To the Editor:

I enjoyed reading Arch Puddington’s review of John Kenneth Galbraith’s Annals of an Abiding Liberal [Books in Review, March]. Mr. Puddington scores some telling points. It is good to see that the pro-labor brand of social democracy still finds vigorous expression in COMMENTARY. To be exact, it is good to see Galbraith’s plan for nationalization of industry criticized, not because it would violate the “free-market basis of a free society,” . . . but because workers would be excluded from participation in running the nationalized industries.

However, I fear Mr. Puddington involves himself in an intriguing contradiction. He indicates that Galbraith wants to have the New Class take over industry via “public” ownership. But from this scanty evidence he comes to the conclusion (in his final sentence) that “. . . Galbraith is the ideological spokesman for a class [the New Class] . . . which has a good deal of power, and wants much more.” The point is apparently that the New Class wants socialism in order to realize its power ambitions. But while it is clear that such is Galbraith’s desire, it is not clear that Galbraith accurately reflects the desires of the New Class. Mr. Puddington himself says that Galbraith does not share the New Politics/McGovernite position (which Mr. Puddington equates with the New Class position) favoring “decentralized, ‘participatory’ socialism,” namely, workers’ codetermination and “other models of industrial power-sharing.” It is not at all clear to me from the available survey data (see my “Neoconservatives and the Defense of Capitalism” in the Jan.-Feb. 1980 Worldview) that this is indeed what the New Class wants. But what is clear is that Mr. Puddington can be heard to say that Galbraith wants all power to the New Class, but the New Class does not want what Galbraith wants, since it actually wants the capitalists’ hegemony over industrial power broken and shared with workers—and presumably the public (whether nationalization is required here is unclear). So, Mr. Puddington undercuts his own conclusion.

Since the New Class is already heavily involved in industry—both inside the major corporations and the regulatory apparatus—the big gainers in “industrial power-sharing” could turn out to be not the New Class but the working class and the general public. If this is what the New Class wants—a big “if”—it comes out looking less malevolent than Galbraith (inadvertently) pictures it.

Galbraith’s elitist “socialism” runs so strongly against the democratic American grain as to be virtually self-condemning. If John Kenneth Galbraith did not exist he would have to be invented by the defenders of corporate power. The interesting question here is not what Galbraith or other self-appointed spokesmen for the New Class want, but what the (empirical) New Class itself wants.

Dale Vree
New Oxford Review
Oakland, California

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Arch Puddington writes:

I appreciate Dale Vree’s comments on my review of Annals of an Abiding Liberal, but I do not think they are particularly relevant to the major points of my argument. In any political movement or tendency there are bound to be differences over specific issues and especially over strategic questions. Some American trade unionists are open to the idea of codetermination-type arrangements of industrial power-sharing; others strongly prefer the traditional adversary relationship between labor and management. Within John Kenneth Galbraith’s educational and scientific stratum there are similar differences. Some believe that large corporations should be broken up and operated as community-based and community-controlled enterprises with management prerogatives taken from private hands and given over to representatives of various constituency groups: minorities, feminists, environmentalists, consumers, and workers. Others, Galbraith included, consider such proposals utopian and unworkable; they are willing to come to terms with the giant corporation as long as it is “publicly” controlled.

Whatever their differences may be, however, the various spokesmen for the educational and scientific stratum do agree on one point: responsibility for the governance of the large corporation should be relegated to members of their own class, or tendency. Some would reserve a role (but not the dominant role) in the corporate governance structure for representatives of the workers; others, such as Galbraith, would exclude unions altogether. No one, however, is proposing that corporations be governed on the European codetermination model, in which unions and management (but only unions and management) sit together on corporate boards and determine policy.

The reason for the relatively minimal role proposed for unions is not simply that the various spokesmen for the New Class want to reserve all power for themselves, although this, indeed, is a factor. More important is the view, held by Galbraith and Ralph Nader among others, that unions are insufficiently attuned to the “public good” to be trusted with running, or helping to run, large industrial enterprises. Unions and their members, after all, have a profound stake in the success and growth of the corporation. With expansion comes more jobs; with success in the marketplace comes the possibility of higher wages.

On the other hand, those not directly employed by the corporation—especially environmentalists and consumerists—have no abiding stake in the performance of the corporation. Indeed, those who are most insistently clamoring for a role in the direction of the corporation are often overtly hostile to economic growth, the concept of the large corporation, technological innovation, and the like. Although their conception of the public interest is no doubt sincerely motivated, I feel certain that their goals, translated into corporate policy, would inevitably clash with the needs of the workers and quite probably those of the ordinary consumer as well.

The debate over the role of the corporation and its power will be a crucial one in the next decade; even conservative supporters of the current corporate governing arrangements predict that changes in the current structure are inevitable. It is important to approach this debate with an open mind; this means, however, recognizing the underlying objectives of those demanding the changes and a careful and critical scrutiny of proposals wrapped in the mantle of the “public interest.”