BOO KS
287
theories proved that what had just happened could not have taken
place. A mobilization of resources and price fixing were declared in
conflict with the laws of paper and the economy went back to a
somewhat more sophisticated (by Depression standards) squandering of
men and materials.
In less hurried times, America might have absorbed these contradic–
tions at the simple price of human suffering. But, Bazelon argues,
in
times of technological explosion, colonial revolution and "peaceful
competition" with the Soviet mode of production, these absurdities
could be historically decisive. I think that Bazelon underestimates the
amount of illusion in the Soviet system. For example, the "over-fulfill–
ment" of quotas, so dear to Communist mythology, is actually a way of
sabotaging the plan since, in a situation where resources are politically
allocated, Plant X's overfulfillment must be Plant Y's underfulfillment,
which leads to a marvelous mix-up. Yet the fact remains that Russian
totalitarianism is at least concerned with production rather than the
manipulation of paper.
Bazelon develops
this
analysis in a polemical, irreverent, and
convincing way which is accessible to the educated laymen if not to the
men who run the society. The latter cannot afford to understand their
own myths.
It is because
The Paper Economy
is so provocative that I want
to
quarrel with one of its central theses. The issue is not one of scholastic
accuracy but something more basic: where does one locate the source
of illusion in the paper economy? Bazelon is devastating in his descrip–
tion of the American sur-reality and then, curiously for a book so
suffused with realism, he is over-optimistic on this count.
II} analyzing the source of the American illusion, Bazelon leans
heavily on the Berle-Means thesis: the American economy has effectively
separated ownership and management, property and decision. As a
result, "... while the intellectuals and other ideologists on all sides
were locked in the capitalist-socialist debate, the non-owning and non–
theorizing managers were effecting the revolution which created our
present system." The institutional form of this change is the corpora–
tion; its directors are the managers (or new intellectuals) who rest
their position upon education and technical skill rather than property.
In this view, the paper economy is the product of a massive, and
unnecessary, cultural lag. The concepts and ideologies of the older
system, based on private property, have irrationally survived its trans–
formation. Our problem, then, is not so much reality as it is the way
we think about reality.
