Ideas or Interests?

I had wanted to pursue the question of managerial power but found myself returning instead to the battles of the 1930s from which amazingly – thanks to Keynesianism and trade union strength – capitalism emerged in the postwar period with a complete facelift.

This positive experience lasted precisely 30 years before governments were undone - by a combination of the oil shock of the 70s and globalisation - and trade unions by post-industrialism. 

The fall of communism revealed once more the ugly side of capitalism – to which social democratic governments responded with little more than a shrug of their shoulders. Social democracy since then has been in tatters. 

It all reminded me of a table I had doodled which tried to identify, for each decade since the 1930s, the central issue(s) of the time. It is, of course, entirely subjective – it makes no mention, for example, of Freudianism. It is, however, a useful reminder of the ebb and flow of fashionable intellectual debate and, indeed, raises the question of what exact social conditions crystallised a focus on a topic which previously had aroused little interest. The first excerpt takes us to the 1980s. 

Decade	Themes of intellectual discussion	Key names
1930s	End of capitalism Fascism	John Strachey, Harold Laski Sorel, Gramsci
1940s	The managerial revolution Keynesianism International relations	J Burnham JM Keynes R Niebuhr, EH Carr
1950s	Totalitarianism Brainwashing Meritocracy Revisionism Private affluence/public squalor	H Arendt; Z Barbu. Talmon V Packard Michael Young A. Shonfield; Tony Crosland JK Galbraith
1960s	End of ideology Corporate planning, management Modernisation of society Participation critique of professionals	Daniel Bell R Ackoff, Peter Drucker Peter Berger C Pateman; Ivan Illich
1970s	Costs of economic growth Public choice theory Small is beautiful Change Corporatism Feminism	EJ Mishan, club of rome J Buchanan E. Schumacher; L. Kohr S. Beer; A. Toffler; D. Schon A Cawson Betty Friedan
1980s	Deindustrialisation Privatisation ecology decentralisation globalisation racial equality	Blackaby; Dyson Consultancies; World Bank James Lovelock, Club of Rome OECD J Stiglitz, Martin Wolf B Parrekh

Adam Curtis is a documentarist who has acquired a reputation for splicing film, music and voiceovers to suggest that we are being manipulated by elites with agendas often influenced by writers of the past. I’m no friend of conspiracy theorists – but I do like the idea of writers having influence and it’s in that spirit that I mention a couple of the writers who figure in my table. 

Peter Drucker is universally recognised as the father of modern management. But he was much more than this – as the link recognises. Born in 1909 in Austria, he was first a journalist before moving into teaching and academia and was, at one stage, spoken of as a successor to Joseph Schumpeter. His first book The End of Economic Man – the origins of totalitarianism came out in London in 1939 and won praise from both Winston Churchill and JB Priestley.

By then he had moved to the US where in 1943 he published The Future of Industrial Man - a conservative approach leading to an invitation from General Motors to study the company’s policies and structures which produced “Concept of the Corporation” (1946) and his subsequent amazing consultancy and writing career. 

Unable to classify his work as belonging naturally to any particular discipline within the social sciences, Drucker describes himself as a ‘social ecologist’ who is ‘concerned with man’s man-made environment the way a natural ecologist studies the natural environment’, a discipline in which he also places Alexis de Tocqueville and (among American thinkers) Henry Adams, John Commons (the intellectual mover behind economic and social reforms in the state of Wisconsin which foreshadowed parts of Roosevelt’s New Deal), and ‘above all’ Thorstein Veblen. 

But it was James Burnham who had, just 4 years earlier, written The Managerial Revolution which was to have such a profound effect in the post-war period on our perception of capitalism. Burnham, at the time, was actually a revolutionary socialist and the previous couple of decades had, of course, given the system of capitalism a very bad name. But he was able to use an important book which had come out a decade earlier - The Modern Corporation and Private Property written by Adolf Berle - which had argued that managers now had more control than owners.

And it was this argument that was taken up in the postwar period by European leftist revisionists in the German and British Labour parties such as Anthony Crosland who produced in 1956 the famous The Future of Socialism. And in 1959 Germany’s SDP adopted the Bad Godesburg programme which duly expunged its Marxist heritage.

Typically, it was almost 40 years later before the British Labour party managed to do the same – and the struggle between the British New Left and labour party revisionists is superbly explored in this article. 

So “ideas” do matter – and so do “interests”. 

Further Reading

The British Labour Party in Opposition and Power 1979-2019 Patrick Diamond (2021) it looks a very detailed and balanced analysis of a critical period

Futures of Socialism – the pandemic and the post-Corbyn era; ed Grace Blakely (2020) a short book with no fewer than 27 articles from the left