BOOKS
107
begin to grapple with the basic conceptions. Some examples will show
what I mean:
p. 44: "It was not until the general strike of 1926 that Transport
House (the trade-union headquarters) and the British Iron & Steel Fed·
eration began to intervene directly into politics." (This is to support
his thesis that the British aristocracy ran English politics up to 1926
to the exclusion of the two main 'economic' classes, labor and big busi–
ness.) What "directly" means I don't know, but the Trade Union Congress
established a Parliamentary Committee in 1869, founded the British
Labor Party in 1900, and had 42 seats in Parliament by 1910.
p. 72: "Instead of a cut in production and a boost in price, maximum
production and minimum price is the economically most profitable policy
in
an industrial system. Certainly Henry Ford made
TTUJre
money than
all
the monopolists of the old school
together."
(My italics.) In practice,
our monopolists (who may be presumed to have at least as keen a
nose for profits as Mr. Drucker) have found the opposite policy pays
bigger returns. Drucker writes as though only a few antiquated fuddy–
duddies pursue what he sneeringly calls "the old-line mercantile theory,"
whereas
all
the great monopoly industries, from steel and aluminum
to telephones, are run on this principle. Henry Ford, finally, is not
a monopolist, nor is there any possibility of his profits adding up to
more than the
combined
profits of AT&T, Alcoa,
U.
S. Steel, Interna–
tional Nickel, General Electric, and a dozen other giants of the "old
school." (One would never suspect, from statements like the above,
that Mr. Drucker is a professional economist who is now a member of
the economics faculty of Bennington College.)
p. 114: "Never before in Western history [the fine old Druckerian
sweep!] had there been such ample economic provision for the needy
and the unemployed as in the Depression years with their doles, relief
payments, WPA's, etc." I refer Mr. Drucker to a 17,000 word article
on unemployment relief which I published in
The New International
for September, 1939. That year two-thirds of the unemployed lived, or
tried to, on state relief payments ranging from $4 a month
per family
in
Oklahoma to $32 in New York. A relatively fortunate one-third re–
ceived a WPA wage averaging $57 a month, or $684 a year, which was
35% below what
the WPA itself
stated to be "a minimum emergency
budget." From the alleged fact of "ample economic provision," Drucker
argues his usual thesis: that since the unemployed had economic security
already, what they really wanted, as non-economic men, was "social
status and function." It would be interesting to put the Drucker family
on a budget of $684 a year and see whether they worried about social
status and function, or food. It would also be interesting to see the effect
on Drucker's admiration for American institutions.
p. 123: "To substitute union leadership for corporation management
as the foremost if not the decisive power as the union creed demands
would not make for any real change in the structure of society." This
