of contract--the disadvantage of workers in relation to owners in such "free" contract-making compelling them to resort to collective bargaining which had no place in the old logic, interfering as it did with owner's prerogatives in relation to their own property, and individual contract. (While less criticized, he noted that it was even the case that business itself was inverting the old natural law philosophy for its own ends, in regard to its justifications for property, which rather than being the fruit of productive labor, was increasingly argued for as a prerequisite to it.)
Most fundamental, however, was the changing ethos that went with exposure to and participation in that "machine process." This drove a turn to a materialistic, cause-and-effect-based, "matter-of-fact," scientific outlook, especially among skilled industrial workers and still more, scientists. Imbued with it, the old natural rights view--and along with it the older aristocratic ("barbarian") ethos that still colored much of contemporary life and thought with an anthropomorphic "metaphysics," and a stress on pecuniary acquisitiveness, and personal force and personal subordination--were "no longer self-evident or self-legitimating to [their] common sense."3 In more concrete terms this meant a diminished attachment to the old patriarchal family, religion, patriotism and most at issue here, property, with a secular, cosmopolitan and ultimately socialist ethic in the ascendance, to the horror of cultural traditionalists, the power elite, and especially those who were both. That certainly included businessmen, whose "metaphysics" was of the older kind, with property and contract the unquestioned starting point and "final ground" of their thought, which ran to "explanations of phenomena in terms of human relation, discretion, authenticity, choice" rather than a coming to terms with impersonal fact, and "the interpretation of new facts in terms of accredited precedents, rather than a revision of the knowledge drawn from past experience in the matter of fact light of new phenomena," making "facts conform to law."
The result was that, as the dominance of business became less compatible with the development of industry, the sway of the traditional values congenial to a business culture, too, were faltering, and the conflict between the associated ideologies and social models sharpening. As business enterprise could not do without the machine process it had unleashed, but the machine process could do without business; and technological advance meant that the machine process was exerting its influence more widely and deeply; it appeared that history was on the side of industry, not business.
Still, in his closing chapter Veblen does note that the scene is somewhat more complicated than that, identifying a number of powerful, reactionary forces at work across the Western world. Mass education was tailored to the needs and values of business, and even conducted on business-like lines, while stressing "conviction over inquiry," rather than training young minds. The popular press catered above all to that audience "in moderately easy circumstances . . . the respectable middle class . . . of various shades of conservatism, affectation and snobbery," with content designed to be even further to the right than they, and intellectually of the lowest common denominator--all "pointlessness" and "edifying, gossipy optimism." Meanwhile, the rising tide of nationalism, imperialism and the associated militarism and militarization were a conditioning to servility. (As he put it, military training was training in "ceremonial procedures, arbitrary command" and "unquestioning obedience," while "martial law puts civil rights in abeyance.") However, threatening as all these were, it was his long-range expectation that the machine process would triumph over them all.
As all of this suggests, Theory is one of Veblen's longer works, and a fairly dense one at that, more difficult than I had expected it to be in its discussion of finance, growth, boom, bust, depression, which comprises about half the book. It strikes me that this is partly because this was less familiar territory for him, but partly because older writing on these matters, preceding the richer vocabulary we have developed and the wealth of statistical and other data we take for granted in such discussions, was unavailable to him; partly because Veblen's discussion is so abstract and intricate at the same time, with little in the way of concrete examples to provide clarification and points of reference. (Perhaps reflective of a certain strain, Veblen's biting humor and linguistic flair are not much on display here.) Still, if less efficient or striking than usual he was not without considerable insight here. Veblen's theory of depression, if perhaps looking thinly sketched today, still has its interest, bound up with that analysis of what economic life means when high finance dominates non-financial industry, a matter still timely a century on--its core in the significance of inflated values and corrections for the business cycle to which he was so attentive, and the effect they have on actual production, not just of importance in understanding his time, but our own as well.
Veblen's writing also reacquires its accustomed sharpness and vibrancy when he turns to the other aspects of his chosen subject matter, ranging from his lucid exposition of the roots of the "natural law" philosophy, to the ways in which it had become problematic in the nineteenth century. Considering his last chapter it strikes me that little is said now of the failings of our education system and the press, or the dangers of militarism, that he did not say then, if only in outline. Indeed, in the contrast between the older value system of the traditionalists, and the more skeptical outlook of those touched by the machine process, we get an adequate description of the stuff of the culture wars that rage on today in tiresome, destructive fashion--devotees of flag, cross, family values and capitalism-as-freedom clashing with socially liberal, secular progressives then as now.
To be fair, Veblen would go on to say much of this elsewhere, in more developed, sophisticated fashion. But this important, early exposition is strong enough to enrich the understanding of them (as I found when I took a second look at Absentee Ownership). Similarly I have found this book an aid to understanding not just Veblen's body of work, but that of the numerous writers who followed in his footsteps over the twentieth century--the preoccupations and analyses of figures like C. Wright Mills, John Galbraith, Gabriel Kolko and Paul Sweezy, all of whom have considerable debts to him. In short, even after having read a good deal of Veblen previously, The Theory of Business Enterprise more than rewarded my pushing on through its less even patches.
1. Veblen took a comparatively dim view of businessmens' intellects, observing that "short-sightedness and lack of insight beyond the conventional routine seem to be fairly universal traits of the class of men who engage in the larger business activities"--and even suggested that if the class as a whole got wise to the realities, "business traffic as now carried on might conceivably collapse through loss of its base line."
2. Veblen acknowledged that there had been efforts to restore growth without changing the system, namely "wasteful expenditure," as on arms; and the effort to control competition, by way of the "trusts"; but viewed both as undesirable, with trusts particularly ineffective (the latter, due to the implausibly comprehensive character they would have to attain).
3. The aristocratic, barbarian ethos was, of course, the principal subject of Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class.
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However, the Industrial Revolution centering on what he called the "machine process" fundamentally changed the character of both economic life, and culture. (By "machine process" he makes clear that he does not simply mean mechanical industry, but includes also such sectors as chemicals, the fundamental point being the replacement of individual craft by scientific precision and standardization.) What it eventually produced was a worldwide, high-technology economic system, extraordinarily productive but also extraordinarily delicate and susceptible to disruption. What had also happened was an increasing differentiation between production on the one hand, and "pecuniary management" on the other--"industry" on the one side, and "business" on the other--which he found problematic.
What seemed to best serve the needs of society was the uninterrupted, efficient functioning of the industrial system, for the sake of its maximum efficiency, and highest and most "serviceable" possible output. However, that system was ultimately controlled by business, a step removed from the object of production--its interest, instead, in the maximum of profit ("what the traffic will bear"), which might or might not be served by that maximum of efficiency and output. Indeed, with the rise of the business corporation and modern high finance trafficking in "vendible corporate capital" (stock) rather than "vendible goods," the controlling business interest was actually a second step removed from that concern with production--centering its "endeavors upon the discrepancy between the actual and the putative earning-capacity rather than upon the permanent efficiency of the concern," and even prepared to compromise the latter for the sake of the former (again, at the expense of the social good).
Veblen makes the case that this conflicting interest, combined with business dominance, leads to much business conduct that is "useless or detrimental" to society, and in fact a constant disruption of industrial output, and "parasitism" on what occurs. Anti-competitive practices aimed at destroying competitors rather than besting them in the marketplace (like railroad rate wars), and financial operations aimed at raising and lowering the valuation of firms for the sake of "tactical maneuvering" ("A convincing appearance of decline or disaster will lower the putative earning capacity of the concern below its real earning capacity and so will afford an advantageous opportunity for buying with a view to future advance or with a view to strategic control") are examples of such disruption. "Competitive selling" (entailing such activities as advertising) is in his view similarly parasitic, adding nothing to the stock of goods, and forcing every enterprise to engage in it simply because others are. There is also the duplication of effort and failure to realize efficiencies of scale (for example, consolidating the rail networks or Great Lakes region iron ore mining operations).
Finally there is the periodic, large-scale, systemic idling of workers and plant in the business downturns he explains as above all due to a "malady of the affections of the business men," laying out a theory of depressions that even more than all the rest is key to his reading of the system's long-term viability, and warrants commensurate discussion here. The affections of which he wrote were for rising financial valuations (businessmen being more concerned with nominal valuations than real valuations--"current dollars" rather than "constant dollars" because they falsely imagined currencies to be stable).1 These were increasingly based not on material capital but optimistic readings of "earning-capacity," based on the inclusion of "intangible assets" like the involvement of star entrepreneurs, and rising demand and prices. These led to what one might, to use a more contemporary phrase, call "irrationally exuberant" recapitalizations and commensurate credit extensions (boom times!), which led to overvaluations, tightening credit, firms going out of business and the redistribution of the associated property on an eventually systemic scale (hard times), clearing the way for a return to the beginning of the cycle (which, he claimed, seemed to alternate between ten to twelve year upturns and downturns in the 1816-1873 period). However, since the 1870s the deflationary effect of increasing productivity, which more than offset the effect of demand on price, prevented those price rises and recapitalizations from happening in the old manner, resulting in what he characterized as "chronic" depression for the last three decades, in his view the new tendency of the system.2
In short, the imperatives of business were getting in the way of the optimal functioning of the industrial system that had grown up under it. This, moreover, threw into question its legitimation in the eyes of population, not just its claims to efficiency, but in others as well--like the challenge that corporate stock presented to the idea of property. (As Veblen put it, "the general body of owners are necessary reduced to the practical status of pensioners dependent on the discretion of the great holders of immaterial wealth.") The same went for the matter of contract--the disadvantage of workers in relation to owners in such "free" contract-making compelling them to resort to collective bargaining which had no place in the old logic, interfering as it did with owner's prerogatives in relation to their own property, and individual contract. (While less criticized, he noted that it was even the case that business itself was inverting the old natural law philosophy for its own ends, in regard to its justifications for property, which rather than being the fruit of productive labor, was increasingly argued for as a prerequisite to it.)
Most fundamental, however, was the changing ethos that went with exposure to and participation in that "machine process." This drove a turn to a materialistic, cause-and-effect-based, "matter-of-fact," scientific outlook, especially among skilled industrial workers and still more, scientists. Imbued with it, the old natural rights view--and along with it the older aristocratic ("barbarian") ethos that still colored much of contemporary life and thought with an anthropomorphic "metaphysics," and a stress on pecuniary acquisitiveness, and personal force and personal subordination--were "no longer self-evident or self-legitimating to [their] common sense."3 In more concrete terms this meant a diminished attachment to the old patriarchal family, religion, patriotism and most at issue here, property, with a secular, cosmopolitan and ultimately socialist ethic in the ascendance, to the horror of cultural traditionalists, the power elite, and especially those who were both. That certainly included businessmen, whose "metaphysics" was of the older kind, with property and contract the unquestioned starting point and "final ground" of their thought, which ran to "explanations of phenomena in terms of human relation, discretion, authenticity, choice" rather than a coming to terms with impersonal fact, and "the interpretation of new facts in terms of accredited precedents, rather than a revision of the knowledge drawn from past experience in the matter of fact light of new phenomena," making "facts conform to law."
The result was that, as the dominance of business became less compatible with the development of industry, the sway of the traditional values congenial to a business culture, too, were faltering, and the conflict between the associated ideologies and social models sharpening. As business enterprise could not do without the machine process it had unleashed, but the machine process could do without business; and technological advance meant that the machine process was exerting its influence more widely and deeply; it appeared that history was on the side of industry, not business.
Still, in his closing chapter Veblen does note that the scene is somewhat more complicated than that, identifying a number of powerful, reactionary forces at work across the Western world. Mass education was tailored to the needs and values of business, and even conducted on business-like lines, while stressing "conviction over inquiry," rather than training young minds. The popular press catered above all to that audience "in moderately easy circumstances . . . the respectable middle class . . . of various shades of conservatism, affectation and snobbery," with content designed to be even further to the right than they, and intellectually of the lowest common denominator--all "pointlessness" and "edifying, gossipy optimism." Meanwhile, the rising tide of nationalism, imperialism and the associated militarism and militarization were a conditioning to servility. (As he put it, military training was training in "ceremonial procedures, arbitrary command" and "unquestioning obedience," while "martial law puts civil rights in abeyance.") However, threatening as all these were, it was his long-range expectation that the machine process would triumph over them all.
As all of this suggests, Theory is one of Veblen's longer works, and a fairly dense one at that, more difficult than I had expected it to be in its discussion of finance, growth, boom, bust, depression, which comprises about half the book. It strikes me that this is partly because this was less familiar territory for him, but partly because older writing on these matters, preceding the richer vocabulary we have developed and the wealth of statistical and other data we take for granted in such discussions, was unavailable to him; partly because Veblen's discussion is so abstract and intricate at the same time, with little in the way of concrete examples to provide clarification and points of reference. (Perhaps reflective of a certain strain, Veblen's biting humor and linguistic flair are not much on display here.) Still, if less efficient or striking than usual he was not without considerable insight here. Veblen's theory of depression, if perhaps looking thinly sketched today, still has its interest, bound up with that analysis of what economic life means when high finance dominates non-financial industry, a matter still timely a century on--its core in the significance of inflated values and corrections for the business cycle to which he was so attentive, and the effect they have on actual production, not just of importance in understanding his time, but our own as well.
Veblen's writing also reacquires its accustomed sharpness and vibrancy when he turns to the other aspects of his chosen subject matter, ranging from his lucid exposition of the roots of the "natural law" philosophy, to the ways in which it had become problematic in the nineteenth century. Considering his last chapter it strikes me that little is said now of the failings of our education system and the press, or the dangers of militarism, that he did not say then, if only in outline. Indeed, in the contrast between the older value system of the traditionalists, and the more skeptical outlook of those touched by the machine process, we get an adequate description of the stuff of the culture wars that rage on today in tiresome, destructive fashion--devotees of flag, cross, family values and capitalism-as-freedom clashing with socially liberal, secular progressives then as now.
To be fair, Veblen would go on to say much of this elsewhere, in more developed, sophisticated fashion. But this important, early exposition is strong enough to enrich the understanding of them (as I found when I took a second look at Absentee Ownership). Similarly I have found this book an aid to understanding not just Veblen's body of work, but that of the numerous writers who followed in his footsteps over the twentieth century--the preoccupations and analyses of figures like C. Wright Mills, John Galbraith, Gabriel Kolko and Paul Sweezy, all of whom have considerable debts to him. In short, even after having read a good deal of Veblen previously, The Theory of Business Enterprise more than rewarded my pushing on through its less even patches.
1. Veblen took a comparatively dim view of businessmens' intellects, observing that "short-sightedness and lack of insight beyond the conventional routine seem to be fairly universal traits of the class of men who engage in the larger business activities"--and even suggested that if the class as a whole got wise to the realities, "business traffic as now carried on might conceivably collapse through loss of its base line."
2. Veblen acknowledged that there had been efforts to restore growth without changing the system, namely "wasteful expenditure," as on arms; and the effort to control competition, by way of the "trusts"; but viewed both as undesirable, with trusts particularly ineffective (the latter, due to the implausibly comprehensive character they would have to attain).
3. The aristocratic, barbarian ethos was, of course, the principal subject of Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class.
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