Fredy Perlman Archive

The New Freedom : Corporate Capitalism
Chapter 5
Corporate Dispensation

Written: 1961.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021

The democratic ideal was an affirmation of human life. Democracy was to open for all men the possibility for creative development, imaginative exploration, experimental activity. Every man was to participate in the creation of the human community. Knowledge and technique need not have been put to the service of profits and slaughter. If taken up in a spirit that affirms human life, the sciences and technologies could be made to serve human ends. As Lewis Mumford has pointed out, “The ability to face one’s whole self, and to direct every part of it toward a more unified development, is one of the promises held forth by the advance both of objective science and subjective understanding.”[213] If put to the service of human development the science and technology which have come to the verge of annihilating mankind would enable men to “attempt enterprises that no civilization seeking mainly to exploit immediate economic advantages would entertain: launching projects and experiments whose outcome may await centuries.…

The margin of free time, free energy, and free vitality that modem man may command is so great that, instead of devoting most of his days to mere biological survival, he now has capacities for self-development that were once confined to a minuscule ruling class.”[214] In the democratic society, there would be science but no “experts,” technology but no “technicians”; there would be no narrow, undeveloped, incomplete persons who are imbecils outside their own specialty: “the fragmentary man would be replaced by the completely developed individual, one for whom different social functions are but alternative forms of activity. Men would fish, hunt, or engage in literary criticism without becoming professional fishermen, hunters, or critics” (Karl Marx). The completely developed individual would not allow the instruments of human growth to fall once again into the hands of those who would use them for human oppression; such an individual would also have the intellectual power to undertake “ruthless criticism of everything that exists, ruthless in the sense that the criticism will not shrink either from its own conclusions or from conflict with the powers that be.”[215] Giovanni Batista Vico long ago pointed out that man can understand and affect human history because it was made by man. On the same grounds, man can grasp all human knowledge because it is created by man. In a society which promotes wholeness and understanding, each individual would be able to do what any other can do. Thus each would be able to extend the frontiers of his own greatest interest, whether it is physics, poetry, or food preparation, and at the same time would understand, and participate in, the break-throughs of other frontiers. From early childhood on, men would participate in the important activities of the community, and thus would attach to them the naive curiosity and adventurous spirit which men reserve for the activities of childhood. There would be no “problem of leisure,” which plagues societies that thwart imagination and creative energy, and reduce human activity to repetition and drudgery. Simone Weil has observed[216] that farmers who have participated fully in the life of the farm from childhood on consider their work, and not the escape from work, the meaningful facet of their lives. To force a man to carry on for thirty years an activity he has mastered in two would be considered a crime in a human dispensation: a crime as ugly as murder, for it kills the potentialities and thwarts the growth of the individual.

But the corporate dispensation is a negation of human life: it thwarts development, prevents wholeness, and nurtures fragmented “experts” and “professionals.” Those who reject fragmentation are the outcasts of the corporate society. Yet the armies of incomplete men needed to support the corporate structure are at the same time its greatest danger: nurtured on ignorance, they are prey to a nihilist rejection of human life and a thirst for annihilation which, if allowed to erupt, will not exempt even the corporate masters.

The rich are the only beneficiaries of the corporate society. They are the Holders of all the projects, all the activity, all the rewards. The corporate society is their machine; it yields their profits. Contrary to their own claims, what the rich possess is not internal; it is not related to physique, or psyche, or intellect. The rich do not owe their wealth and prestige to themselves, but to their society and its institutions. In the excellent definition of C. Wright Mills, “the elite are simply those who have the most of what there is to have, which is generally held to include money, power, and prestige—as well as all the ways of life to which these lead. But the elite are not simply those who have the most, for they could not ‘have the most’ were it not for their positions in the great institutions. For such institutions are the necessary bases of power, of wealth, and of prestige, and at the same time, the chief means of exercising power, of acquiring and retaining wealth, and of cashing in the higher claims for prestige.

“By the powerful we mean, of course, those who are able to realize their will, even if others resist it. No one, accordingly, can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, powerful. Higher politicians and key officials of government command such institutional power, so do admirals and generals, and so do the major owners and executives of the larger corporations.”[217] If the institutions rotted, or were abolished, the “elite” would not be elite; if they were eased to the bottom of their own market economy, the “elite” would probably be quite pathetic, since they would lack the training of other men to survive in such conditions. But such an eventuality is inconceivable to them, and since they stay by and large only among themselves, they are not fully aware that there is a bottom, they do not suspect that human beings live there, and they are not greatly concerned. Their world is a closed world; it is not a windowless world, but its windows look out only on lawns and beaches, not on slums. “They form a more or less compact social and psychological entity; they have become self-conscious members of a social class. People are either accepted into this class or they are not, and there is a qualitative split, rather than merely a numerical scale, separating them from those who are not elite. They are more or less aware of themselves as a social class and they behave toward one another differently from the way they do toward members of other classes. They accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike.”[218]

The rich are born to wealth; thus they take wealth for granted, and do not feel concerned with wealth. They are bom with their privileges, consequently they do not have to reach for privileges, and they can afford to look down on the “climbers” who do reach for privileges. Being themselves “well born,” they feel no solidarity with those who are not “well born”: they regard “the mass of mankind” with condescention and contempt. They do not identify with the goals or the problems of other men. Their own world, their “way of life,” is made for them: it exists independently of their goals or their efforts. “Every member of the dominant class is a man by divine right,” wrote Jean Paul Sartre. “Born into a society of leaders, he is convinced from childhood that he is born to command, and in a certain sense that is true, since his parents, who command, have engendered him to follow in their footsteps. There is a certain social function which awaits him in the future, into which he will slip as soon as he has come of age, and this function is something like the metaphysical reality of his person. And in his own eyes he is a person, that is, an a priori synthesis of fact and rights. Awaited by his peers, destined to take their place when the time comes, he exists because he has the right to exist....”[219]

The dominant minority of the rich consider themselves “the Nation.” Born to command, born to privilege, they see their own welfare as “the welfare of the nation”; they see the defense of their privileges as “national defense.” The welfare of others is a favor conferred by the rich. Other men do not have the right to exist: they are maintained, and kept happy, through the grace of their benevolent masters. And this grace must be repaid. The duty, the function of other men, is to maintain and protect the privileges of the rich. The ungrateful wretches who refuse must bear the consequences: they will not have jobs conferred on them, they will be unemployed, and to survive they will have to beg from their own lowly peers who are employed for the wages they turn down from the rich. Ungrateful or not, there must always be a certain minimum number of unemployed, between two and five million in the United States, for otherwise the employed would develop inflated conceptions of their own importance: they might become duped with ideas about the Welfare State, or worse. They might demand a greater share of wealth and privilege, and the rich know that “the mass of mankind” would only cut their own throats with greater leisure and wealth: they would not know what to do with it, and they’d commit suicide and increase the divorce rate. That’s bad. “The mass of mankind” had best be kept in place. For the masses, the highest virtues are obedience and patriotism: these are the two components of nationalism. The educational system must see to it that obedience and patriotism are internalized, and that men are good workers. The good citizen is the patriot who identifies his own interests with the interests of the rich, who sees his duty as the defense of the privileges of the rich. And, as in slave societies, the slave must be taught to get vicarious joy from his master’s Greatness and Power.

The corporate structure has irresponsibility built-in. Unlike other aristocracies, the dominant minority of corporate Holders do not have personal contact with those who serve them. This is the main psychological difference between the Holders of the corporate society and the earlier entrepreneurial capitalists. The entrepreneur was often the owner, the chief executive, as well as the employer. He was master over a relatively small number of men, and he was visible to them. The men knew he was the Boss: they were hired by him, supervised by him, reprimanded and fired by him. Or, in case there was a supervisor or a foreman, the men knew this was the second man, that he was the Boss acting by proxy. And the Boss had an equally clear view of his relation to “his men.” Such an entrepreneur knew, for example, that when one of his “hands” fell into a meat vat, this was an unfortunate consequence of “the business.” He may have greeted such an event with indifference, but the chain of responsibility was not hidden from him.

The corporate Shareholder, however, is completely removed from the activities of his corporation (or corporations, since most of the rich are Shareholders in many corporations, even “competing” ones). He has control over thousands of men, but is thoroughly unaware of his relation to them. This unawareness is built into the corporate structure itself.

The Shareholder’s money is invested for him by a high-priced specialist hired for that purpose. His corporation’s activities are supervised by Executives who are paid to do that. He does not employ his own men, since vast “personnel offices” exist for that purpose. He does not advocate or advertise his products, since he pays ad men for that. He does not talk to people about his corporations, but sends hired public relations men to represent him. His only concern is to apportion money to serve one purpose or another, and he can hire an “expert” to do even that for him. If he chooses, he does not have to know what his corporations make. That, too, is his Privilege. He can literally allow his money to “work” for him, and can maintain complete ignorance about what his money “does.” He may spend all his time traveling wherever he wants to go; he may collect art works, women, sport cars. He can “give” minute fractions of his wealth to Foundations, thus getting it tax-exempted and feeling like a humanitarian philanthropist devoted to “helping suffering humanity.” He can, if he likes, run for political office, and thus extend the dominion under his control: he has the means to represent “the mass of mankind” in the legislature: the means to pay the party boss; to finance the advertising campaign; to hire the “writers” in the public relations firms whose “releases” inform newspaper readers of his candidacy, his honesty, and his devotion to “democracy.”

The Holder lives in a world of privilege; he eats only the cream. He does not participate in the affairs of society. The corporation runs for his profit, but he does not design its product, does not produce it, does not distribute it, does not necessarily even consume it. The workers run for his profit, but he does not hire them, does not talk to them, does not share their concerns. Taught that all work is degrading, the Holder cannot imagine a state of affairs where work would be satisfying and ennobling. With absolute control over the projects of thousands of men, he is nevertheless deprived, by his ideology and his position, of the satisfaction that comes from the creation and carrying out of projects. His decisions are absolute, but they concern only money; he “sees” his corporations’ activities only in the form of a financial report. The implementation is delegated to many men, none of whom fully comprehend the entire project. Tied to the financial end of all his activities, he does not, and cannot, get the understanding or the fulfillment of making, of creating—yet by fragmenting projects among hired servants, he deprives others of the joy of creation.

The financial masters of the realm are many times removed from the consequences of their decisions; they do not implement the decisions they make, or those made in their name. If one suggested to a Holder, for example, that most of his wealth came from a corporation that manufactured equipment for weapons of genocide, he could become righteously indignant: he doesn’t have anything to do with genocide, he merely reads the “financial reports” prepared for him; he may not even read the “reports,” since his subordinates are trustworthy, devoted men, highly trained to spend their lives increasing his wealth. He can continue his travels undisturbed. And his subordinates are not responsible either; they’re merely hired to invest his money, and weapons happen to be the most profitable “item.” Thus the Holders aren’t responsible. And below the Holders, everyone is hired and no one is responsible. If an “accident” should take place, and if humanity should happen to be annihilated, no one will be responsible, no one will be to blame, no one will have caused anything. In fact, everyone will have been doing his best. The annihilation of mankind will not have been caused by a definite group of men, at a definite time, under definite circumstances, but rather, according to the Corporate Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the cataclysm will have been caused by Sin, and those responsible for it will be Collective Humanity: every human being who has ever lived anywhere will be equally responsible and equally guilty. Within the confines of the corporate structure, no solutions can be found—to anything.

Rich and removed, taking wealth and privilege for granted, the Holder feels no solidarity with other men. Any sense of obligation or responsibility is totally lacking. Men are not his brothers. He cannot feel equality towards “inferiors.” He does not live in a community. Humanity is a fictional concept to him. He does not believe in sharing, or in cooperation. If he agrees to a project, he will do his part only if it pleases him. He feels no more reason to discharge obligations or promises towards “inferiors” than men feel towards dogs. But he takes it for granted that his reign constitutes the best of all possible worlds, that “Men of great property are deeply interested in the welfare of the states and they are the most competent judges of the form of government, best calculated to preserve their property, and such liberties as it is proper for the common and inferior class of people to enjoy. Men of wealth possess natural and acquired understanding, as they manifest by amassing riches, or by keeping and increasing those they derive from their ancestors, and they are best acquainted with the wants, the wishes, and desires of the people, and they are always ready to relieve them in their private and public stations.”[220] The rich also take it for granted that “the mass of mankind,” the hierarchy of hired servants, recognize and appreciate the superior wisdom, understanding, and benevolence of the dominant rich. However, according to George Bernard Shaw, the rich do not interpret correctly. “I he taste for spending one’s life in drudgery’ and never-ending pecuniary anxiety solely in order that certain idle and possibly vicious people may fleece you for their own amusement, is not so widespread as the papers would have us think.”[221]

“They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other—since there are no kings—messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.”[222]

Franz Kafka’s couriers carry many meanings into various realms and certainly they bring a glaring light into a corporate world where Holders are the hidden monarchs, Profits the aim of the realm, and Executives its most visible representatives. If the Holders get the privileges of the corporate society and the workers bear its physical brunt, the administrative couriers, besides being the society’s most conspicuous members, bear its full psychological impact.

The new men in the capitalist economy—variously known as White Collar Workers, Minor Executives, Managers, New Middle Class— thoroughly upset and threw into confusion the expectations of traditional socialists. The drive for monopoly which propels all capitalists was expected, in time, to lodge great wealth and power in the hands of a few capitalists. This much, in fact, took place: “Slightly more than half [of American Industry] is owned outright by not more than 200 corporations.”[223] However, it was expected that the property-less working class would grow larger and larger. In fact, the number of property- less men has increased. But it is not a working class. Seemingly out of nowhere, the White Collar men appeared on the scene, and before socialists could adjust their theories, these new men started to outnumber the workers. These men are property-less, they are often no better paid than workers, but they are not wage-workers, they do not produce anything, and they find solidarity not with each other, but with the corporations they serve. Even Karl Marx, the most far-seeing and imaginative of the founders of socialist theory, could diagnose only the coming of a monopoly capitalism where the greatest wealth would be concentrated in a few hands; his imagination was not cruel enough to visualize the plethora of lackeys who would be hired to preserve the higher privileges of their masters.

Every agrarian society has its officials and tax-collectors, even’ government its bureaucrats. In themselves they are not new. But a society where elaborate feudal hierarchies of bureaucrats exist to preserve and maximize the profits of private corporations—this is new. And the visibility of these people—the conspicuous roles which they play in every activity of the corporate society—this is new. In the past, kings displayed their military establishments but hid their bureaucrats. Farmers are never conspicuous; separated by patches of land, they are rarely seen in large numbers. Workers are crowded together, but hidden from public view by windowless factory walls. The factory owners are on their estates or recreational resorts set off from other men by fences marked KEEP OUT — PRIVATE PROPERTY — NO TRESPASSING. But in the cities, during the working day, the couriers are everywhere visible; they are the front of the corporate society; they are the department-store salesgirls, the door-to-door salesmen, the gas-station attendants, the bank clerks, office clerks, secretaries, higher secretaries, Managers, Supervisors, Directors, and entire schools of Assistants. In parts of New York City, there are banks on all four corners which have glass walls: inside, in full view of the thousands who pass daily, are the regimented rows of desks, each with its clerk. Skyscrapers with glass walls, gigantic rectangular filing cabinets in the “international style,” are built constandy in the Empire City. Inside each of the thousands and thousands of slots, behind a large pane of glass, there is a manager, with his desk and his secretary. Thus an illusion is created that bank clerks exert some control over “their” banks, or salesgirls over “their” department stores, or gas-station attendants over “their” oil corporations. The king does not make public appearances, whereas the couriers are always on display. Thus the inhabitants of the corporate society are under the illusion that the couriers, the White Collar people, control the corporate economy.

The administrative hierarchies are organized along military lines: they are pyramids where power is passed from the top down through an infinity of layers, which grow larger as they get lower. Each corporation has its own private hierarchy. However, unlike military armies, these hierarchies are composed of all officers and no soldiers. The actual top is invisible except to very special couriers, mostly lawyers. From the top down, each group has its rank, and each feels awe before the ranks above and contempt for those below. Next to the top are generally the Boards of Directors. These may be the Holders themselves, but generally they are glorified salaried-employes. These highest Directors may or may not hold stock in the corporation, they may or may not be independently rich, but some things they all do have in common: their one and only loyalty is toward the corporation, the only profits they work for are those of the corporation, the only wellbeing they know is the corporation’s. Whether the corporation deals with steel or oil or food, the Directors concern themselves only with money—with maximizing profits that are not their own. High up on the pyramid, they are nevertheless couriers, not kings. They set the pace and hold up the image for all those below. Various types of subchiefs, Executive Directors, are the tops of the pyramids at a corporation’s regional plants. The Executive Director is more visible than the Board. He generally has a local office. He is “benevolent” to those under him, but fearful of the Board. It is his task to implement locally the financial decisions of the Board. Hired and fired by the Board of Directors, the local Executive is die highest in the pyramid who has no view of the Holders.{5} From this point down, there are many couriers but no king. Immediately below the Executive Director, there is an intricate network of Assistant Directors, Associate Directors, Supervisors, Head Secretaries, Office Supervisors, and many, many other titles and sub-titles. The Office Supervisor is generally an efficient woman in middle-age, who is in charge of the secretaries, switch-board operators, typists, filing-cabinet experts, and filing cabinets. Generally prudish in her sexual habits, she finds her life’s greatest joy in a one-sided Platonic intimacy with her immediate superior, the Executive Director. To her, the Board is a complex system of unapproachable deities. She speaks of “The Board,” not as a group of human beings, but as an impersonal Thing that sits over and judges the affairs of her office. For her, the Holders no longer exist. The rich men at the top of her own corporation are as unreal to her as the rich men of any other corporation.

The ranking system effectively prevents any unity, any feeling of solidarity. With awe for the top and contempt for the bottom, the White Collar people envy their own peers, and are in constant anxiety lest one of their coworkers “rise” above and one of those below rise to their own level. The master-servant relationship is hidden from their view. Each group’s contact is limited to the rank immediately above, and that immediately below. The rest is shrouded in a deep fog. The top is above the clouds, the bottom below hell. The only solidarity, the only identification they feel, is toward the corporation they serve, but they do not know who controls the corporation, nor why.

Although they are as property-less as manual workers, the White Collar people do not make anything they neither produce nor create. They fill what are known as “Service Occupations.” Their “service,” as C. Wright Mills has summarized, consists of “handling” people and symbols. The symbols they handle are not those of the poet, but those of the filing-cabinet expert. Their relationship to the symbols is neither intellectual nor imaginative: it is a relationship of things to things, devoid of understanding, devoid of any human meaning. Trained animals or electronic machines could do their “work” much more efficiently, and the White Collar people know it: this knowledge is the basis of much of their frantic anxiety. Their relation to the objects of their world is a filing-cabinet relation. They sell articles they have not made. They file papers they do not understand. They answer letters they have not read. They file money they did not earn and will not get. They read forms in which they have no interest. They sit at the apex of uprootedness and alienation. Their frame of reference for understanding their relation to their work is the frame of reference of their particular filing cabinets. They live in a narrow one-dimensional world. The dimension is either alphabetical or numerical.

The Psychologists of the White Collar world fill their clients with an ideology of Interpersonal Relations precisely because the White Collar reality is completely alien to human relations. The Managerial and Secretarial people do not ever “relate” to human beings: they “handle” human beings. And their handling of people is modeled on their handling of things. People, in the administrative world, are merely another form of filing cards. If a man’s name starts with Z, he cannot be “interviewed” until after the As, Es, Cs.... The salesman boasts that he has “contacts” with thousands of people—yet he neither understands nor communicates with any of them, because understanding and communication are undefined concepts in the world of the “contact” and the “pitch.” The interviewer boasts that he “sees” hundreds of people every day, but he shares no dreams or goals or projects with them, because there are no projects in the White Collar world. A vast number of psychologists and analysts, equipped with a fictitious doctrine of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones which portrays the human mind as a bureaucracy, gain their wealth by tranquilizing the White Collar people. They tell their clients that “seeing” hundreds of people daily is an effective substitute for one true friendship, provided the clients swallow the “reality” of the Freudian doctrine. However, the tranquilizer is as spurious as the doctrine, and the lie does not effectively fill the emotional vacuum. In spite of all the psychological doublespeak, the White Collar people still suspect they are not fully human beings. Comradeship remains an alien notion in a world where men are objects to be classified or used. Communal sharing is a crime in a world where endless corporate appropriation is the only legitimate goal. Cooperative projects are impossible for men who have never initiated projects of their own, and who understand cooperation as a servile submission to mechanical routine. Under the ideology of Interpersonal Relations is a world of talk without communication, activity without human meaning, work without joy.

The White Collar hierarchies grow constantly; they are the front behind which every activity of the corporate society is carried on. The hierarchies are not restricted to Corporations. Government offices have always had their clerks. But today, labor unions are “administered” by clerks who are loyal only to their filing jobs, indifferent to the workers or their goals. Pre-university “education” has been effectively converted into a vast bureaucracy. All teachers must spend time at Teachers Colleges where they are taught how to administrate, not what to teach. The first result is that the imaginative spirits drop out to seek more adventurous pursuits, whereas the least intelligent and least independent receive their “teaching” licenses. The second result is that a vacuum exists in these people, the vacuum left by the knowledge they lack. While the “teachers” administrate, advertizers “educate” the students. The effect is a thorough indoctrination in the corporate ethic of profits and war. Even in the universities, teachers are being replaced at crucial spots by administrators. Thus even if a student has retained some intellectual curiosity and some imagination after a twelve-year Americanization through elementary’ and high school, he still hasn’t much of a chance to become an educated man. Freed from the high school administrators, he will anxiously go to the University Admissions Office to seek enlightenment about the world of knowledge. There an Assistant Director will “counsel” the expectant student on the philosophy courses he should take, though to this Director philosophy is merely another classification in the catalog; and the Director will advise the student about humanities, though this administrator’s only “humanities” are the sex-crimes of the newspapers and the higher pornography of Hollywood movies. From then on the student will learn that in American universities, philosophy is a card to file, a grade to get, a requirement to fill, and no more. Reality is elsewhere—it resides in the corporate profits and the permanent war economy. From the administrator he has nothing to learn. The bureaucrat’s advice comes from catalogs, his knowledge extends only to forms, his discourse is automatic repetition, and after the “job” he has nothing to say. Among high school students, many of the more intelligent quit school to become juvenile delinquents, and they try to find the adventure and meaning their society keeps from them by committing crimes against that society. Among university students, the few who retain a vestige of intellectual honesty and creative imagination become Beats, and they try to regain a worthwhile human community on the fringes of the corporate world, often succeeding in nothing more than becoming parasites of the corporate society and mirroring its values in reverse.

Because the White Collar people conspicuously occupy every niche and layer of the corporate society, because their work consists of “servicing, distributing, coordinating,” their spokesmen have tried to build around them a halo of Indispensability, and to derive from this halo the claim that Managers would become the new ruling class. The assumption of this spurious theory is that the indispensable rule. C. Wright Mills has exploded the logic of this argument. In every society, workers, farmers, and slaves are the most indispensable members, since it is they who carry on the society’s most basic activities. If indispensability were the mark of a ruling class, workers, peasants and slaves would have ruled every human society.

In actual fact, the indispensability of the White Collar people is a delusion limited to the White Collar people. The filing-cabinet has this delusion built-in. If a filing system is set up to classify trash according to certain characteristics, then of course each scrap has its “place,” and the man who finds the “place” is indispensable. If the function of a system is to file all trash and to keep records and cross-references on it, then each of the millions of trash-collectors will derive his “meaning” and “station” from the particular type of trash it is his role to file. The illusion of indispensability can be maintained only as long as no one emerges from the system to question the human relevance of filing trash. As soon as someone asks, the halo of indispensability bursts, and the Administrators suddenly become parasites devoting life and energy to irrelevant and superfluous activity. The nihilistic literature of our time, best exemplified by Beckett and Ionesco, is addressed to this middle layer of the corporate society, to the men who neither initiate activity nor carry it out, but merely file and classify, service, distribute, and coordinate.

The people in the Service Occupations are runners—but they do the running for someone else. In the corporations, they have neither voice nor control. Service is the proper name for their occupations. They constitute the new feudal hierarchy. The couriers of corporate capitalism are servants: their task is to carry other men’s projects, from those who initiate them to those who implement them; their function is to integrate the malfunctions of monopoly capitalism. Those who claim they’ll rule the corporate society do not in fact even rule themselves. Their style of life is set by their status, the sole purpose of their lives is to rise, the meaning of life is to have a “place” in the hierarchy. The search for creative activity and imaginative adventure has been whittled down to a ceaseless preoccupation with rank, station, position. The International Business Machines have imposed their style of life on the men who run them.

Since life is identified with the slot one occupies, individuality and human dignity are taken to mean action that corresponds to the slot. When A Secretary becomes The Head Secretary, she must take on the style of life of the new station. She must talk and dress and walk like a Head Secretary. She must thoroughly familiarize herself with the habits, and even the main idiocyncracies, of other Head Secretaries. The advertizers and movie makers specialize in providing the models. Every American vehicle of public transportation advertises the Miss Subways, Miss New York, Miss America, or Miss Alcoholic Beverage, and describes her main habits and activities for the edification of the millions who dutifully ape her style of life. As with “Interpersonal Relations,” the White Collar people intoxicate themselves with an illusion of their Individuality precisely because they have no individuality. The Individuality of White Collar consists of thinking and acting like all others in the same Position. Thus “individuality” is identified with the most servile conformism. Within this conformism, the most disgusting characteristic of the “mass society,” namely the search for invidious distinctions, becomes a mania. The runners accentuate their frantic conformism by lodging their “individuality” in the color of their cars, in the corporations that make their oars, in their ties, even in their names.

The mental and emotional vacuum of White Collar is where the “mass culture” finds a home. The world of comic strips, television heroes, and especially the world of the celebrities, are tailored for the personality-less couriers of corporate capitalism. Each Manager thinks himself the local incarnation of a celebrated movie hero; each secretary is the local Elizabeth Taylor or Deborah Kerr. When the actress Elizabeth Taylor was in a British hospital, New York office girls told each other they were “sick, just sick.” And the American Press, Protector of the educated and informed public indispensable to any democracy, obligingly gave front page accounts describing every phase of the Celebrity’s illness. When the movie actor Clark Gable died, Directors and Assistant-Directors all over the country “felt glum.” Trapped by their filing-cabinet world, the White Collar people do their “living” by means of television and the movies. They live by proxy; Marlon Brando does the “living” for hundreds of thousands of minor executives and their assistants. Public Relations, Advertising and Communications men mold the ideas and ideals of the Masses in the Administrative Hierarchy.

A Bureaucracy is always a disguised servility to the status quo. A bureaucrat’s greatest fear is a change of social institutions, although a change at the top is irrelevant to him. Predictability, Regularity, and Security are the absolute limits of the administrator’s life, and any social change inevitably threatens all three. A man who has spent his life “working his way up” cannot conceive that the slot he has been aiming to reach might be abolished or replaced. He would then be nothing. The bureaucracy requires no talents and provides no training. A manager’s only claim to relevance is his title. That the system of titles and ranks could be abolished is inconceivable to him: that would be the end of the world. The fact that the entire hierarchy exists to maintain the wealth and privilege of men who are not themselves within the hierarchy—this fact cannot penetrate the administrative mind without shattering it. Communication on these matters is impossible. Bureaucracy must be seen as part of the order of nature, as something that has always been and will always be. The White Collar man will be loyal to whoever protects the regularity, the routine, the ceaseless monotony, of his career. The subject matter of the forms is irrelevant, so long as the filing system remains the same. The purpose of the entire institution is irrelevant, so long as the ranks remain unchanged. The White Collar people would accept any regime so long as their “indispensability” was recognized. Among regimes, however, their preference is decidedly in favor of some form of military fascism. The WTiite Collar people were Hitler’s most enthusiastic supporters. In Nazi Germany they not only had their rank-system ensured by a military regimentation of all society; they also had a real-life comic strip hero whose lunacy they could ape, through whom the smallest clerk could “live” and feel powerful enough to destroy the world. In the United States, vestiges of an earlier entrepreneurial capitalism still send occasional anxiety through the White Collar world. But the consolidation of economic activity into the hands of a few corporations, the increasing militarization of American society, and the growth of the permanent war economy, are effectively giving the Managers the type of Security they desire.

“I do not want an economic system so grossly inefficient that, at its most efficient—in the U.S., with every child bom to about five hundred times the natural resources a European child is heir to—it can achieve only twice the European standard of living, and then only at the cost of excluding three or four million citizens from work and spending over half the government’s income on lethal ironmongery,”[224] wrote Edward Hyams. In March 1961, according to official government statistics, five and a half million citizens were excluded from work,[225] and the expenditure on lethal ironmongery continued exceeding all previous bounds. The government’s count of those excluded from work was challenged in many quarters. A Monthly Review editorial pointed out that “the government counts as unemployed only those who are (a) without any work at all and (b) actively looking for a job. Hence its figure leaves entirely out of account those who are involuntarily idle a part of the time and those who would like a job but are not looking for one (usually because they know from their own and others’ experience that there is none to be had). It is not certain just how much should be added to the official figure to make good these omissions, but a careful study made by Philip Eden, economist for the West Coast longshore union, leaves no doubt that the needed adjustment is both absolutely and relatively large.”[226] According to the adjusted figure, there were more

than eight million unemployed citizens — which is of the labor force. In other words, “with every child bom to about five hundred times the natural resources a European child is heir to,” more than one out of ten people were excluded from work. In December 1960, according to official figures, the percentage of white citizens excluded from work was slightly less than 6%; of nonwhite citizens, 12%. “Among nonwhites the unemployment rate is thus twice as high as among whites,” commented the Monthly Review editorial. “What a splendid advertisement for the affluent society in a predominantly colored world!”[227]

Since 1946, United States workers are told, the American economy has been following a “full employment” policy. However, it is not the workers who interpret the laws in America. The Employment Act of 1946 is implemented by businessmen—big, corporate businessmen. As interpreted by the men who run the government, the Employment Act doesn’t really say anything: it speaks of maximum employment “in a manner calculated to foster and promote free competitive enterprise.” Since “free competitive enterprise” is the polite name given to corporate practice, the law is unnecessary. The government of the United States has always acted “in a manner calculated to foster and promote free competitive enterprise.” Obviously full employment would not “foster and promote” this ideal. In 1952, there were two million people without work in the United States. Paul Baran quoted a frank statement from Business Week which vividly demonstrates how the corporate businessmen dislike such “low” unemployment: “Unemployment remains too low for the work force to have flexibility. Anytime the jobless total is less than 2 million, even common labor is scarce. Many employers must tend to hoard skills. And certainly, the labor unions are in the driver’s seat in wage negotiations. More workers can be had, to be sure. But only at considerable cost. And they probably wouldn’t be of the skills most desired. There’s no assurance against inflation like a pool of genuine unemployment. That’s a blunt, hard-headed statement, but a fact.”[228] In 1961, the businessmen got their with a “pool of genuine unemployment” containing eight million people “calculated to foster and promote free competitive enterprise.” Clearly, the Employment Act does not mean what the poor read into it; the Law is not designed to upset the status quo, but to maintain it; when “unemployment remains too low for the work force to have flexibility,” it is not consistent with “free competitive enterprise.” As the satirist of the Constitution wrote in 1788, “debtors might safely trust to the humanity and clemency of their creditors who will not keep them in jail all their lives, unless they deserve it.... Men of great property are deeply interested in the welfare of the state; and they are the most competent judges of the form of government, best calculated to preserve their property, and such liberties as it is proper for the common and inferior class of people to enjoy.”[229]

For the American worker, the “free competitive enterprise” of the corporations means constant anxiety, intellectual and psychic fragmentation, and incomplete development. The constant threat of unemployment is accompanied by constant pecuniary anxiety. A man beset with rents, bills, food expenditures, automobile maintenance, and contingencies with no end, does not have the conditions required for creative contemplation or intellectual development. Unless he is very unusual, his circumstances will not permit him to seek to extend the frontiers of human knowledge, or to devise projects for community participation. If he has time-off, he will seek to forget the rents, bills and contingencies, and the best way to forget is to immerse himself in mindless activity. The Cony Islands of the corporate world are the epitome of mindlessness available to anxiety-ridden men trying frantically to forget they have no control over their lives. If the worker’s hours are shortened, he will seek to lessen the anxiety of rents, bills, contingencies, by getting an additional job and spending his life in endless accumulation for “in case.” Money is made the condition for survival, and then workers concerned with survival are roundly condemned for their lack of other interests by the rich who have no need to be concerned. To survive, a worker must have a “job” and each “job” requires a “skill.” In order to have a “skill,” a worker must have spent a portion of his life pushing, pulling, pressing, stamping, filing, shaking.... Those who have no “skill” are not exterminated in the corporate society: they are allowed to live and sleep on the sidewalks and doorways of the Bowerys and the Skid Rows of the cities. It is the “skill” that defines the humanity of a worker; without it, he’s an animal, as useless to himself as to the corporate masters. It is the “skill” that makes a worker someone at the employment offices: there a man is not asked about his ideals, his goals, his projects; he is asked “what’s your skill?” In the corporate society, Socrates would be doomed to speak to the drunken wretches of the Bowery. Socrates did not have what the employment offices consider a “useful skill.” The developed human being cannot survive in the world of skilled employes. Only those who successfully transform themselves into “hands” can survive. The most employable worker is the one who has devoted his life to one “skill,” and who has effectively suppressed his intellect and imagination to the point of being able to put up with the drudgery and boredom of the one-skill life.

The Advertising Council, however, by means of the “free press,” informs the world that America is a “People’s Capitalism,” and that the United States “has come closest to a democratic, classless society...”[230] and so on. In short, Everyone has a Share in People’s Capitalism, America is a Shareholder’s Democracy, and, if it weren’t for the unions and their constant grasping for bigger Handouts, America would be Paradise. However, according to the 1953 Economic Report of the President to Congress, “average hourly earnings in manufacturing, adjusted for consumers’ price changes, have not risen faster than the economy’s real productivity gains, but instead apparently have lagged significantly.”[231]

In other words, in spite of their endless grasping, the unions have not even succeeded in maintaining their members’ share of the wealth; they’ve let it get smaller. But the profits ofthe Holders don’t get smaller: they’ve been going uphill since 1787. And not all the 180 million Americans are Shareholders, nor do the relatively large number of Shareholders own a significant number of shares. Paul Baran quoted a Brookings Institute study on Share Ownership which contained the following statistics: “...2.3 percent of all stockholders in manufacturing corporations account for 57 percent of the total number of those corporations’ shares. In the field of public utilities 1 percent of shareholders own 46 percent of all shares. In finance and investment 3 percent of shareholders control 53 percent of the number of shares, and in transportation 1.5 percent of shareholders hold 56 percent of stock.”[232] Thus the Advertising Council was fibbing; its account of the “democratic, classless society” was neither history, nor science, nor truth. But advertizers will be the first to admit that corporations would not hire them if they dealt with history, or science, or truth. Any advertizer “who would be so foolish as to write his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.”[233] If such demands were made of advertizers, unemployment would rise yet higher.

The Advertising Council’s “democratic, classless society” is an undemocratic class society. If America is a Shareholder’s Democracy, then it has a far smaller proportion of Citizens than ancient Athens, which was a slave society. Less than 4% of the United States population own shares,[234] and of this four percent, less than three percent own a tremendously large proportion of the shares. At this rate the modern Athens that calls itself a Shareholder’s Democracy can only boast that one out of every 750 members of its population is a Citizen. The “democratic, classless society” and the Shareholder’s Democracy” cannot stand to be scrutinized. Scrutiny takes patience, effort and time. It is far easier for an advertizer to make claims than for a scholar to disprove them. The advertizer has merely to say so, and it is so. The scholar must spend years of study, thought and analysis to say it is not so—and then he’s not as well rewarded, if rewarded at all.

The North American Paradise is heavenly only for the chosen few who, through the grace of Mammon, were hoisted up into Eden at some historical point. This garden, too, is confined to those whom Gerrard Winstanley called the “Adams of the earth.” For the rest— those whom Hamilton called “the mass of mankind”—Heaven still lies in the grave. In a recent study, Leo Huberman compared some significant statistics about the unheavenly circumstances most people are born to in “People’s Capitalism.” There are a few Adams in America who are billionaires: that is, there are a few men whose personal incomes are greater than the total value of all property in the United States at the time of the American Revolution. These are the heirs of “five hundred times the natural resources a European child is heir to,” And yet, one third of all American families receive incomes of less than $4000, and one fourth, less than $3,000.”[235] According to Fortune magazine, “families with after-tax incomes under $4000 are obliged to spend just about everything on the necessities of food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and medical care.”[236] Consequendy, while wealthy Adams dress and keep their garden of Eden, the other “creatures” crawl from slum to slum. Huberman quoted the following from the editor of The Housing Yearbook: “New slum areas are found in every large city. Families displaced by slum clearance have to move elsewhere, and Congress sees to it that there isn’t enough low-rent public housing for them. So they go into the big old houses of the 19^th century, with a dozen families occupying space designed for a single household. Or they find shoddily built little houses on a 25-loot lot.”[237] And a West Virginia Congressman, representative ot a “distressed area” outside of Eden, said in 1959: “In areas of chronic unemployment I have talked with families who have not had fresh milk, eggs, meat, or citrus juices for periods ranging up to 2 years. These Americans actually exist on a diet less than half as nutritive as that provided for the occupants of displaced persons camps in Europe after World War II.”[238] The original Lord had given the Adams dominion over all other creatures; He had, however, made the following proviso: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” And between twenty- four and twenty-nine centuries later, the Digger, Winstanley, amplified the Lord’s saying in the following terms: “O you Adams of the earth, you have rich clothing, full bellies.... But know... that the day of judgment is begun.... The poor people whom thou oppresses shall be the saviors of the land.”

The new Adams have not been unmindful of old Jehovah’s warning; with the help of Mammon they have converted Eden into a Crystal Palace with floors of asphalt and concrete, walls of steel and glass. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil cannot grow on glass, steel and concrete. Consequently, the Adams will not eat from the tree, and they will not die from their knowledge of good and evil. They will perhaps stifle from the lack of earth and air and men, but they will not die from knowledge. On their Park Avenue, the Corporate Adams have confined the earth to a “park” which separates two asphalt roadways— the “park,” in Percival Goodman’s measurements, “consists of little islands 16’ wide.” On the far sides of the asphalt stand the monuments which advertise the corporate products: whiskey, soap, money.... And inside, “people in the thousands sit in mechanically controlled atmospheres handling endless pieces of paper. In the hushed quiet of acoustically treated spaces, they talk to a variety of instruments from silken blonds to black telephones. In these great aquaria, sportsmen fish in stenographic pools. Most everything is brittle, transparent, brightly lighted, invisibly operated, synthetic. But the carpets are deep, soft to the spiked heels and extended endlessly from wall to wall. Outside the trains rumble underground and on the street no one wants to linger. The shards of glass are paper thin.”[239] The architectural advertising in the Empire City grows with unprecedented speed: the cost of the corporate showhouses on Park Avenue represents potential housing for millions of homeless Indians. Looking at the world from air-conditioned rooms through steel-lined panes of glass, however, the chosen ones are not likely to discover their relation to the burning heat outside. To them, the New Freedom is real. Not only have they been assured financial “security,” far more lucrative than was enjoyed by the Krupps and Farbens of the earlier Nazi version of a corporate capitalism. The New World’s Adams have also streamlined their manipulative techniques to heights never reached before. Robert Jungk, a German journalist familiar at first-hand with the Nazi version of the nation of obedient servants, was astounded by the extent and direction of North American progress in manipulation. In a book entitled Tomorrow Is Already Here, Jungk described, not the police brutality, the political persecutions, or the other extreme situations which are localized in area and restricted to few people, but the subde, widespread phenomena, the little things with which every worker is familiar: “...the far more innocent and ethically unobjectionable techniques of counseling, the public opinion polls and the promotion of happy industrial relations, have indirect effects all too reminiscent of similar phenomena in the totalitarian states. Knowing that before and during their employment they are being watched by people in whose hands lies their economic fate, many who wish to keep their jobs speak in a way that does not reflect their true feelings.

“Millions of Americans, as soon as they cross the threshold of their place of work step, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, into roles which correspond to what the soul engineers expect of them. They are happy, and ‘keep smiling’ even when they do not feel so inclined. They act as though they were ‘well balanced’ and ‘perfecdy normal’ even when they have a tremendous urge to kick over the traces. They strain every fiber to suppress their natural aggressiveness and to be ‘good companions’ with whom everyone easily gets along, even when they would like to break into loud curses at the next desk. And above all they behave as though they were loyal to the firm through thick and thin, even if they find more to criticize in it than to praise.

“This standard mask ofthe ‘jolly good fellow’, ofthe ‘easy going guy’, of the ‘sweet girl’, grows on to some of them as a second face....’”[240]

The upkeep of the Crystal Palace, its masters, and its “soul engineers,” is an expensive proposition, and the toll is not confined to the “natives” of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The cities of the corporate paradise also contain unprivileged “natives.” According to the Chairman of the City and Regional Planning Dept, at Harvard University, “Despite all efforts being made by public and private enterprise, cities are deteriorating at a faster rate than they are being renewed through new construction, repair or maintenance. Not one city is known to have a program so complete as to be able to renew at even the same rate that its deterioration takes place.”[241] Millions of incomplete, manipulated, faceless men, each with his “skill,” travel obediently through underground tunnels from the slums in which they live to the factories or air-conditioned rooms in which they work Perhaps they are dead. Maybe they are only asleep, and maybe when they wake and realize they’ve been robbed of their humanity, they will not wait for their birthright until the day when their masters eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.