556
DAVID
T.
BAZELON
war, and the total cltlzenry is involved not only because it may
be
destroyed by nuclear bombs, but because the means and the end of the
war are social and political control over the great bureaucracies which
are an ineradicable part of the new technological world. This means
some measure of control over the managers. Properly conceiving this
war, our greatest failure in it has been that we have developed no
techniques for calling our
own
managers to account to us, the democratic
polity, for their stewardship of the economy. The corporate managers
in America are as little willing to engage in politics-in ideological
argument and factual justification before a public-as are the Russian
managers. The method of suppression is different, but the results are
exasperatingly similar.
The only good reason for our struggle with Russia is that we do
not want the profound defeats of the Russian people vis-a.-vis their
managers to become a pattern for world development. Here
in
America, we have suffered fewer defeats (we have joined fewer bat–
tles) but we have not met the final issues of the integration of the
great bureaucracies with state power.
The differences between managerialism in Russia and America lie
in the fact that we are not yet completely bureaucratized, and
in
the
means of control of the population by the bureaucracies and of the
bureaucracies by their ruling figures. Simply, the Russians utilize vary–
ing degrees of terror. But the terror in Russia is required mainly
be–
cause the people there do not yet have our standard of living.
It
goes
with the primitive accumulation of capital, which is a horror for the
mass of the people whether or not accompanied by totalitarian state
rule; as Engels described it, the effects were shockingly brutal in nine–
teenth century England. The Russian model is primitive accumulation
by bureaucratic means, backed up by terror. But if one compares nine–
teenth century Britain with twentieth century Russia, the sharpest dif–
ference will be in the cultural quality and style of life, freedom or lack
of it, of the two ruling and privileged groups, not in the condition of
the masses.
If
Russian industrialization has been worse for the masses,
this is probably because it has been bigger and quicker, rather than
inherently more "evil."
The mass productive society achieves its most profound effects
with or without terror. In American organizations we have a bureau–
cratic conformism which often seems like "voluntary" totalitarianism.
It is voluntary in the sense that no organized, extra-legal police ter–
ror has induced it, and totalitarian in the sense that so many aspects
of personal and spiritual life are "controlled" or relevant to social rule
