RADICAL QUESTIONS
pesticides, the eradication of farmers, and the enclosure of the
countryside for motels.... "Political Economy" is the galloping
Gross National Product, stepping up TV advertising, the un–
checked aggrandizing of the broadcasting networks . . . and
more highways when there are already too many cars. . . .
. . . In the teeth of this magnitude of bucks, one cannot serious–
ly point to the minimum wage of $1.25 (excluding many
categories) or
10,000
in the Peace Corps (after three years and
$300
million) or the anti-discrimination housing order (ap–
plied to a minority of cases). Indeed a
good
synonym for
Liberalism is Tokenism. But where are good neighborhoods,
or clean rivers, or rural reconstruction, or liberating education,
or an effort to improve the quality of the standard of living,
to countervail regimenting and brainwashing? ...
It
is insult–
ing
to
hear these people talk of a Great Society.
191
Old problems fester and new ones appear, threatening the
precarious equilibrium of the welfare state. For the great temptation
in thinking about the welfare state
is
to assume
in effect
what we
deny in theory; that it
is
stable and static. The inner motions of eco–
nomic development, the heavy impact of technology, the complicat–
ing effects of international politics--all disturb,
if
not dissolve, the
seeming fixity of the welfare state. Perhaps the most immediately
threatening force is the cybernetic revolution which cuts through
technique, management and economy, with some of the following
possible repercussions:
• We face the danger of drifting into a society in which there
will appear new and fierce class divisions: not so much between
owners and workers or even rich and poor, though these will persist,
but between various skilled elites living in affluence and a stratum
of permanent unemployables, an "underclass" consisting mainly of
older workers, the young and the Negroes.
• The power and size of the trade unions seems certain to
decline, even if they undertake-which they probably will not-bold
steps to meet the new conditions.
• The problem of government intervention in economic life
will
become a sharper political
issue
than it has been these past
several years.
