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barrage of arguments against the presumption of a managerial revolu–
tion: however propertyless they may be, managers are still bound to the
overall constraints of the need to pursue profits. "The individual
nineteenth and early twentieth-century owner-entreprenuer," they
point out, "may have been more liable than the board of a modern
corporation to be diverted from profit maximization by a concern with
personal prestige and self-aggrandizement." Moreover, there is a
difference between administrative operations and the use of power:
propertied interests may leave the day-to-day administration of the
corporation to managerial executives, but reserve the capacity to
intervene when it is deemed important or necessary to do so. Finally,
propertyless managers turn out not to be so propertyless after all.
It
may be true that in the very large enterprises share-ownership is often
widely spread, but nevertheless most directors of such enterprises own
substantial shareholdings, thus bringing their interests closely into
line with the more substantial sectors of the propertied class.
The real meat of Westergaard and Resler's work is
to
be found in
the chapter in which they attempt to analyze the achievements of the
welfare state, and try
to
show that they fall disastrously short of the
reformist ambitions underlying its history since the War. The power of
capital has not been tamed by an internal expansion of management
control; how far has it been curbed by the promotion of welfare
schemes, and by the range of other economic and educational objec–
tives pursued by the interventionist state? Most of the welfare schemes,
including social security, health services, provision of subsidized
housing etc., they indicate are double-edged. In one sense they help
buffer lower income groups from the vicissitudes of the capitalist
economy; in a more profound sense they are the necessary means of
consolidating its survival, through helping to provide a stable and
docile labor force. Welfare provisions are by and large financed from
the income of wage earners themselves, and are not accompanied by
any shift of power into their hands, being administered by bureaucratic
organizations over which welfare recipients themselves have no direct
control. The same is true with respect to state intervention in the
economy in the shape of nationalization. Westergaard and Resler
recognize that some of the impetus
to
nationalization has come from
reformist zeal-particularly in the program instituted by the Labor
Party after the War. But the principal effects have been to shore up the
capitalist economy by the public appropriation of industries of low
profitability. Nationalization has produced neither a significant redis–
tribution of wealth, since compensation was paid to former owners,
"
