74
PARTISAN REVIEW
has been growing very slowly for three decades. Some years of faster
wage than price inflation have effectively redistributed considerable
income from the prosperous to the unionized majority . Although the
English response is more equitable than the American, it is no more
viable. Capital has left England, domestic investment has declined
to perilously low levels, and British unions have reluctantly agreed
to slow the pace ofwage inflation.
Capitalism offers no acceptable alternative strategy to rapid
growth as the legitimizer of its institutions . When growth ceases ,
economic policy fluctuates between restraint of inflation and stimula–
tion of employment. Incomes policy, the only way to combine
high employment and stable prices, breaks down because no
principle of division between wages and profits
is
simultaneously
acceptable to owners and workers. The rash of interest among such
alert members of the American business and financial establishment
as Felix Rohatyn (MAC), W. Michael Blumenthal (Bendix), and
Robert Roosa (Brown Brothers, Harriman) in democratic national
planning amounts to recognition of the inadequacy of market
processes in a time of reduced economic expansion . But planning ,
Japanese or French style, is no quick fix. All the hard planning
issues-who plans, by what processes , for whose benefit-are as
divisive as quarrels over wage and profits guidelines .
First in England and now here at home, there has been a
quantity of wistful talk of a more formal social compact than the
one which was dissolved by the thunder of the guns of October 1973 .
Apparently a version of incomes policy , the social compact is an
attempt to win the agreement of organized economic groups about
the fair distribution of the social product. The outlook is unpromising
for arriving at a definition, let alone a means of enforcement , for
such a pact. Capitalism's success in generating consumer goods has
simultaneously devalued older icons of community, elevated self- and
group-interest as almost exclusive motivations of action , and rendered
highly unlikely the emergence of unifying political leadership .
When a popular prophet of American triumphalism like Daniel
Boorstin can seriously postulate the significance of consumption
communities peopled by devotees of Cutty Sark , Budweiser , Total,
and Alka-Seltzer Gold as paradigms of fraternity , capitalist-style ,
then one can only respond in Boorstin's terms: What happens when
