30
PARTISAN REVIEW
that have been immensely discussed and considered. Can we maintain
educational standards while making education more "democratic"?
Can we make technical training more universal and more humane
while still meeting the demands of industry? Is the "opposition"
role of the trade unions a hindrance to "industrial democracy"? It
is not that these matters have not been studied; it is rather that
they have been studied on too severely practical a level and without
a sufficient consultation of our final aims. We should profit by
widening the area in which they could be discussed with intelligence
and interest.
A study of nationalization, such as
Industry and Society,
for
instance, representing an official attitude, combines complexity at
the technical level with question-begging simplicity at the moral
and theoretical level. "Nationalization" is spoken of in terms of
redistribution of wealth, making important powers socially respon–
sible, and enabling the State to profit from the present structure of
our economy. "Equality" is envisaged as the abolition of private
shareholding and inherited position. Keynes is quoted to show that
with the dissociation of ownership of industry from its control there
is a "natural line of development" in the direction of State Socialism.
There is a momentary reference to "joint consultation." Nothing
whatever is said about conditions and nature of work. Whereas
critics (the authors of
The Insiders,
for instance) who rightly
suggest that "public ownership must be seen in the context of the
original Socialist goal of industrial democracy," and who point out
the extent to which
Industry and Society
takes our present economic
and social structure for granted, still conceive the problem in terms
of "the democratization of power," rather than in terms of what
such a shift of power would be designed to achieve. But the fascina–
tion of the means should not obscure the end; and to
see
the end
we must to some extent separate it from the often seemingly barren
complexities of the means; we must to some extent lend it the re–
moteness and flexibility of a "theory." The problem of the trans–
formation of labor is not only the original center of Socialist thought,
it is the problem of the managerial society. Even to pose it with
enough clarity would help to counteract the movement of talent
and interest toward the levels of bureaucratic control and to send it
back toward the levels of the unskilled. But for such an idea to
be
