Theories Of The New Class: Intellectuals And Power

7. Bourgeois and Post-Marxist Theories of the New Class in the West

144 Seven Bourgeois and Post-Marxist Theories of the New Class in the West The most significant contributions to New Class theory came in the East, where the weakness of capitalism and the success of communism gave these theoretical debates far more gravity than in the West. They were developed in response to the hegemony of a party guided by Marxism, and thus struck at the very heart of the legitimacy of the existing order, the notion that the “vanguard” ruled for the people. Further, the state socialist society that emerged in these countries endowed these ideas with much greater power than they would generate in the advanced capitalist West. It is the lack of the separation of the “political” from the “economic” under state socialism that was responsible for this. Where politics dominates, political loyalty is the primary attribute for social mobility; one of the most important ways to demonstrate this political loyalty is the ritual espousal of the dominant ideology. Thus, ideas that directly challenge this dominant ideology are far more important and potentially dangerous than under a capitalist system. Under capitalism, the economy functions (relatively) independently from the political and ideological spheres. Political elites will remain “structurally dependent” on the capitalist economy, creating much greater personal freedom of expression for elites in these spheres. Thus, New Class theory in the West was developed in the shad- Bourgeois and Post-Marxist Theories 145 ow of the much more consequential New Class debate in the East. Western New Class theories were influenced not only by the debate in the East but also by the existence and evolution of the communist states—above all, the Soviet Union and then China. Nonetheless, Western New Class theories were still about Western society, and thus reflected the evolution of the position of intellectuals under Western capitalism; only, these theoretical constructs were often shaped in important ways by the towering example of the apparently successful anticapitalist regimes of the East. This is true for Marxist, bourgeois, and post-Marxist theories. Theories of the Technostructure in the West The shadow of the New Class in the East can easily be seen in analyzing the work of the first major Western theorist of the New Class, Thorstein Veblen. Shortly after World War I, Veblen put forward a theory about the class potential of engineers in the United States. Veblen expressed some of the experiences of the Progressive Era: scientific management, Taylorism, and the early power aspirations of the emergent American technical intelligentsia. In the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1919, he suggested that in the United States the engineers and not the proletariat would be the class that could and would carry out the socialist transformation. Veblen was an early-twentieth-century version of the Saint-Simonian New Class theory; he was the apologetical theorist of the emergent American technical intelligentsia, which had not yet been fully integrated (or co-opted) into the structure of capitalist society. Veblen’s most provocative work, The฀Engineers฀and฀the฀Price฀ System, in many ways was a sophisticated sociological comment on the ideas propounded by the scientific management movement, led by Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor’s work arose in the context of the growth of corporations and the incorporation of electrical and chemical technologies into the production process, two decades before the turn of the century. (See Chandler 1962 for the classic account of the corporate revolution.) The rise of large, complex organizations meant that the owners of corporations, now often dispersed stockholders, became increasingly removed from the direct control of their businesses. In their place, an army of accountants, engineers, managers, and other New Class actors arose. From the 1890s forward, engineers no longer were 146 Bourgeois and Post-Marxist Theories primarily shop stewards with only practical knowledge of the production process, but instead were educated in college, where they learned theoretical knowledge and the discourse of scientific reason (Stabile 1984). With intense and widespread labor militancy1 in the recent past, and the reform era under way, the theoretically trained engineers sought to reconcile what they saw as the contradiction between profit maximization and productive efficiency. Taylor and those in his camp believed that scientific principles could be applied to the organization of production, replacing the profit-maximizing behavior of bankers and financiers that engineers perceived as the cause of industrial strife and economic crises. Scientific management, in classic New Class style, vastly enhanced the power...