PARTISAN REVIEW
129
stitute over 12 percent of the total labor force, and will continue to grow
in
the future. They are "the heart of the post-industrial society" because
they are indispensable to its functioning.
I find both arguments less than convincing. Blue-collar workers in
manufacturing surely constituted the single largest category of all
workers in industrial society, and they evidently were indispensable to its
operation, yet Bell would be the first to recognize that they were at no
time the master class.
If
indispensability were really a source of socielal
power, sanitation workers or baby sitters would be a formidable social
and political force. They never were and never will be because indispen–
sability results in societal power only if and when it is accompanied by a
self-conscious will to act in common for shared supraoccupational
objectives. And such self-consciousness, in turn, emerges only under
specific structural conditions. When Marx discussed the French peasantry
around the middle of the nineteenth century, which then was, of course,
a large majority of the French population, he asserted that the condi–
tions of their existence were such that they could not form common
bonds and a common consciousness, that they were like "potatoes in a
sack" rather than a solidary collectivity that could put its stamp on
society.
Bell furnishes no evidence whatsoever that knowledge has replaced
property as the main source of power. He only shows that modern
society increasingly depends on the activities of scientists, educators,
engineers, social workers, technologists, and researchers, and simply
assumes that they are therefore our new masters. He never seems seri–
ously to entertain the notion that the employers and funding agencies,
both public and private, who employ them or contract for their work,
may in fact direct their activities much more than they themselves are
directed by them. One need not hold the vulgar notion that he who pays
the piper always calls the tune, to remain skeptical of the notion that the
knowledge "estates" are gaining ascendancy because we all depend on
them as resources.
The notion of power remains unclarified in Bell's book. The word is
not even found in the index, despite the fact that the whole argument of
the work revolves around it. At one point lhe author states that "corpo–
rate power . .. is the predominant power in the society." But elsewhere
he argues: "In lhe post-industrial society, technical skill becomes the
base of and education the mode of access to power; those (or the elite of
the group) who come to the fore in this fashion are the scientists."
According to one scheme power rests in the executive suite, according to
the other in the faculty club. Bell surely cannot have it both ways, and
no amount of intellectual fireworks can hide the fact that he has not
