Power Without Property, by Adolph Berle

[p025] Power Without Property.. By Adolph A. Berle, SInr., Sidgwick & Jackson, 15s. This is yet another in the Iong list of books attempting to show that capitalism has -been~ transformed. This basis of this‘ particular variation © on the theme the is three-fold;

[p026] 104 growing power of the consumer to dictate the goals of the economy; the increased planning of the government and, most important, the separation of ownership and control, with the attendant growth of a professional _ managerial class in control of the big American corporations. More exactly, Berle shows that in the post-war USA the vast majority . of capital formation has come from sources internal to the firm; ploughed back profits, depreciation allowances - and-:so on. Increasingly the rest is supplied by pension trusts and insurance companies. To a growing extent both the control of the big firms and their investment programmes are falling into the hands of a non-owning salaried managerial class. Berle con- cludes from this that managers, as non-owners, will be less interested in profits—they can take wider social issues into account and be more willing to respond to pressures from the consumer and the government. In his final chapter Berle suggests that, because of this growth of a managerial class in the USA, the basic economic power structure is in essentials fairly like that of the Soviet - Union. Even accepting Berle’s version of the ‘managerial revolution’ (and British research would suggest that Burnham’s followers have over-stated their case considerably) one cannot accept the conclusions which he draws from it. In the first place, Berle’s picture of the consumer’s relationship to the economy has recently been rejected by a fellow-adviser to Kennedy, J. K. Galbraith. In The Affluent Society he admits that big business, via high pressure advertising, sets the goals of society. More importantly, Berle fails - to examine the basis on which the managers hold their power. The fact is that, because they function within a capitalist economy, they must expand their capital or die. To continue to play the game they must abide by the rules. They have no choice. Finally, in comparing the USA to the USSR, Berle offers no explana- tion of the latter’s tremendous economic progress, now in sharp contrast to the present under- employed American economy. In 1917 capitalism was abolished and it was on the basis of the planned LABOUR REVIEW—Winter, 1961-62 economy then established that _the Russians recently launched a man into space and will soon overtake America -in terms of production and income levels. One cannot help noting the similarity of the arguments in this book to those of Burnham and of C. A. R. Crosland in his Future of Socialism, the latter of course being the theoretical foundation on which the Right wing in the Labour Party are trying to abolish Clause 4 and remove the socialist and class content from the Labour Party’s programme. GP. White hope The Bernard Sachs. Dobson, 18s: Too much of the recent large out- put of writing on South Africa, has been of dubious value; and here is a book saved from the opprobrium of Socialists only by the weakness and confusion of the author’s presenta- tion. For it is hard to take seriously a writer whose pages are splattered with name-droppings—. . . as Burke . Schopenhauer. . . etc. . ... said . . 2—and who suggests that the greatest peril to the Nationalist regime ‘comes from beyond the borders of South Africa, as the agitation about boycotts and sanc- tions gathers momentum’. _ He finds the ‘only hopeful sign’ in the ‘vigorous opposition’ of Sir de Villiers Graaff, leader of the United Party; and, in his hopeful quest, he discovers anew ‘the one ray of hope’ in the growth of moderation within Afrikanerdom. Bernard Sachs’ purpose, which pro- trudes uneasily from the muddle, is to advertise the case for the Progressive Party, the all-white offshoot of Smuts’ (all-white) United Party. This group is anxious to build bridges to moderate African opinion, and it proposes to assimiliate ‘by a steady process every black man who reaches a certain level of civilisation’. In the Africa of the 1960s, this must be irresistible. It is-no accident that he discusses