The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

Dear Jim,

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Daniel Bell spends such an extended amount of time writing about Marx, that it's hard to discuss this book without making reference to Marxism. Perhaps in some trendy way--much as Nike revived Che Guevara with a swoosh instead of a star on his beret--Marx will be back in vogue sometime in the '00s. Hip-hop information workers will discourse on Karl during MTV's Road Rules. We'll have a Marxist analysis of banner-ad "click throughs," and tomes on the five-year plan for the collectivization of Windows 2001.

I find it difficult to discuss Marx today, because it's so hard to make sense of him in the context of our time. Let's take a look at some of the more super-capitalist structures: the use of stock options to "incentivize" workers. As workers, like, err, Microsoft employees for instance, get vested with options (convertible to stock), or get to buy stock at a discounted rate (typically 15 percent of that day's market price), it's hard to say where the "capitalist class" ends and the "proletariat" begins. The tension between the haves and the have-nots is supposed to destabilize the system, leading to--in Marx's view--a revolution of the proletariat. Bell examines this question, but phrases it in terms of "envy," writing, "Democracy is by nature contentious because men constantly covet what other men have ... the result is often--in Nietzsche's term--ressentiment or envy, anger, and hatred towards those at the top." What then to make of Newsweek's recent cover story, with a tag line (paraphrasing) "Everyone is getting rich, except for me!" accompanying a Roy Lichtenstein-esque caricature of a 1950s businessman with furrowed brow?

The cover--a reference to the omnipresent Internet/Nasdaq slow-mo capitalist money shot that's lasted four years--doesn't hint at any sort of destabilizing class conflict, but rather phrases it in terms of envy alone. There's always someone else with a better package. By turning the stock market into America's national lottery, everyone gets a chance to become a successful capitalist. Our gonzo day traders, high on Starbucks double lattes and monitor afterburn, are today's working class. With 90 percent of them estimated to lose money, extending their margin calls on their Visa bills, they're modern-day sharecroppers of a sort, indebted to the dot-com company store known as an online brokerage. In this kind of environment, Bell's analysis seems off in the wrong side of the woods. As you point out Jim, Bell is really a reformed old-school lefty. As far as I can tell, the main element of his vision that's come to pass is his rather abstract statement that "Now reality is primarily the social world."

He also wrote, "The post-industrial society is essentially a game between persons." (There's a Ted Kaczynski quality to his writing--earnest, structurally obsessive and plodding.)

I take this to mean that our media-matrix--TV, radio, Net, and magazines--have come to form our reality. And this media world, obsessed with celebrity, famous "persons," and the game between them, does form the shared experience as a society. This aspect of Bell's thinking isn't developed much in his book. Another aspect of our future that he mentions, but fails to really investigate, is his criticism of "groups" ("blacks," hippies, women, etc.) and his sense that a cultural fissure is appearing between young and old. Where he sees these elements as destabilizing and misguided, we've come to understand them as modern-day tribalism--what marketers like to call "affinity groups." But from Bell's perspective, affirmative action, demands for quotas, and automatic inclusion of minority groups in democratic decisions through mandates are his red flags. He imagines a future where the call of every minority for inclusion, by quota, destroys the meritocratic principle of his favored scientist-citizenry. The problem with revisiting this book is that so many of Bell's bugaboos from 1973 don't exist anymore. Twelve years of Reagan-Bush plus eight of Clinton took care of that, along with the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history.

So Jim, what's the takeaway from Bell that you're left with? Any gems in this coal mine?

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