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just how much social and economic change has occurred with respect
to
class inequalities. These comments, I think, are particularly war–
ranted in the case of Westergaard and Resler. Their book is written in a
dispassionate, clinical way, in contrast to that of Bowles and Gintis,
which has a more vigorous and compelling style. But there are several
quite basic junctures in Westergaard and Res ler's empirical discussion
where counterinterpretations to their own are inadequately examined.
For example, in discussing the distribution of wealth, the authors
strongly emphasize the conclusion that inequalities of wealth have
changed only marginally in the direction of a broader spread; apparent
shifts in wealth distribution as indicated by wealth sta tistics, they
affirm, are primarily the result of transfers among the wealthy, as a
safeguard against taxation. This is a point of view which I find
convincing; but it is a much more controversial one than they impl y,
and they ignore the work of economists (e.g., Polyani and Wood) who
have claimed to show that a very substantial redistribution of wealth
has taken place over the course of this century. Westergaard and Res ler
seem to admit only reluctantly that reformist groups, even the labor
movement itself, may have been a significant force for change in British
society, preferring to put the emphasis upon the manipulative power
of capital to institute changes which suit its own interes ts. There is
more than a hint here of the view that anything which is not a
revolutionary change is not a change at all. This sort of downplaying
of the achievements of the labor movement in Britain is in a way
expressive of an underlying pessimism in the authors' views, which sits
uncomfortably with the (certainly very tentative) hopes they express for
revolutionary change in their concluding chapter. For if even the
rather modes t reformism of the labor movement has been really
managed and controlled from above, how could we ever expect labor to
generate an effective impetus towards the much more basic processes of
opposition that a revolution would demand? Their analysis leaves the
impression of a society that is as stable, although class-divided, as the
peacefully evolving industrial society evoked by the liberal writers of
the 1950s and 1960s-perhaps more so, for the latter group did after all
hold that the Western societies were in the process of creating major
and progressive social transformation from within.
As I have already emphasized in the beginning of this discussion,
the theory of industrial society forecloses the differentiation between
capitalism and socialism fundamental to any type of Marxist view–
point. Industrialism, it is argued, is linked to a distinctive type of socio–
economic order which has, in Kerr's term, its own inherent logi c.
Although the theory of industrial society was connected
to
an optimis-
