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Title: Liberalism and Social Control Author: Kevin Carson Date: May 2000 Language: en Topics: liberalism, social control, social classes Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2021 from http://www.mutualist.org/id7.html
Twentieth century liberalism, as an ideology of social control, goes
back to the Progressive movement in this counry and Fabianism in
Britain. Its primary base of support was the New Class of social
engineers, planners, technocrats and “helping professionals” who saw
themselves as divinely appointed to manage the lower orders for their
own good. Although the term “New Class” was coined by Milovan Djilas to
describe the bureaucratic collectivism of communist society, it is well
suited for the ruling class under welfare state liberalism. Orwell’s
description of this class is as good as any.
The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats,
scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts,
sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These
people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper
grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the
barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government.
Walter Lippmann described the phenomenon from a much friendlier
perspective in Public Opinion:
The Great Society had grown furiously and to colossal dimensions by the
application of technical knowledge. It was made by engineers who had
learned to use exact measurements and quantitative analysis. It could
not be governed, men began to discover, by men who thought deductively
about rights and wrongs. It could be brought under human control only by
the technic which had created it. Gradually, then, the more enlightened
directing minds have called in experts who were trained, or had trained
themselves, to make parts of this Great Society intelligible to those
who manage it. These men are known by all kinds of names, as
statisticians, accountants, auditors, industrial counsellors, engineers
of many species, scientific managers, personnel administrators, research
men, “scientists,” and sometimes just as plain private secretaries [pp.
233–234].
The central theme of this new class ideology, as Joel Spring put it
[Education and the Rise of the Corporate State p. xiii], was that “the
good society meant the efficiently organized society that was producing
the maximum amount of goods”--and the most efficient social institutions
for this purpose were “[l]arge organizational units and centralized
government.” The ordinary person was “viewed as a raw material whose
worth was determined by his contribution to the system.”
Christopher Lasch, a left-wing populist who sounded at times
suspiciously like a social conservative, defined the New Class ideology
in terms of the ethos of “professionalism.” The Jeffersonian ideal of
the independent yeoman farmer or tradesman--a well-rounded citizen
capable of competently handling all issues that affected his daily
life--was, in the view of the Progressives, obsolete. Instead, every
aspect of life was to be “professionalized,” handed over to a class of
“experts” protected from interference by the lower orders [Revolt of the
Elites; The Culture of Narcissism; The True and Only Heaven]. This was
unabashedly argued in The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly, who
sought to obtain “Jeffersonian ends with Hamiltonian means.” In this
progressive manifesto, he praised “experts” and “intellectuals” in
almost messianic terms.
Barton Bledstein admirably described this fetish [The Culture of
Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher
Education in America, in Boyte]:
The citizen became a client whose obligation was to trust the
professional. Legitimate authority now resided in special places like
the courtroom, the classroom, and the hospital; and it resided in
special words shared only by experts.
John McKnight, in a speech to the 1976 retreat of the Brainerd, Minn.
Community Planning Organization [“Are the Helping Systems Doing More
Harm Than Good?” in Boyte pp. 173–174], described the ways the “helping
professions” infantilize ordinary citizens.
When the capacity to define the problem becomes a professional
prerogative, citizens no longer exist. The prerogative removes the
citizen as problem definer, much less problem solver. It translates
political functions into technical and technological problems.
It is important to remember that the New Class’ dream of professional
control of the population did not arise in a vacuum. Liberal social
engineering was not the only alternative to exploitation by robber
barons. The working class in the nineteenth century had its own culture
and institutions, and was attempting to build a society in which workers
themselves controlled all the things that affected their daily lives.
Working class children in England sometimes attended “penny a week
schools” taught by an aged or crippled worker; the artisan class
contained a large proportion of self-educated people, some of them
remarkably well-read in the political controversies of the time (many
radical leaders were master tradesmen who found time to educate
themselves during breaks in their work); friendly societies often
subscribed in common to the radical press and met to read and debate [E.
P. Thompson, Chapter Sixteen, “Class Consciousness,” in The Making of
the English Working Class].
Genuine working class unions, built from the bottom up and controlled by
workers themselves, aimed at direct workers’ control of the production
process. Workers’ organizations for self-help and mutual aid included
collections for charity, and “friendly societies” organized on a
subscription basis to insure members against funerals and sickness [They
are described in the later chapters of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and in E.
P. Thompson’s chapter on “Community”]. So every function of the
“progressive” welfare state so beloved of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was
already being attempted by the workers themselves--but organized from
the bottom up, instead of handed down from on high by paternalistic
liberals.
The main shortcomings of working class self-organization were those
imposed from outside--i.e., lack of resources, and active suppression by
the state. Had the working class been free to organize without
interference by the state--and more importantly, had they had the full
product of their labor to dispose of--their provisions for their own
health, education and welfare would have been far superior to anything
doled out by the state. But goo-goos like Schlesinger ignore the fact
that the welfare state was created precisely in order to prevent the
working class from organizing to keep the product of their own labor and
control their work. The entire “progressive” agenda in the twentieth
century was oriented, not toward ending the framework of state policy
that supported corporate rule, but increasing state intervention to make
corporate rule more bearable.
The New class saw such self-organization as an atavism, to be eliminated
with all the other imperfections of the past when society was
reorganized under the benevolent rule of “professionals.” Working class
institutions were either supplanted or destroyed: working class free
schools were rendered “obsolete” by state schools, and in the process
the New Class ideology achieved hegemony over the minds of children;
organs of self-help were encouraged to wither away by the “helping
professions”; syndicalist unions controlled by the rank and file, and
the vibrant labor press, were liquidated by good “liberals” during
Wilson’s Red Scare.
One of the best pictures of the ideal world envisioned by the New Class
was drawn by Hilaire Belloc in The Servile State. Belloc believed Fabian
collectivism to be less dedicated to state or workers’ ownership as such
than to the idea of control by “efficient” centralized organizations. It
would be politically impossible to carry out expropriation of the large
capitalists. Therefore, attempts to regulate industry to make labor more
bearable, and to create a minimal welfare state, would lead instead to a
system in which employers would be compelled to provide a minimum level
of comfort and economic security for their employees in return for
guaranteed profits. The working class would be reduced to a state of
near-serfdom, with legally-defined status replacing the right of free
contract, and the state fitting the individual into a lifetime niche in
the industrial machine. Such a society would appeal to the authoritarian
kind of socialist, whose chief values were efficiency and control.
Let laws exist which make the proper housing, feeding, clothing, and
recreation of the proletarian mass be incumbent upon the possessing
class, and the observance of such rules be imposed, by inspection and
punishment, upon those whom he pretends to benefit, and all that he
really cares for will be achieved [Ibid. pp. 146–147].
Belloc was horrified by bloodless Fabians like H. G. Wells and the
Webbs, who dabbled in social engineering in addition to their many other
hobbies. The Fabian movement preferred working within existing
institutions to make capitalism more stable and humane. Since it
coincided with the rise of “Progressive” industrialists--who envisioned
cooperation between business, government and labor in the interest of
efficiency--the two phenomena reinforced each other to promote class
rule by men in suits who sat behind desks. In place of the classical
socialist movement of the nineteenth century, aiming at workers’ control
of production and largely made up of real workers, the Fabians and
Progressives substituted management of workers by their betters. As
Belloc pointed out, if only their lust to manage and regiment the
underclass were satisfied, the Fabians would be quite accomodating about
capitalist ownership.
Wells favored a minimum safety net of aid to the children of the
destitute, in return for responsibility of parents to the state, on pain
of rehabilitation in “celibate labor establishments.” Minimum wages and
housing standards would be designed, not to guarantee subsistence to
poor families, but to end the availability of cheap housing and
low-paying jobs on which the destitute subsisted. The goal was to cease
perpetuating “the educationally and technically unadaptable elements in
the population” and to breed “a more efficient race by increased state
supervision,” in Wells’ words to “convince these people that to bear
children into such an unfavorable atmosphere is an extremely
inconvenient and undesirable thing.”
The Webbs wanted relief conditioned on “treatment and disciplinary
supervision,” with local government councils imposing compulsory
vaccination and determining who was “mentally defective or an excessive
drinker” (these things became a reality in the Swedish “social
democracy”). Those too unemployable even for the “compulsory labor
exchanges” would be required to attend training camps, with “their whole
time mapped out in a continuous and properly varied program of physical
and mental work, all of it being made of the utmost educational value.”
Those refusing to cooperate would be sent to “Reformatory Detention
Colonies” [Wells, Mankind in the Making; the Webbs, The Prevention of
Destitution; John P. McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc, Edwardian Radical].
This “liberalism” reached maturity during World War I, when a group of
statist intellectuals grouped around the British War Office, the Wilson
administration, and The New Republic, invented the modern science of
propaganda as a tool to engineer public support for the war. Some
members of this circle, like Walter Lippmann and Harold Lasswell, went
on to develop theories of “spectator democracy,” in which the masses
choose among elite candidates every four years, and sit down and shut up
the rest of the time.
It is instructive to compare the composition of the socialist movement
before and after Wilson. Before the Great War, Socialist Party
congressmen, mayors, etc., were elected by Montana miners, Milwaukee
brewers, and Oklahoma oil workers. After the Wilsonian terror, the rare
“socialist” politician comes from a yuppie hog heaven like Burlington,
Vt., and the main demographic base for socialism is academia.
Human services departments today are a favorite habitat of authoritarian
statists. The welfare state, portrayed by conservatives as an instrument
of class warfare, is really an instrument of class rule. It regulates
the underclass so as to prevent class warfare from threatening the neat,
comfortable, antiseptic world of the New Class. The Progressive Jacob
Riis, in How the Other Half Lives, warned spell-bound middle class
readers of the “Man with the Knife,” the anarchist raising “the
danger-cry... the shout that never should have been raised on American
soil... the solution of violence [in Spring p. 5].” Despite the
illusions of aging New Deal Democrats who live in an Arthur Schlesinger
time warp, this is the real origin of the welfare state.
Piven and Cloward argue that the two major expansions of the welfare
state, under FDR and LBJ, were both spurred by drastic increases in
social disorder, with the unemployed and homeless participating in
violent demonstrations and being drawn to radical movements [Regulating
the Poor]. The welfare bureaucracy serves three functions: it takes the
edge off of potential underclass radicalism by minimizing outright
homelessness and starvation; it subjects its clients to close
supervision by a network of case-workers who make sure they don’t get up
to any subversive mischief; and it enforces labor discipline by making
the system as unpleasant as possible and scaring away all but the
hard-core unemployable.
The most egregious example of the New Class sense of divine right can be
seen among the ideologues of the “public” education establishment. Joel
Spring draws a close parallel between early Progressivism in society at
large and public educationism as a microcosm of that ideology, with the
schools being “a central institution for the production of men and women
who conformed to the needs and expectations of a corporate and
technocratic world” [op. cit. p. 1]. The state school systems were
organized about the time that large factories began to need a docile,
obedient work force that was trained to line up on command and eat and
piss at the sound of a bell. In the words of Edgar Z. Friedenberg,
Whatever the needs of young people might have been, no public school
system developed in response to them until an industrial society arose
to demand the creation of holding pens from which a steady and carefully
monitored supply of people trained to be punctual, literate, orderly and
compliant and graded according to qualities determining employability
from the employers’ point of view could be released into the economy as
needed [The Disposal of Liberty and Other Industrial Wastes p. 16].
Public educationists have never been bashful about their self-appointed
mission: to take pieces of human “raw material” from their families and
transform them into useful servants of the State. James Mill, for
example, saw the task of the schools as being “to train the minds of the
people to a virtuous attachment to their government.” The writings of
leading figures in departments of education, teachers’ colleges, the NEA
and the AFT, were full to overflowing with statements to this effect.
William Bagley’s Classroom Management was the standard teacher’s manual
for two decades, reprinted thirty times between 1907 and 1927. It
recommended machine-like organization as the “educative force” for
“slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature of
law and order, fit for the life of civilized society.” A teacher’s
efficiency could be judged by “the manner in which lines pass to and
from the room.” He recommended the establishment of “regular habits...
with regard to the bodily functions,” and conditioning to assume a
posture of “head erect, eyes turned toward the teacher, hands... folded”
upon hearing the command “Attention!” [Spring pp. 46–47]. The
sociologist Edward Ross, in his 1890s Social Control, treated
school-sponsored extracurricular activity as “an economical system of
police” [Spring p. 75].
The educrats’ mania for social engineering dovetails nicely with the
corporate state’s need for easily controlled drones. From the very
beginning of the factory system, the more “benevolent” owners tried to
exercise paternalistic control over the social lives and morals of their
employees, with experiments in “company planned self-improvement
programs or moral and ethical instruction” to weed out those prone to
“immoral conduct, bad language, disrespect, or... an improper attitude.”
The goal was to create healthy, well-adjusted workers and prevent the
emergence of a “depraved and shiftless” proletariat on the European
model. “The combination of work, self-improvement through education, and
moral scrutiny created a wedding between the church, the school, and the
factory” [Spring pp. 22–23].
This tendency was rapidly augmented by an arsenal of pseudo-science;
personality and aptitude testing evolved into a new industry under
school guidance counselors and “human resources” departments. The most
ominous development of human engineering is the “school to work”
movement. Currently, all fifty states receive federal grants under the
terms of the School to Work Opportunities Act of 1994. When fully
implemented, the program calls for “comprehensive career guidance” for
every student by seventh grade at the latest. He is to adopt a “career
major” within an occupational area, with available choices to be
prescribed by a local planning board based on projected “need.” Students
at graduation receive “certificates of mastery,” based on national
standards being developed by the National Skill Standards Board. If the
program develops as envisioned, it will evolve into a system of
certification for all occupations, with the federal government using tax
and regulatory powers to “encourage” businesses to hire only those with
certificates of mastery [Gary Wolfram, “School to Work].
Most of the Progressive-era “good government” reforms were aimed at
“professionalizing” government and removing it from “politics”--that is,
placing the rule of “experts” safely beyond interference by the great
unwashed. In the words of FDR, “The day of the Politician is past; the
day of the Enlightened Administrator has come.”
The replacement of ward representation with at-large election resulted
(in Pittsburg’s 1911 “reform,” for example) in transformation of a
council made up of two-thirds common workmen, tradesmen, clerks and
shop-keepers, into one composed entirely of “professionals” and
“prominent businessmen” [Spring p. 86]. The replacement of neighborhood
control with city-wide school boards and superintendents was similarly
designed to remove education from parental influence and give it over to
the care of properly trained “professionals.” The intergovernmental
“authority,” pioneered in America by the New York Port Authority and
Robert Moses’ Long Island highway system, like many methods of
authoritarian government, was resurrected from British law and adopted
near-universally as a form of “professional” government beyond the
control of the electorate.
The New Class ideology of “progressivism” appeared in the workplace in
the form of “scientific management.” The goal of Taylorism was to take
the management of work as much as possible away from master craftsmen on
the shop floor, and eliminate the initiative and independent judgment of
the worker. The blue collar worker was to be deskilled, and expertise
shifted upward into the ranks of salaried white-collar engineers.
Management would determine the most efficient way of organizing
production, and tasks would be transformed into rote repetition which
engaged the mental faculties as little as possible. Workers were to be
taught in no uncertain terms that they were paid to do as they were
told, not to think. The bosses feared that, if workers controlled the
production process, they might realize that the bosses were parasites
and, in the words of the Wobbly slogan, “fire the boss.” [Stephen
Marglin, William Lazonick, David Montgomery, David Noble and Katherine
Stone have produced an excellent body of work on this trend].
Taylorism was accepted by the labor establishment in the devil’s bargain
of the New Deal. The Wagner Act was supported by corporations engaged in
high-tech, export-oriented production, because labor costs were a
relatively insignificant part of their total costs, and they needed
long-term stability and predictability in the workplace. The Wagner Act
ended the genuine revolution that was taking place on the shop floors of
Detroit and the docks of San Francisco, coopted the CIO leadership as
part of the corporate establishment, and turned unions into enforcers of
labor discipline. The position of the new labor bureaucrats was “Let the
bosses manage, as long as they pay us good.” The result was that a labor
establishment dominated by mediocrities like George Meany was willing to
purge itself, during the Cold War, of the same leftist radicals who had
led workers to victory in the mid-30s.
William F. Buckley said somewhere that he’d rather be governed by people
randomly chosen from the Cambridge, Mass. phone book than by fifty
Harvard professors. True enough; but the same holds true in the
workplace. I’ll take a decision made by workers on the shop floor over
one made by a boss any day.
Conservatives who complain of “left-liberals” and otherwise treat
liberalism/progressivism as synonymous with leftism are sadly mistaken.
There is nothing left-wing about liberalism. As Chomsky wrote somewhere
about the press, they may be “liberal” in the sense that they favor gun
control and “a woman’s right to choose,” and listen to NPR a lot; but
they are far from “left wing” in the sense of a genuine criticism of the
institutional power structure in this society.
In fact, liberalism closely parallels Leninism as a pseudo-leftist
ideology of social control by the New Class. Leninism and liberalism
between them wiped out the genuine (i.e., libertarian, populist) left
from a major part of the world. Woodrow Wilson, A. Mitchell Palmer, and
their liberal storm troopers tossed hundreds of Wobblies, socialists,
anarchists, Nonpartisan Leaguers and other leftists into prison under
the provisions of the Espionage act and state criminal syndicalism laws;
many thousands of anarchists and libertarian socialists, labelled
“saboteurs” and collaborators with White forces, disappeared into
Lenin’s gulag. Ever since then, the conventional “left” has been a
movement largely of academics and pseudo-intellectual peckerheads.
Attempts at workers’ control of production met similar resistance both
in Lenin’s Russia and in corporate America. Although management of
factories by workers’ committees compared favorably to pre-revolutionary
managers, Lenin and Trotskky placed them under increasing restrictions
by the people’s commissariats, finally replacing them with
state-appointed managers. In an April 1918 Izvestiya article, Lenin
praised Taylor’s “scientific management” methods and argued that, in the
name of the proletarian revolution, workers should unquestioningly
submit to one-man management of production [Maurice Brinton, Workers’
Control in the Bolshevik Revolution]. American corporate experiments
with worker self-management were abandoned, even when they resulted in
drastic productivity increases and reductions in absenteeism and injury.
The reason, in both countries, was that social control was more
important than productivity. If workers saw how much better they could
organize production without the foreman, they might try to decide
questions of what and why, instead of just how--and fire the board of
directors or people’s commissar.
New Class progressivism continued to flourish among welfare statists
after WWII; it heavily influenced both interest group pluralism and
neo-conservatism, and the shadowy borderlands in-between. Among others
this includes Daniel Bell, Samuel P. Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski,
and Francis Fukuyama. The most notable modern descendant of the
“progressive” social engineer, by the way, is Hillary Clinton. Her ideal
government is a giant matriarch, like Godzilla in an apron, who
constantly chants “Momma don’t allow, Momma don’t allow”--all to protect
us from ourselves, of course. Or as Joseph Stromberg wrote, “the body of
Leviathan and the head of a social worker.” Those who view Hillary as a
radical leftist are delusional. A woman who made a 10,000% profit in
cattle futures and served as a director of Wal-Mart, is hardly a threat
to the power of the ruling class. She and her ilk just want to protect
upper middle class soccer moms with SUVs and cell phones from any
underclass disruption of their white bread suburban world.
The New Class’ sense of privilege is evidenced by its zealous defense of
the publik skools’ monopoly status (while they send their own kids to
Sidwell Friends); and their relentless struggle against their serfs’
right to bear arms (without touching their right to hire armed guards
for themselves). And then there’s the National Health official from
Quebec who sneaked across the border under an assumed name to get decent
medical care.
There has been a whole host of commentators who have put the New Class
at the center of their analysis. Those who draw the most critical notice
are those on the Right like Peggy Noonan, who focus on what I call the
“soft” New Class. This category includes mainly academics, teachers, and
“helping professionals.” But they tend to ignore the other side of the
phenomenon, in the private sector--the “hard” New Class of managers and
engineers. The paternalistic welfare state and arrogant “public” school
establishment cannot be separated, in their origins, from the rise of
scientific management and the cult of “professionalism” in the
workplace. Both reflect an attempt to alienate the ordinary person from
his own common sense, and rob him of the ability to control the things
that affect his daily life.
The solution to New Class rule is not the spurious populism of the
neocons and New Right. The dittoheads appeal to the “aw, shucks”
sensibility of Norman Rockwell’s America, and play on the producing
classes’ resentment of bureaucrats and welfare deadbeats; but their real
interest is getting government off the backs of bankers, plutocrats, and
CEOs. They carefully conceal the fact that the greatest criminals are in
the corporate boardrooms and the national security state, and the
biggest parasites and deadbeats are the heavily subsidized, privileged
corporations.
The real solution is to revive the kinds of working class
self-organization and direct action which the New Class so despises:
LETS, mutual banks, cooperatives, militant syndicalist unions,
squatting, rent strikes and tenant unions, community-supported
agriculture, etc. We need to appeal to an American populism not limited
by traditional left-right fetishes or sectarianism. We need to fight the
New Class in all its manifestations; while we’re organizing to “fire the
boss,” we should also be fighting to “fire the school board” and “fire
the department of human services.” Those of us on the left who believe
in things like workers’ control, community technolgy, and neighborhood
government, need to find common ground with those on the right who are
into gun rights, home schooling, and free juries. Anyone who believes
that ordinary people should control their own lives and work, and that
producers should keep the fruit of their labor, is an objective ally.
SOURCES
Hilaire Belloc. The Servile State (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1913,
1977).
Harry Boyte. The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen
Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
Maurice Brinton. The Bolsheviks and Workers Control.
Herbert Croly. The Promise of American Life (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1909,1989).
Edgar Z. Friedenberg. The Disposal of Liberty and Other Industrial
Wastes (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor Books, 1976).
Pyotr Kropotkin. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York: Doubleday,
Page & Co., 1909).
Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of
Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1978, 1979).
Lasch. The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1995).
Lasch. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (New York:
Norton, 1991).
Walter Lippmann. Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co.,
1922).
John P. McCarthy. Hilaire Belloc, Edwardian Radical (Indianapolis:
Liberty Press, 1970).
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. Regulating the Poor: The
Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1971, 1993).
Joel Spring. Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1972).
E.P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class (New York:
Vintage Books, 1963, 1966).
Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The Prevention of Destitution (London, New
York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911).
H.G. Wells. Mankind in the Making (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1909).
Gary Wolfram. “School to Work: A Large Step Down the Road to Serfdom,”
Ideas on Liberty, Sept. 1999.