The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

The question "How much of Bell's vision of a post-industrial society has come to pass?" is freighted in all sorts of subtle ways. Looking over your own summary of his 1973 projections of what U.S. society in the year 2000 would look like, one would say that they were, by and large, pretty prescient. But Bell himself disclaimed the role of futurologist. "I am writing," he said, "an 'as if,' a fiction, a logical construction of what could be, against which the future social reality can be compared in order to see what intervened to change society in the direction it did take." And what was his original motivation in constructing this as-if scenario? He wanted to understand how another sociological theorist went wrong in predicting social change: Karl Marx.

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Though he is often (wrongly) lumped with the neocons today, Bell is in his bones an Old Left intellectual. (He joined the youth of the Socialist Party in 1932 at the age of 13, and his first book, published in 1952, tried to explain why no Marxian socialist movement took root in the United States.) The distressing thing for intellectuals of a Marxian bent is the failure of Marx's scenario for the collapse of capitalism (as presented in Volume I of Capital) to come true. What was the fatal flaw in Marx's scheme for explaining structural changes in society as a consequence of increasing conflict between two classes, the capitalists and the proletariat, whose identities were determined by the industrial mode of production?

The answer, it is generally thought, has something to do with the emergence of a third class--the managers, technocrats, white collars, "symbolic analysts," or whatever you want to call them--that is neither capitalist nor proletarian. Bell (who actually made it through Volume III of Capital!) discovered that Marx himself foresaw this possibility as he observed the growth of an investment-banking system in the late 19^th century. But Marx thought that the white-collar workers would eventually become "proletarianized" because of the alienating division of office labor and the depreciation of their value through free public education. He was wrong.

How did Bell propose to save Marx? By "decoupling" (as he puts it) the two dimensions of technology and social relations, which Marx had conceptually unified. According to Bell, changes in the one do not determine changes in the other (for example, the United States is capitalist and the Soviet Union was collectivist, but both were industrial). So in Bell's sociology they are treated as independent variables.

I think that is why I find Bell so much less interesting a theorist than Marx. Marx's theory of social change was based on a simple and seemingly powerful premise: The material mode of production determines everything else in society. History has falsified that premise. Bell wants to salvage the theory by introducing distinctions and complications. He insists that we talk about a "techno-economic system," a "political order," a "cultural sphere," with an "axial principle" running through them all--the "codificacation of theoretical knowledge."

I find it very hard to see how Bell's forecasts about the future, prescient as they may be, flow from this rather inert theory obtained by weakening that of Marx. I understand what it means for a prediction of Bell's to be wrong (like his prediction that inflation would become a permanent feature of the post-industrial economy). But I wouldn't know how to go about falsifying his theory of social change. It has too many degrees of freedom, as it were. It seems to fail Karl Popper's criterion for being scientific.

And I seem, David, to have completely evaded your very reasonable question, "What part of Bell's post-industrial society has come to pass?" Please steer me back to the real world.

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