Fordism & Its Discontents

The Next Left: The History of a Future.
by Michael Harrington.
Holt. 197 pp. $17.95.

Michael Harrington’S The Next Left, a work of unrelieved economic argument, aims to demonstrate that the prosperity Americans believe they enjoy is both shaky and illusory. “The West,” Harrington claims, “is living through an economic and social crisis so unprecedented in its tempo, so complex in its effects, that there are many who do not even know that it is taking place.” Yet this truth, Harrington argues, will soon become clear to all, and the Left will then have an opportunity to lead us out of our current dismal state into an era of social justice and stable, real prosperity.

What is thus established at the very beginning of this book is the supposedly sharp disjuncture between a significant reality and the ordinary experience of most people from whom this reality is hidden. If experience is unreliable, so must be the assessments and judgments arrived at on the basis of that experience. The choices which people make in the marketplace and in the voting booth are thus the results of deception.

The Next Left focuses its attack on the cause of this great deception: capitalism in general, “Fordism” in particular. The latter term refers, of course, to Henry Ford, and specifically to his policy of paying workers wages that were far higher than the norm at the time. Ford, Harrington suggests, should have “an age named after him,” for although he did not fully understand the implications of his act, he had discovered an insidious mechanism for deceiving the working class into believing that capitalism could be beneficial to it. In brief, by being offered more money, workers would be beguiled into abandoning their otherwise militant opposition to the system.

The bribe has worked. In return for homes, furniture, cars, clothes, radios and then televisions, and more leisure to enjoy these useless objects, American workers not only do not seek to overthrow the capitalist system, they even have ceased to think of themselves as workers: ask a member of the American working class today what level of society he belongs to, and he will usually answer that he is middle-class.

Harrington is quick to point out that these changes, seemingly so beneficial to workers, were not wrought out of altruism or a sense of social justice. Capitalism has provided “not simply high wages and a modicum of decency for the workers, but those things in order to expand the power of corporate America.” The resulting general prosperity is the consequence of corporate greed and of the reckless pursuit of profit.

One might ask why the motives should matter if the results have been good ones. Might we not have here an application of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” according to which economic success goes to those who provide what others want? Harrington, however, is interested in political as well as economic benefits, and political benefits of more than one kind:

The possibility . . . of a society established by an affluent elite and an unhappy but not desperate middle, while the bottom is marginalized—is not simply morally intolerable. It also threatens to destroy the social base of the Left.

There are a number of questionable assumptions in this statement. How unhappy is the middle, and where or when has it been happier? What is the status of the “bottom” in America as compared with its status in other, non-capitalist societies? Answers to such questions, by no means clear-cut, point to more complex considerations than Harrington is willing to entertain. But the thrust of his remarks here is in any case not to judge the American status quo in comparison with other societies or with possibilities within our own society. His main worry is, rather, political: the system, by succeeding, has destroyed, or will destroy, the “social base”—that is, the hope of political victory—of the Left.

The “United States,” Harrington writes, “is, in political and legislative terms, the most backward of advanced societies. It is the only developed capitalism without a significant socialist movement. . . .” One notes that to Harrington the absence of a socialist movement is itself a criterion, and the main criterion, of economic and political backwardness. What he means is that Americans (because of “Fordism”) have not, do not, and probably will not vote for socialists. This is the specter that haunts 20th-century socialists: that the system whose faults they abhor has won the allegiance of the very groups they claim to speak for. No wonder they aim, not for the amelioration of that system in directions of which they approve but which would leave its essential structure intact, but for the replacement of the system by another.

_____________

Much of Harrington’s work is taken up with an analysis meant to support his thesis that the system of “Fordism” is, in fact, at long last unraveling, and that its structural defects will, “within the next five years,” present an opportunity throughout the West for the Left to come to power. It is unprofitable to argue with this proposition. Five years is not a long time, and most of us will be alive to see whether or not Harrington is right.

It is, however, interesting to note Harrington’s prescriptions for the moment when the Left will have power within its reach. Many of his proposals are familiar and predictable: more meaningful work, redistribution of income, greater worker participation, a thirty-five-hour work week. (One might ask: does not a nine-to-five workday with an hour for lunch already constitute a thirty-five-hour work week, and is not such a work week common in this country?) But at least one of his proposals takes us to the center of a political debate which has been going on for more than a century:

[In planning] the government should be required to rely on a national-needs inventory, which will involve local planning groups with competent staffs stating their priorities.

The very term “national-needs inventory” suggests that needs can be determined in this manner, i.e., from the center. Harrington’s concession to “local planning groups” notwithstanding, what is lacking here is any deference to the competence of individuals or communities to determine their own needs and their own priorities, any recognition of their ability to register their decisions democratically in an election or individually in a marketplace.

Socialists, of course, would maintain that (under current circumstances) such decisions are not truly free. But it is rather for them to face up to the anti-democratic implications of their own position. It is simply not enough to protest, as Harrington does, that he is a “democratic socialist.” What will remain of democratic decision-making after the task of determining “national needs” is transferred to public bodies whose competence to judge will be guaranteed solely by their putatively superior commitment to the public interest? The dictatorship of the proletariat was the product of precisely such a line of thought.

_____________