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International Socialism, Spring 1963

 

Henry Collins

Eurocrats

 

From International Socialism, No.12, Spring 1963, p.31.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The European Executive
David Granick
Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 30s.

This is a strange, messy, unmethodical book with valuable insights for sociologists of class and students of the Labour Movement. Mr Granick’s reading is wide, his statistics second hand and his observations sometimes shrewd. A valuable conclusion, if by no means a discovery of Mr Granick, is that class divisions are sharper and, for the individual, more impassable in France and Belgium than they are in Britain. The educational system sees to that. Outside the farms, manual workers constitute, in France, 45 percent of the male working population; their children comprise barely 5 percent of students in the lycées. Both in France and Belgium – where class exclusiveness is, if anything, even stronger – education is the gateway to all posts in industry beyond that of foreman. In England, where feudal traditions are weaker, workers’ children have more access to education though, as the author shows, a child’s promotion potential for the rest of his life is coming more than ever to be decided in his schooldays. A comparison with Germany – the fourth European country studied by Mr Granick – would have been useful, but is missing. An interesting sidelight on France’s social structure is shown by the fact that in 1954 only 18 percent of French employees worked in plants employing more than 1,000. In Britain, Germany and the USA the proportion was almost double. An interesting question, suggested but not discussed, is whether the rigid class divisions and petty-bourgeois social structure of France explain the strength of her Communist Party compared with countries of more developed capitalism. In any case the electoral strength of Communism in France is incongruously combined with a relative lack of industrial militancy and effective trade union organization. A comparison with Italy – not provided by the book – would be needed to carry this line of enquiry any further. Which aspects of this rich rag-bag of a book are found to be of interest will depend entirely on the reader’s predilections. I found the sections dealing with comparative managerial ethos in different West European countries of little significance or interest. By contrast, the decline in trade union strength in Western Germany from

40 to 30 percent in the last ten years is impressive. The author rightly attributes it to over-centralization, the growing irrelevance of wage agreements to local earnings in a period of labour shortage and the lack of rank and file militancy at local and factory level.

 
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