Source: http://www.aaap.be/Pdf/International-Council-Correspondence/International-Council-Correspondence-5-04b.pdf
http://www.aaap.be/Pdf/International-Council-Correspondence/International-Council-Correspondence-5-04c.pdf
http://www.aaap.be/Pdf/International-Council-Correspondence/International-Council-Correspondence-5-04d.pdf
Living Marxism: International Council Correspondence, Vol. V (1940-1941), No 4 (Spring 1941)
Sociologists, who for professional reasons are more disturbed than other scientists by the unsocial behavior of men, find their greatest challenge in present-day reality. On the one hand there is an enormous advance in science and production, and on the other an almost complete inability to apply them to the advantage of society as a whole. This paradox leads sociologists once more to turn from their cherished pre-occupation with isolated sociological data to new attempts at formulatings comprehensive theories designed to influence and direct social change.
It must be noted, however, that the vaunted empiricist formula was used to extensively not only for reasons of objectivity but also because it served as a sort of escape-device for scientists unwilling to make political decisions. Sociologists could not help noticing that all their findigs led to conclusions which in one way or another were directed against the ruling interests in society. But though it was not difficult to maintain “neutrality” in the name of science, that was not enough. Whatever their attitude, the scientists are now dragged out into the open to “take their stand”. Thus the recent tendencies in sociology are both a series of “confessions” and a militant defense of the scientists’ position in society.
Although prosperity and depression, war and peace relieve one another all that can really alternate in the course of social development is the emphasis upon one or the other side of thins singular but double-faced process; for in the prevailing society productive forces are simultaneously destructive ones. This fact explains why, in an atmosphere suggesting war and reflecting general disorder, hopeful investigations are made and optimistic proposals offered to preserve peace and to re-establish order. Unless precluded by the requirements of warfare the search for sociality in the “unsocial” society is continued even in the midst of war. In this respect Karl Mannheim’s new book Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction[1] must be regarded as an important contribution to contemporary social thought.
I
For Mannheim the present social crisis is not a temporary affair but a transition period to a new social order. The principle of laissez faire and its paralleling social structure resulted in chaos; a new principle, “planning for freedom”, and a new social structure must evolve and lead to a higher social level which incorporates in itself former types of action, thought, and freedom compatible with the new society, and at the same time guards against exaggerated dogmatism in planning. Instead of despairing over the birthpangs of the emerging “mass-society”, instead of longing for the irrevocable past, we should accept the new reality and help to realize a new freedom, new security, and new progress.
Since in Mannheim’s opinion radical solutions of the existing social problems are out of the question, and since we have to be content with gradually altering small details within the framework of “established relationships” (381)[2] we must, independent of our preferences, “use all our intellectual energy towards finding a combination of social controls which would determine how far individual liberties should be left unrestricted in order to preserve both the freedom of the individual and the efficiency of the community” (8). He, too, would prefer, he says, to live in a period “in which the social order and the technique of control did not allow one group of people to force its conception of he ‘good life’ upon another. But we have no power to choose the social order and its tecnhique of control. They are already in existence, and the most we can do is to combine and mold them to the best advantage” (7). As there is no longer, “a choice between planning and laissez faire, but only between good planning and bad” (6), and as the “planners can recruit themselves only from already existing groups, everything will depend on which of these groups with their existing outlooks will produce the energy, the decisiveness, and the capacity to master the vast social machinery of modern life” (75).
All this is quite in keeping with the spirit of the time, for it must be obvious by now that kind of “planning” and social ordering initiated on a national scale by the Bolsheviks, adopted by the Fascists and Nazis in a somewhat modified form and with partly different means because of different conditions, is now under pressure of crisis and war being brought in a steadily increasing measure into the structure of those nations still paying lip-service to democracy and free-trade. In one respect, and with much more right than Harcourt who in 1901 said that “we are all socialists now”, one could say that “we are all fascists today”. A comparison between the various fascistic proposals and practices in regard to social problems and those brought forth by the reformists of the socialistic and liberalistic schools would suffice to justify such a remark. In view of this situation, Mannheim’s book may also be appreciated for its attempt to reconcile social theory and practice, and for its recognition of the fact that whatever stand we may take in regard to fascism, our future activity has to be based on that social necessity which led to the rise of the totalitarian state.
II
Mannheim’s central theme is formed by the problem “of how psychological, intellectual, and moral developments are related to the social process (15). He wants to show the connection between the changes in human beings and the great contemporary changes in the social system. The Marxian method of “contemplating our inner life in the light of economic processes does not exhaust all the possibilities of interpreting the mind in relation to contemporary society” (19). Relationships which are neither economic nor political, but social, “form the real center of the drama in which social changes are directly transformed into psychological changes” (21). Psychology, aesthetics, and jurisprudence are no more able than economics to deal sufficiently with the problems of mind and society. The isolated sciences have their usefulness, but they will have to translate their separate conclusions into sociological terms. Though until today we had no historical or sociological psychology, we now have to begin “to perceive the social aspect of every psychological phenomenon, and to interpret it in terms of a continual interaction between the individual and society” (17).
Mannheim points out that the number of sociological relationships and processes which affect the psychology of man is much greater than is usually supposed. To make this clear, he selects out of the variety of present-day social relationships “the conflicting principles of competition and regulation”. He says “that not only in economics, but in every sphere of life the principle of regulation is replacing the principle of competition” (21). Because of the particular trend of thought which prevailed in those social sciences reflecting the rise of industry, it happened that the principle of competition was first discovered in the economic field. It has, nevertheless, universal validity. (There is competition in love, in art, in politics, etc.). Today, too, though the change from competition to regulation has economic causes, it also has a significance of its own; its influence is felt in every kind of social activity (22).
Mannheim’s first attempt to forge a link between psychology and the social sciences serves to lay bare the “various sociological factors which could explain why civilization is collapsing before our eyes” (15). He points out that reason and order exist only under certain conditions. Belief in the progress of reason has lately been shattered; “groups which have hitherto ruled society and which, at least since the Age of Reason, have given our cultura its special tone” (40), have suddenly lost power. Thus it has become necessary to include in the “picture of historical development the recent experiences of the power of the irrational… It is the task of sociology to show at which points in a given society these irrationalities are expressed and which social functions and forms they assume” (63).
As points of departure Mannheim advances the theses that “the unfolding of reason, the ordering of impulses, and the form taken by morality are not accidental… but depend on the problems set by the existing social order. Societies of earlier epochs could afford a certain disproportion in the distribution of rationality and moral power. The contemporary society, however, must collapse if rational social control and the individual’s mastery over his impulses do not keep step with technical development” (43). This latter disproportion proves – in the long run – to be incompatible with the industrial society because this society leads to a growing social interdependence and a fundamental democratization. Since there exists a “general disproportion in the development of human capacities”, because “modern technical mastery over nature is miles ahead of the development of the knowledge and the moral power of man”, and also a “social disproportion” in the distribution of rational and moral capacities, becase of the class and functional divisions in society, it happens that as soon as the masses “enter in one way or another into politics, their intellectual shortcomings and more especially their political shortcomings are of general concern and even threaten the elites” (45). To be sure there is today no more irrationality than in the past, but “hitherto it has found an outlet in narrower social circles and in private life” (45). As long as democracy was only a “pseudo-democracy”, Mannheim goes on to explain, it allowed for the growth of rationality but since “democracy became effetive, i. e., since all classes played an active part in it, it has been increasingly transformed into a ‘democracy of emotions’.” (45).
At this point it is necessary to explain in what sense Mannheim employs the terms “rational” and “irrational”. He speaks of substantial and functional rationality and irrationality. A substantial rational act of thought “reveals intelligent insight into the inter-relations of events in a given situation. Every thing else which either is false or not an act of thought at all (drives, impulses, wishes, feelings) is substantially irrational. Functional rationality or irrationality he uses in the way it is usually employed in regard to rationalization processes in an industry or administration, that is, where a “series of actions is organized in such a way that it leads to a previously defined goal” (53). “The more industrialized a society is”, Mannheim explains, “and the more advanced its division of labor and organization, the greater will be the number of spheres of human activity which will be functionally rational and hence also calculable in advance” (55). This increased functional rationality does not, however, promote to the same extent substantial rationality. Rather, functional rationalization has a paralysing effect on th capacity for rational judment, as crises and revolutions so amply testify.
In earlier societies “the individual acted only occasionally and in limited spheres in a functionally rational manner; in contemporary society he is compelled to act in this way in more and more spheres of life”. Most intimately connected with the functional rationalization of conduct is the phenomenon of self-rationalization, that is, the individual’s systematic control of his impulses. However, since in a functionally rationalized society the thinking out of a complex series of actions is confined to a few organizers – men in key positions – the average man’s capacity for rational judgment declines steadily. This leads to a growing distance between the elite and the masses, thus to the ‘appeal to the leader’. Self-rationalization becomes increasingly more difficult. “When the rationalized mechanism of social life collapses in times of crisis, the individual cannot repair it by his own insight. Instead his own impotence reduces him to a state of terrified helplessness” (59).
The origins of the rational and irrational elements in modern society are thus traceable to the fact that ours is not only an industrial but also a mass society. As an industrial society “it creates a whole series of actions which are rationally calculable… and which depend on a whole series of repressions and renunciations of impulse satisfactions. As a mass society, it produces all the irrationalities and emotional outbreaks which are characteristic of amorphous human agglomerations” (61).
The “irrational”, however, “is not always harmful, … it is among the most valuable powers in man’s possession when it acts as a driving force towards rational and objective ends” (62). It is harmful when it is not integrated into the social structure and enters the political life in a society in which the masses tend to dominate. This is so “dangerous because the selective apparatus of mass democracy opens the door to irrationalities in those places where rational direction is indispensable” (63). In short and to be specific, irrationalities are still and asset in France and England, but of course very bad in Germany.
III
It might be well to interrupt our exposition of Mannheim’s studies and to select for discussion the following ideas:
1) Society is in a transition from laissez faire to planning. The character of ruling elites is decisive for future events.
2) To understand the actions and ideas of men the “multi-dimensional” nature of social events must be considered.
3) A civilization is collapsing; the belief in progress is gone; irrationality is on the increase. The last must be understood as the result of the contradictory development of “social interdependence” and “fundamental democratization”, the more rapid growth of the functional as compared to the substantial rationality in industrial mass society.
To deal with the question of transition: It is essential for an understanding of Mannheim’s thought to observe that his book has been influenced by “experiences in Germany and later by the English way of thinking, and is an attempt at reconciling the two” (4). The democracies, Mannheim says, “have not yet found a formula to determine which aspects of the social process can be controlled by regulation, and the dictatorships cannot see that interfering with everything is not planning” (14). He favors neither of them, but a social policy which successfully merges what is good in both; everything depends finally on “whether we can find ways of transferring democratic parliamentary control to a planned society” (380). The political character of Mannheim’s work is here revealed. Although somewhat hidden by a benevolent acknowledgment of Marx’s contribution to social science, it is nevertheless an attack upon the idea of revolutionary change. Though convinced of the necessity of many of the fascistic reforms, Mannheim is thoroughly frightened by their social consequences. He favors a middle-way, that is, he favors the political attitude prevailing in the so-called democratic nations which are in opposition to the new German imperialism.
Mannheim is convinced that “if the groups engaged in politics still refuse to look beyond their own immediate interests, society will be doomed” (15). It is difficult to see more than rethoric in this statement, for one or another group may be doomed (whatever that may mean), but why society? It is still more difficult to understand this because Mannheim does not believe “that the great theme of our time is the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie” (215). He admits that at an earlier time the class-struggle idea appeared to be quite realistic, but now it has to be recognized as a “distorted perspective”. It is no longer true, he says, “that class antagonisms are the principal characters” in the social drama, because “new classes grew up which cannot be placed in the same category as the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, or the military caste; party organizations have been created which ignore the economic division between workers and industrialists. These issues dwarf the significance of the continued class tensions” (251).
If class issues are of “secondary importante” today they cannot be made responsible for the continuation of the present social crisis. If Mannheim nevertheless speaks of group frictions as responsible for the present chaos, this must be understood in the light of his conviction that “party organizations ignore the divison between workers and industrialists”. What “dooms” society is the struggle between party organizations and industry, between fascism and private-property capitalism. Mannheim’s quest for ending group frictions to “save society” is an appeal to both fascist and “anti-fascists” to end their struggle and find a compromise solution which satisfies both, – a plea which simultaneously assumes that the proletariat as an independent force is already out of the way.
It is from this view that Mannheim’s claims that most of the bad symptoms of our time are due to the transition from laissez faire to planning, from a limited democracy to mass society, and to the changes in social technique accompanying this process, must be understood. These principles appear to him as more important than the Marxian principles of class conflict and the struggle for power whose “concrete patterns are much too changeable to be accepted as the eternal frame-work of future events” (251). He considers his principles more fundamental because they are more abstract, because “they sufficiently explain a large number of changes which will endure after the special classe patterns have been modified” (252).
Though principles which will endure and transcend the narrower problems of the present are all right so far as they go, they are not “superior” and do not relegate the less abstract problems of the present into “secondary categories”. To say that most of the symptoms of our time are due to its transitional character is to repeat – only in other words – that they are due to the actual struggle between party organizations and industrialists. Thus Mannheim has not replaced less abstract with more abstract principles. He has only narrowed down still further the class struggle principle by accepting – in concreto – one of its phases, that is, the present struggle between party organizations and industrialists, as of greater importance than the class struggle itself.
It might be difficult to recognize in the present struggles between fascism and private-property capitalism the old struggle between those who control the sources of economic and social power and those controlled by them because of the fact that the emphasis has now been shifted from the so-called economic into the political sphere. It is easier to discard the whole problem and to concentrate on issues which apparently transcend both the class struggles in their former and in their present disguises. In that case one cannot help assuming that society is already in the process of transition towards planning. Thus for Mannheim all present social tensions and difficulties result from the side-by-side existence of laissez faire and planning. But here a new difficulty arises, for Mannheim himself says, that so far we are “only in thatstage of development where each of the dominant social groups in order to turn its power against rival groups” (70). He thinks that up to the present “history has not produced genuine attempts at planning, since the experiments of which we know are blended with the spirit[3] either of oriental despotism or military dictatorial traditions” (7).
For Mannheim real planning does not exist; but real planning should exist. The new principle is not practiced, but it should be practiced. Since this real planning does not exist, the present miserable state of affairs cannot be attributed to the side-by-side existence of new and old principles, that is, laissez faire and planning, democracy and dictatorship. The less so, since the old principle was in force only in the same sense as the new principle is in force now, not really, not socially, but only to favor some dominant social group, just as the new planning principle now favors other dominant groups. That both the democracies and the dictatorships, in Mannheim’s opinion, fall short – although at different poles – of doing what he deems socially necessary is explained by the fact that both systems, despite all their differences, are still capitalistic regimes at different stages of development and within different settings. Both by perfoming apparently opposite movements nevertheless reach identical results, a process that finally may reestablish a new capitalistic “unity”, a relative uniformity of behavior, the fussion of the “good” to be found in both the old and the new for which Mannheim hopes. From this point of view, Mannheim’s book merely reflects what is now in the process of development, i. e., the social re-organization of the prevailing society in accordance with recent economic and class changes.
Mannheim’s assertion – based on the ever-existing parallelism of old and new social patterns, techniques and principles, and their bewildering influences – that the present social crisis is a transitional period leading over to a new society is not convincing. From such a point of view all societies are always in transition, and though in one sense this is true, such a statement is not sufficient to explain social phenomena, nor can it serve any practical purpose.
Throughout capitalistic development, planning and laissez faire, democracy and dictatorship have always been two sides of the same coin. The planning of individual enterprises, which is now extended to national planning, and dictatorship over the working class, which now embraces all layers of society, are indications of the “maturity” of a society whose development has been determined by the characteristics of its embryonic stage, that is, by specific production – and class-relations that allowed for “progress” only in terms of capital concentration and power centralization.
No doubt one could very well speak of the present as a “transition period” in distinction to a period where fascism was not as yet fascism but merely a tendency expressed in the growth of monopolies, where dictatorial control over the workers’ life did not extend beyond the factory, the barrack, the relief station and additional compulsives of the wage system. One could, that is, – to use an analogy – arbitrarily refer to the ripening period of fruit as its transitory stage, and to its previous growth as its “real”, “normal”, or “healthy” stage. Transition to what? Though there is no reason why one should not distinguish between differente developmental stages of one particular societal form, yet all that transition could mean here is the transition toward decay. Disctinctions have to be made between different developmental stages in a certain society and between one society and other societies. Though the birth of capitalism preceded the capitalist revolution, nevertheless the transition from feudalism to capitalism must still be regarded as a revolutionary act, as the result of class struggles. And though the transition to a new society need not and will not copy the transition from feudalism to capitalism, still it cannot be a mere “reconstruction” of the prevailing society. It would then still be the prevailing society, however changed.
Even if one follows Mannheim’s advice and concentrates his attention “not on the contrast between evolution and revolution but on the content of the changes themselves” (12), it still has to be established whether those changes constitute a real social revolution, that is, abolish one kind of class rule in favor of another, or abolish class rule altogether – the criterion for which rests in the socio-economic field. Of course the latter query is of importance only to the class interested in revolutionary change. But disinterest in the problem does not eliminate it. Here, however, lies the crux of the matter, for the Mannheim is convinced that “revolutions” can no longer be anything other than good or bad “reconstructions” of the existing society. He is satisfied with a very limited program, which as a matter of fact is so limited that it has already been overtaken by recent events. In the economic sphere, for example, he pleads for no more than a minor transformation of property concepts[4], for he is convinced that “entirely new principles of construction can often be found in trivial microscopic processes, provided they are integrated in a certain manner. Thus major principles are not infrequently concealed behind the mask of petty details” (12). However, fascism has meanwhile shown us what “major principle” was behind the “petty detail” of the “transformation of property concepts”. The petty details which in the society thus changed, are supposed to secure “freedom for individual adjustment”, on which Mannheim bases his hopes for a better future, suggest, as we shall see later, principles quite as unsatisfactory – at least for the large mass of individuals.
IV
Mannheim, who sees a real transformation of one type of society into another in the metamorphoses of democracy into dictatorship, of laissez faire into monopolistic laissez faire, of imperfect competition into imperfect regulation, maintains that the outcome of the process depends on the character of the elite which gives it direction. We must recall that in Mannheim’s opinion democracy in capitalism is possible only as a “pseudo-democracy”, which grants power to a small propertied and educated group. With the development of capitalism, i. e., with the concentration of economic, political and military forces, “irrationality” grows and democracies change into dictatorships because it is not possible “to bring everyone to more or less similar levels of understanding” (46).
What Mannheim here describes has in a different sense been stated before in Marx’s laconic remark that the “democratic swindle” is over as soon as it endangers the ruling class, and by William Graham Sumner who said that democracy serves as am impetus for class conflict, which finally forces industry to become plutocratic in order to survive. What is new in Mannheim is the peculiar way in which he attempts to show that it was not the sharpening of class frictions in the course of capital formation that led to the end of democracy, but the extension of democracy, that is, the quantitative growth of democratic political processes that led to the qualitative change into dictatorship. An exaggerated democracy leads to fascism. Thus the “democratic nations” fight the fascist nations today because there was too much democracy in the latter and too little in the former.
Let us recall once more Mannheim’s explanation of the growth of irrationality. There are always fewer positions, he says, from which the major structural connection between different activities can be perceibed. The broad masses become increasingly unable to understand what occurs. Their actions disturb the smooth working of society if the men in key positions are not able propertly to integrate those activities into social life. “Primitive types” of men in key positions endanger the whole society. The “primitive type” has a chance to reach those positions because of the existing democracy. “The first negative consequence of the modern widening of opportunities fo social advancement throught education”, Mannheim says, “is the proletarization of the intelligentsia. There are more persons on the intellectual labor market than society as it is requires for carrying out its intellectual work. The glut of intellectuals decreases the value of the intellectuals and of intellectual culture itself” (100).
This kind of argument seems familiar. There is, for instance, Hitler’s observation that there are too many Jews in the intellectual professions, more than is good for German culture. Jewish intellectuals become in Mannheim’s language just intellectuals, German cultura, simply cultura. This attitude is common to all separately organized groups with vested interests within the capitalistic structre. Essentially it expressed no more than the never-ending fear of the “arrived” of losing their positions to the “up-starts” in society “as it is”, that is, in the relatively stagnating capitalistic society. But Mannheim says more. He asserts that if the “primitive type” worms or fights his way into the intellectual positions, he – the primitive type – reduces the whole intellectual level to his own. There is still another important assumption: If culture is no longer determined by the really cultured, who are to be copied with more or less success by the rest of the population, culture will be distorted. The specific economic and class outlook of the proletariat, for instance, which stresses the importance of technological development because by so doing it raises its own importance, may lead to an over-emphasis of the technological aspects of culture. “In Russia where the proletariat possesses exclusive political power”, Mannheim says, “the proletariat carries this principle so far, that even if for no other reason, it continues to accumulate and to invest in order to expand itself as a social class as against the peasantry” (105). If this is so, then all capitalistic development must have been carried out by a “ruling proletariat”. Capitalism adavanced so rapidly because it accumulated for the sake of accumulation and for the sake of transforming, if possible, the whole population – excluding the capitalists – into exploitable wage workers. Thus the Russian workers would seem to have taken power only to carry on the good, if one-sided work, from that point where the capitalists lost their breath. This overemphasis on accumulation under the direction of the capitalist, however, did not interfere with the cretion of that civilization which Mannheim now sees endangered. Mannheim’s rather grotesque example illustrates his point quite well however. Even in the “best case”, so he thinks, class-rule determined by a class point of view leads to distortions. Consequently, the regulation and direction of society, in order to be intelligent and appropriate to social needs, must from hist point of view be carried out by an elite which stands above classes and groups and knows what is good for the whole.
We do not think that the “democratization” of society is in any way responsible for the glut of the intellectual labor market. The existing “oversupply” is true of all kinds of labor, not of any particular kind. This indicates that the present crisis is not caused by maladjustments or disproportions between different branches of production which may be eliminated by way of a planning that reestablishes a lost workable “equilibrium”, but is a fundamental crisis of the whole capitalistic system – a crisis that affects all branches of production and thus the whole of the labor market. The question of the intellectuals could no more be solved by rearrangements in the labor market than could a mere readjustment in the productive process overcome the economic crisis. As a matter of fact what adjustments and rearrangements are possible have already been accomplished, as the wide-spread destruction of capital and the proletarization of the intellectuals bear witness.
From a different point of view than that which still accepts society “as it is” when speaking of the future, the glut of the labor market is meaningless. If class and profit considerations were eliminated and the productive forces of society really released, an “over-supply” of labor could not arise. There would remain the problem of how it might be possible to live better with less labor with the existing labor force and its possible improvement, and thus how to “intellectualize” the masses still further. This question has nothing in common with the present problems of the disequilibrium and disproportionality and the planning needs associated therewith. There is also no bridge leading from the latter kind of “planning theories”, designed for a society in which class issues have been forced into the background because one likes to keep them there, to planning in a society in which class considerations have actually ceased to determine the productive and distributive processes.
Mannheim’s position, which assumes the possibility of planning without fundamental changes in the social structure of the process of production offers little choice as to the way in which his theories might be worked out. Essentially everything boils down to a demand for a better-selected and more secure elite which wisely and justly puts everybody where he belongs, even in labor camps a la Hitler, if necessary[5]. We will have to return to this point when dealing with Mannheim’s suggestions for the planning society.
V
In regard to the second point selected for discussion, namely that social events are of a multi-dimensional nature, we would like to say at once that no one could disagree – that the principle of competition has “universal” validity. There is no problem here – only the problem of where to begin. The selection of points of departure is decisive for any social analysis, since all social phenomena are not of equal importance, nor equally accessible for investigation. Mannheim, who conceives Marxism as a theory which “regards the economic and political factors as absolute” and thus “makes it impossible to proceed to the sociological factors proper” (21), misrepresents the theory he criticizes. Though it is true that Marx’s science of society is first of all economic research this does not limit its comprehensiveness. It is not the fault of Marxism that other branches of the social sciences are less amenable to scientific investigation, that they become the less scientific the further they are removed from economic relationships. To remain scientific, Marxism starts where scientific research is possible. It is not Marxism but society which is responsible for the overwhelming importance of economics and politics.
Mannheim prefers to concentrate on the “usually disregarded psychological effects of the more elementary processes”, such as occur “in other than economic surroundings… in which men struggle or co-operate”. He is concerned with questions such as “how and then and why people meet, how power and influence, risk and responsibility are distributed, whether men act spontaneously or under orders, what social controls are possible”, because “all these things, taken individually and collectively, decide what is said, how it is said, what is consciously suppressed, or repressed into the unconscious, and within what limits the dictates of public morality are regarded as binding for all or as valid only within certain groups”. He wants to deal with relationships like “authority and subordination, distancing and isolation, prestige and leadership, and their effect on psychological expression and culture in different social settings” (20), and so forth.
To judge from the results of Mannheim’s studies one cannot help wondering if a less ambitious goal might not have been better. The ideas he advances do not reveal the “social changes underlying the psychological and cultural changes” any better than the more restricted investigations of Marx. Rather the opposite is true, for Marx goes much further than Mannheim, and on the question of competition, for instance, shows that its “universality” remains bound to the specific form of capitalistic economic competition; that the general can only be grasped with reference to the particular. Competitions in love, in art, in politics, though having in one sense a “significance of their own”, really attain their own significance only by way of the economic process. The influence they exert upon society on their “own account”, gain social significance only by winning importance economically. Otherwise, that is, in so far as they really show independent forms, they remain outside the field of social science, which like anything else has its limitations. In short, considerations of an infinite number of social relationships will not lead to useful generalizations. The latter are bound to a definite number of social relationships. To increase that number by way of social research, and thus to improve the reliability of accepted generalizations, or o change those generalizations, is a worthwhile undertaking, but its success has to be measured by the knowledge already gained and the applicability of that knowledge.
It is impossible here to compare all, or even the more important, findings of Mannheim with those of Marx. Any careful Marxian reader of Mannheim’s book is bound to notice that Mannheim – in spite of himself – relies almost exclusively on economic phenomena to interpret social and psychological facts. The extra-economic relationships that “form the real center of the drama” in which social are translated into psychological changes play in his own exposition as small a role as they played in Marx, who granted their existence in order to leave them alone. Thus the Marxian reader of Mannheim’s work will often find himself on familiar ground. However the Marxian raisins to be found in this large cake of many ingredients[6] must not lead to the assumption that the differences between Marx and Mannheim are merely verbal, or that we have to deal here with a new attempt to bring Marx up-to-date. Whenever Mannheim draws from Marx, he empties him. Yet, whatever content this book possesses it owes to that “Marxism” that it declares to be insufficient for the purposes of modern sociology.
It may be in order at this moment to draw attention to Mannheim’s dialectic which never fails to regard at least two sides of each and every problem he presents. As irrationality and rationality have their negative and positive aspects, so has mass-democracy and pseudo-democracy, so has competition and regulation, so has the restricted Marxian view and the more abstract sociological approach of Mannheim himself. Though generally the class war is regarded as a secondary issue, Mannheim at times admits that his “discussion of it does not aim at proviing that there is no real chance of the class war becoming stronger than any other consideration” (341). This, however, is “only one alternative”. “The question of primacy, though an important one”, he says, “in no way alters the fact that in some periods emphasis may be shifted from one mechanism to another, and this in itself may depend on the changing nature of social techniques” (308). Thus everything is possible and Mannheim actually succeeds in giving an idea of the “real”, that is to say, the “multidimensional nature of social events”.
But with this idea of the “real” nothing real can be undertaken. A bewildering picture emerges and it still remains to extract what is recognizable in it in order to reach conclusions. Mannheim in offering this picture stands nowhere and everywhere; as the saying goes, he cannot be “pinned down”. There is not one position from which he cannot withdraw. He is never at a loss for explanations which would justify both his old and any new position. His comparatively constant principles such as the transition from competition to regulation as well as the others therewith connected, allow for a great variey of interpretations. The constant principles are vague enough. Events could never prove or disprove their validity.
His own proposals for the reconstruction of society and the remaking of man have no connection with reality. The “multi-dimensional” nature of his reality excludes both a fruitful empiricism and convincing theories. The latter remain idealistic demands not at all based on the empirical research accompanying them. His search fails to yield results because it is spread out over too large a field; because it consistently refuses to deal with society as it is and prefers instead to deal with society as it should be. Mannheim thus bears witness once more to the fact that a “sociological science” attempting to deal with society is an impossibility in a class society. In dealing with social issues in a class society one has to deal with class issues. But this Mannheim refuses to do. He does not seen that so long as classes exist, class interests necessarily co-exist. He wants to have the first without having the second, or rather he believes tha classes cannot be changed, but that class interests may be dealt with independently.
As thought and actions in the capitalist society do not stem directly from actual social relationships but must, in order to assert themselves, first be transformed into value relations in the exchange process, thought and action within the capitalist society can only be interpreted in connection with the prevailing fetishism in the capitalist economy. As all social actions bear upon economics because of the interrelation of all social phenomena, it is first of all necessary in order then to discover how non-economic social changes are transformed into psychological – to find out how far these changes and their psychological results are ruled by the fetishism valid for all spheres and all aspects of social life. This means that no investigation can yield results unless it starts from the social relationships that underlie all economic and extra-economic relations, that is, the class structure and the class problems of society. The fascistic concentration of capital “simplified” exchange relations but did not do away with them. Within certain territories the maze of the market is displaced by an open antagonism between the controllers and the controlled in the production and distribution process. The ideologies that to a large extent spring – so to speark – “automatically” from the exchange relations, are now planfully constructed and take on outspokenly political characteristics. If it was previously necessary to deal with thought and action in the “round-about” manner enforced by market relations, which made the economic interpretation of social phenomena quite difficult, it is now much easier to discover behind every social phenomenon the actual determining social relations, that is, the exploitation of the non-possessing class by the class, group, or individuals that control the means of production by way of a monopoly over all the social control institutions.
There is no way of saying anything of importance in regard to the manifold social and psychological problems, unless they are seen from the point of view of existing class relations. By relegating class issues to the background and by concentrating on the infinite number of extra-class, that is, extra-economic phenomena, Mannheim can only mystify once more the real social issue of today. In brief, he only helps to formulate new ideologies for securing the rule of fascistic regimes.
VI
Before dealing with the third point selected for discussion it should be said that Mannheim’s distinction between substantial and functional rationality is a devious one, because in reality all rationality is functional. The distinction between the two forms of rationality is based on the assumption that the changes in human beings are something other than social changes, an assumption closely connected with the old idea of the invariability of human nature. Mannheim, however, does not go that far; he only assumes that human nature changes less rapidly than society. He explains this with the principle of the “contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous”. “What is significance of the bomb-dropping aviator?” Mannheim asks. He answers himself: “It is that human beings are able to make use of the most modern products of inventive genius to satisfy primitive impulses and motives” (42).
We do not share Mannheim’s concept of the contradictory character of human nature. For us the whole problem of rationality raised by him seems artificial. But we will continue to argue on his own theoretical ground. Mannheim needs the contradictions in human nature of which he spearks in order to justify his own ideas of planning. Though he knows that war, for example, “is not the outcome of some invariable instict like aggressiveness, but partly of the faulty elaboration of the psychological tendencies through institutions, and partly of the desperate flight of people into collective aggression when un-coordinated institutions clash and bring about a feeling of general insecurity” (141), he also sees that at “the present stage of centralized propaganda new patterns of thought and behavior can be popularized in a much shorter time and on a much larger scale than was formerly possible” (24). Under the new conditions, he says, “leaders enjoy the possibility of raising hatred on one day and appeasing it on the next” (137). Under such conditions it seems indeed important what kind of elite rules society.
It is true that we live in an age that produces ideologies, emotions, and activities in the same way that it produces cheese or any other commodity. It is an age where what was formerly considered “subjective” is now “objective”. We have reached a stage in which all and everything has been perfectly capitalized and robbed of its last remnant of individuality. Except for “sports” there are no longer inventors, but factories for invention; no longer politicians – except clowns – but “machine-politicians”. Each and everyone today, regardless of his specific qualities or shortcomings, can be all or nothing, because – if need be – consent can be produced at will. In short, there is no longer an individual and private sphere, because there have been developed, with modern technique, instruments of control powerful enough to rob the powerless in society not only of part of the products of their labor, but also completely of themselves.
Under such conditions, however, it becomes quite fantastic to follow Mannheim in his attempt to trace the twofold nature of man “right back to prehistory” (64), to search among the investigations of the ethnologists for clues which may explain down to the last details the reason for irrationality in men. Why all this effort? The cause of the “irrationalities” in the present day society is quite clear. If Mannheim states that the same “persons who, in their working life in the sphere of industrial organization are extensively rationalized, can at any moment turn into machine wreckers and ruthless warriors” (64), it is obvious that only if they are ordered to do so can they do one or the other. Because of their contradictory nature” they could only become wreckers and warriors if they were given a chance to escape the physical and psychological control to which they have to submit today. But Mannheim thinks that “the concentration of military instruments lessens the chances of any type of insurrection and revolution, as well as of the execution of the democratic mass will” (48). Then where do the “primitive motives” enter in? The aviator does not drop bombs because of some “primitive impulses”. In so far as “primitive impulses” may play a part they are quite meaningless as regards the aviator’s various activities. He drops the bomb for the clear-cut reason that risking death and killing belong to the capitalistic way of existence. Thus the sociologists do not need to “discover” the “social mechanism” which determines when and in what form in “human society” rational and irrational forces occur. All they have to discover is what lies open before their eyes. All that has to be seen is the class nature of the present – not “human” society, which forces the powerless to serve in manifold ways the singular need of the ruling class to keep itself on top.
According to Mannheim the “negative” side of mass-democracy under conditions of modern industry must be seen in the growth of irrationality and the break-down of morality. The intellectual and moral lag Mannheim deplores accompanied the whole of the capitalist development, but only recentrly did it assume disastrous proportions. Capitalist development, “progressive” as it was in terms of increasing productivity, necessarily lifted the intellectual level of the masses. According to Mannheim, however, functional rationality increased to the detriment of substantial rationality. His proof is the economic crisis and the accompanying political outburst which he considers irrational.
The question arises: Would there have been no crisis if substantial rationality had not suffered as Mannheim thinks it did, if it had been sufficiently increased together with functional rationality. If for the sake of argument one accepts Mannheim’s distinction with regard to rationality, even then it could be said that an inapplicability of substantial rationality is no proof for its nonexistence, or rather, that an insufficiently practiced rationality of this sort is no sign of its decrease. To us is seems obvious that whatever substantial rationality existed in men other than those in key positions, this could not change the fact that because of the peculiar characteristic of the capitalistic production process all that could be employed was functional rationality.
It is not so much the necessary functional division in social production as it is a question of class relations which puts some men in key positions and transforms others into living robots. The men in key positions may then point out that it is precisely the absence of substantial rationality on the part of the masses which forces them to serve society from key positions that give them insight into the interrelations of things. This whole argument of Mannheim’s reminds us of the “white man’s burden”, which he transfers from the colonies to the world at large. Furthermore, the men in key positions are not there because they possess greater insight, nor does their position give them such insight. They, also, are restricted to that unfortunate functional rationality because their whole activity despite all possible insight and consideration for the interdependence of all social phenomena – must serve the interests of just one particular group which struggles against all others. Mannheim himself says that “what is economically irrational for a whole nation may still be profitable to particular groups” (136). We might improve upon this sentence in our own way and say: What is profitable for a particular group is neccessarily irrational for the whole of the nation – if the nation is seen from a viewpoint from which class issues are no longer decisive. Otherwise the whole problema of rationality and irrationality as posed by Mannheim becomes senseless. Rational for whom and in relation to what? To avoid such questions Mannheim must necessarily assume the existence of a society in which class issues are no longer of importance.
If it were true that, relative to functional rationality, substantial rationality declines in the course of technological development, then in times of long-drawn depressions which decrease the tempo and scope of technological advances there should be less, not more, irrationality in the world. And if the masses actually enter politics by way of the democratic mechanism, the decrease in irrationality should also make itself felt in the political sphere. Just what is the proper proportion between technological and intellectual-moral development? When and for what specific reasons does the alleged disproportion become dangerous to society? When is a mass-democracy incompatible with an industrial society and when not? How much democracy must exist, how far advanced must industry be? What kind of intensity of mass-influx turns the trick? At what point can the irrationalities no longer enter narrow circles? For all this and more, Mannheim has always just one answer: at the point when the crisis begins. The crisis explains all his assertions. But what explains the crisis? His assertions of course.
What is forcing its way today “in the arena of public life” is not however, that “irrationality” which hitherto foun an outlet in “narrower circles and in private life”, but the quite “rational” actions of oppressed people to preserve their lives with all their irrationalities. That their activities appear “irrational” to the ruling groups in society is due to the rulers’s fear of losing control over the ruled. These “irrationalities” appear quite “rational” to new controllers, for it brings them to power. This transfer of power-positions from one group to another within the prevailing social structure neither increases or decreases, nor expressed such increase or decrease, of rationality or irrationality. Irrational it that group which loses power – not only “irrational” but “doomed”. The only “rationality” there is for any ruling class or group is that which preserves its rule. The only “rationality” there is for the powerless is the “irrationality” which destroys the ruling “rationality”.
As long as it is possible within a particular social pattern to satisfy the essential needs of the masses, the masses will acquiesce and their behavior will appear “rational”. If the situation changes decisively, as it does in capitalism’s long depressions, the ideologies bound to other situations lose their force. The enforced search for the new ideas and activities that ensues leads to movements in opposition toe the ruling rationality. If the ruling class entrusted with and interested in the maintenance of the existing social relations is unable for one or another reason to adapt its control measures to thew new situation in time, it will be replaced by other groups striving for control and better able to adapt their methods to the new situation – by virtue of the fact that they are less hampered by vested interests and given to a greater flexibility. The “rationality” of the old ruling group is fought by the “irrationality” rationally employed by the new, which in turn, as soon as it is in power, makes the ideologies serving its purposes the ruling ones and the acquiescence in their rule the norm for rational behavior.
As long as the new rulers are able to remove some of the causes which previously disturbed the “social peace” or to transfer the social unrest to another setting by engaging in warfare or simply by creating during the interval between the expectations connected with the political change and the disappointment which may follow, a new control machinery able to force the masses into acquiescence, social “unity” is re-established. This is turn forces the masses to create on their part new methods of struggle and weapons to the new rulers. There arises a period in which the behavior of the masses appears once again quite “rational”. It has not yet found out how to be “irrational” under the new situation.
The Age of Reason was based on the absence of “reason” in the economic sphere whose “unreasonable automatic” functioning has since been disturbed by the capitalistic accumulation process, that is, by increased concentration, centralization and monopolization. It finds its send as soon as reason threatens to be applied in that sphere. However, there was in evidence less mass-pressure and thus less “irrationality” in Mannheim’s sense, during capitalism’s ascendency than during its period of depression. But it was not mass-democracy, nor any kind of disproportion between technique and intellect, which led to a growing “irrationality” in capitalism. This historical form of society developed from a “rational” into an “irrational” dictatorship because of economic occurrences which led to mass movements and their exploitation by groups competing for power within the capitalistic production relations. Democracy was rational for the liberal bourgeoisie; fascism is rational for the fascists. From the point of view of a class-less society, both the “rational” liberalistic society and the “irrational” fascist society of which Mannheim speaks are equally rational as far as capitalism is concerned. Bothare irrational as far as the hypothetical class-less society is concerned.
VII
To work with concepts such as social interdependence vs. fundamental democratization, substantial vs. functional rationality, etc. Mannheim needs a society in which other than economic and class forces are determinant. He must discover “transition belts” that lead over from one into another social structure, culture and psychology. Thus he must not only consider the “negative” but also the “positive” aspects in the present process of social disintegration. The new vigor of the masses, caused by the process of “fundamental democratization” and expressed in the “growing irrationality” may also be looked upon, he says, “as the first stage in a general process of enlightenment in which, for the first time, broad human groups are drawn into the field of political experiment and so gradually learn to understand the structure of political life” (199). Due to changes in the sphere of morality[7] in the industrial society, “a superindividual group solidarity” develops which must be considered a positive element in the existing mass-society. “Our world”, writes Mannheim, “is one of the large groups in which individuals who until now have been increasingly separated from one another are compelled to renounce their private interests and to subordinate themselves to the interests of the larger social units” (69). Capital is combined into large industrial organizations, workers learn solidarity in trade unions; and thus competition creates group unity. By this process, Mannheim thinks, man “realizes gradually that by resigning partial advantages, he helps to save the social and economic system and thereby also his own interests” (70). He learns to understand better the interdependence of events and develops a consciousness of the need for planning. Although till now “the individual thinks not in terms of the welfare of the community or manking as a whole, but in terms of that of his own particular group, yet this whole process tends to train the individual to take a progressively longer view; it tends at the same time to inculcate in him the faculty of considered judgment and to fit him for sharing responsibility in planning the whole course of events in the society in which he moves” (70).
What Mannheim here describes as positive elements in the existing competitive mass society cannot, however, serve regulative principles. The labor organizations, for instance, which he introduces to illustrate his position were formed and controlled in accordance with capitalistic organization and control principles. They were themselves as little “democratic” as the “democracy” with which they were connected. They interfered successfully in the process of “fundamental democratization” and prevented a “mass-influx” into the political life. A new capitalistic institution, the labor bureaucracy, arose, which secured its existence by serving class society. The transformation of these organizations into fascistic control instruments is not a special case of the suppression of labor and democracy but part of the general transformation of the half-dictatorial into the full-dictatorial capitalist society. These organizations were not suppressed, or rather modified, because they contained positive elements in contradiction to fascist needs. In order to serve the fascist needs better, they were more closely integrated into the social life-process of fascistic society. What “positive” elements they had, here found their application. At that moment when – despite all capitalistic control techniques – the economic crisis and large-scale unemployment endangered the whole of capitalistic society, they were reformed together with all other capitalistic institutions and control techniques in order to cope with the new situation. At this moment, not because of a long process of “fundamental democratization”, but through the suddenly arising and not so suddenly disappearing economic and political crisis there arose the possibility of a democratization of society. Under conditions as they were and are a real democratic participation in the political life on the part of the broad masses is possible only in the form of rebellion against all rationality, mores, institution, and labor organizations and all their “positive” elements as they exist in the prevailing society. To speark of mass-democracy is to speak of a proletarian revolution.
One cannot conclude from the existence of “group solidarity” that it prepares the masses for the planned society of the future. The opposite is true. What group solidarity there is only shows that the pseudo-democratic as well as the fascistic capitalist society progresses in accordance with its own rules in opposition to all forms of solidarity. A trend towards “fundamental democratization”, if existing, would find expression in the development of class-consciousness. Capitalism’s triumph over the proletariat comes to light precisely in the successes of labor organizations, gained by way of “group solidarity”; for these successes excluded the democratization of society and removed possible obstacles in the path leading to dictatorship. Behind the illusory democratic processes was hidden the actual trend of development which is now openly exposed in the fascistic dictatorships.
Just as the “group solidarity” of the formerly individualistically oriented capitalists served to destroy the “automatic” capitalist “solidarity” which was made possible by “market laws” as yet beyond effective control, so the growth of capitalist “group solidarity” finally led to the break-down of international “solidarity” by breaking down the open world-market. This, in turn, led to a situation wherein capitalistic solidarity can find expression only in world-wide wars involving the destruction of ever-greter capitalistic “groups combined in solidarity” to serve the “group solidarity” of still stronger groups. The “group solidarity” of the workers, too, has led straight into the fascistic solidarity of the murderous front-fighter collectives and has destroyed for some time to come the basis on which proletarian solidarity could assert itself – the class basis. By hindering the development of class solidarity, “group solidarity” has not diminished but increased the general atomization of society. There is a little “solidarity” witin each “group” as there is between the different social groups. There is a little sacrifice of individual desires in the interests of the whole in each group as there is folk-unity or world-community. The existence of an apparent “group solidarity” clouds the fact that it has come into being in order to intensify the struggle of all against all. The “solidarity” that is within each group is a “solidarity” of force and fear. The final meaning of this solidarity finds dramatic expression from time to time in wholesale murders and political purges in the interest of the “group”. Thus the destruction of “group solidarity” is the first prerequisite for a possble class solidarity. The destruction of class solidarity, in turn, is the first prerequisite for a possible human solidarity. There is, then, nothing in Mannheim’s “group solidarity” which reaches beyond the present and into the future, or acts as a sort of intellectual and moral training ground in preparation for things to come.
VIII
Mannheim ideas on how to plan society are based on those advanced in his interpretation of the collapse of te liberalistic social structure. If social interdependence and fundamental democratization create irrationality and the latter, on account of outworn social techniques cannot be integrated into the changing social structure, new control techniques have to be found which fit into the arising new structure and either transform the existing irrationality into a useful enthusiasm or free it of its dangerous character through sublimations. For Mannheim the question of reconstruction is a twofold one: not only society but man himself must be changed. Thought at the level of planning is different from that of the liberalistic age. Mannheim distinguishes between three historical stages of human thought and conduct: chance discovery, invention, and planning. There exists no sharpdividing line between the different stages, nor, at present, between the stages of invention and planning. They may very well co-exist as long as one dominates. If planning becomes predominant, however, the tension between old theories and new practice press towards solution.
The solution consists in furthering the “positive” aspects to be found in the process of fundamental democratization. The results of this latter process, Mannheim thinks, can be put to at least two different uses. Thus our future depends on what the “users” do; they may further the negative side of the democratization process by making the ensuing irrationality still more irrational, or they may turn this irrationality by way of intelligent and highly moral actions into directions which increase rationality and – in the longe run – even improve the intellectual and moral level of the masses.
For Mannheim the remaking of man and society is planning for freedom. Dictatorship, he says, is not the same as planning. “A correct scheme for the planning of culture, which would plan everything in the sense of the totalitarian states, would also have to plan the place of criticism” (109). “Who plans the planners?”, he asks. “The longer I reflect upon this question, the more it haunts me” (74). This question is asked today by most of the “anti-fascists”, though not all of them are haunted by it. So far, however, it has always been answered in a fascistic manner. Let us look at Mannheim’s attempt to solve the difficulty. He says that, “a new approac to history will be achieved when we are able to translate the main structural changes in terms of a displacement of the former systems of control” (269). As far as the control of the controllers is concerned, however, the former system seems to him to be quite adequate, for the new control techniques refer only to the broad masses, not to the elites. The control over the latter is to be secured by incorporating into the planned structure parliamentary democracy, if necessary without the nuisance of the “plebiscite which has lost its original function and no longer appeals to individuals living in concrete groups… but is addressed to members of an indefinite and emotional mass” (357).
The mass will not have any kind of direct control. A secial set of controllers may be necessary. “It is very proable that a planned society will provide certain forms of closed social groups similar to our clubs, advisory commissions or even sects, in which absolutely free discussion may take place without being exposed to premature and unsatisfactory criticism by the broader public… it must be constitutionally provided that any advice or suggestions coming from these exclusive closed groups would really reach and have an appropriate influence on the government… Admission to those ‘secret societies’ or ‘orders’ would have to be on a democratic basis and they would remain in close and living contact with the masses and their situations and needs” (111). This, however, looks like little more than a sort of glorified GESTAPO or OGPU – organizations which also, quite democratically, select the “best fromm all layers of society, discuss the most subversive ideas behind closed doors, instruct the government as to what it must do in order to remain the government, and have their spies in such close contact with the masses that each member of the masses is secretly suspected of belonging to the secret order.
To be sure, Mannheim has something quite different in mind. But so long as class relations and economic exploitation prevails, all such plans in practice will turn out as if they had been concocted by Heinrich Himmler. However, Mannheim is not too reluctant to learn from the fascists. “Democracy”, he says, “ought to instruct its citizens in its own values instea of feebly waiting until its system wrecked by private armies from within. Tolerante does not mean tolerating the intolerant” (353). But democracy was not wrecked by private armies. Something else took place: the capitalistic exploitation-system changed both economically and politically from democracy to dictatorship. Because no one was intolerant enought to do away with the capitalist structure, class rule and the wage system which feeds it were prolonged in a new form. Property and power changed hands. It has, so far, always changed hands by the two methods of economic competition and military force, with military force lately becoming dominant. Furthermore, the “values” of democracy cannot safeguard democracy. “To safeguard democracy” can mean nothing more than to safeguard those people who, under conditions democratic for them, hold property. To keep their power they have to be intolerant in dealing with other intolerants who thirst to take their place. Thus, when Mannheim says, “there is nothing in the nature of planning or of democratic machinery which makers them inconsistent with each other” (339), what he really says is that those who today in the democracies control property and government need not lose it if only they are willing to defend it with the same vigor and with the same methods that the fascists employ. In this sense it is true that “society can be planned in the form of a hierarchy as well as in the form of democracy” (364) i. e., of a democracy for the controllers as described above. The difference between both forms would be a purely aesthetic one, the choice between a bourgeoisie in mufti and a bourgeoisie in uniform.
Intolerance in a good cause is excusable. There is hope, Mannheim thinks, that “the Western democracies at their present stage of development are gradually transforming the liberal concepton of government into a social one” … that these states are … “changing into social service states” (336). Moreover, “the power of the state is bound to increase until the state becomes nearly identical with society”. What Mannheim could say is that the state becomes nearly identical with the property and power institutions of society; for, unfortunately, the state cannot become identical with society. In that case it would no longer exist – there would then be only society. By equating state and society Mannheim continues to deal with mistaken identities. He sees, for instance, in the growth of social insurance not proof of an actually increasing social insecurity, but a “tremendous advance toward the positive conception of the state” (336). He is even willing to embrace institutions of the kind of Goebbel’s Kraft Durch Freude, since “we seem to have the choice simply between commercialized or state-controlled leisure” (337).
For Mannheim “the only way in which a planned society differs from that of the nineteenth century is that more and more spheres of social life, and ultimately each and all of them, are subjected to state control”. Just the same, democracy need not be lost, for “if a few controls can be held in check by parliamentary sovereignity, so can many” (340). Though central control is more than ever necessary, in a democratic state “sovereignity can be boundlessly strengthened by plenary powers without renouncing democratic control” (341). Mannheim, the optimist, however, is always shadowed by Mannheim the pessimist. Though at first the class issues were no longer for him the decisive ones, he comes to the conclusion, after further reflection on the possibilities of a planning for freedom, that “planning based on the inequality of classes or states probably cannot last long because those inequalities will create so great a tension in society that it will be impossible to establish even that minimum of tacit consent which is the conditio sine qua non of the functioning of a system” (364). Finally, and in contradiction to his previous contention that the good in both the old and the new must be merged, he says that “from the wreckage of liberalism nothing can be saved but its values, among others, the belief in a free personality” (364) which, as we know from history, has been the belief in the right to buy and sell labor power freely. Again, he feels that even this may not be salvaged because “the type of freedom which is possible in one society cannot be reasonably demanded in another, which may have other forms of freedom at its command” (370).
IX
The freedom of liberalism, that is, the freedom of the invention stage cannot be applied to the planning stage. This freedom was highly illusory anyhow. “It has been rightly pointed out”, Mannheim says, “that the ‘liberties’ of liberal capitalist society are often only available to the rich, and that the ‘have-nots’ are forced to submit to the pressure of circumstances” (377). Though at one place he has stated that “one of the reasons for the disorganization in the free system of industrial economy was that an absolute freedom of consumer’s choice made it difficult to co-ordinate production and consumption” (315), now, on second thought, he admits that the “greater part of the population has never had this freedom of choice and has been forced by poverty to buy standardized goods” (348). Thus the greater part of the population is well prepared for the new freedom of planning. It really cannot make the unhappy mistake of applying to one stage of development the concept of freedom of another.
Though this happy situation makes the functions of the controllers of society relatively easy, it must not be overlooked that “the planning approach outruns the immediate actions of the individual even more than in liberal society where separate individual ends were pursued. The tensions between individual actions and thinking become greater than ever before” (212). But the sun breaks through again, because now “we have reached a stage where we can imagine how to plan the best possible human types by deliberately reorganizing the various groups of social factors” (222). It will be psychology’s job to “discover key positions in the sphere of structural sociology, when certain kinds of behavior can be predicted or produced with a high degree of accuracy… It will seek for laws which tun aside the aggresive impulses and guide them towards sublimation” (202). Planning is finally the rational mastery of the irrational.
There are direct and indirect methods of influencing human behavior. Indirect influences work from afar. Thus the “individual might have an illusion of freedom, and indeed he does in fact make his own adjustment. But from the sociological point of view the possible solutions are more or less determined in advance by social control of the situation” (275). Expectations, wishes, rewards fall under this control and must be planned. Appreciatively Mannheim quotes F. Knight’s observation that “even our interest in food is largely a matter of social standards rather than biological needs” (282), and that we have to distinguish between conditions when food and housing carry social prestige, and when the desire for prestige can be satisfied by badges and titles[8]. In other respects, too, Mannheim hopes that “a society in which profit is not the only criterion of economic production will prefer to work by methods which, though less effective from a point of view of output, give the workers more psychological satisfaction” (266). But even then conflicts are bound to develop, making necessary “professions whose principal task is to study the technique of adjusting conflicts” (302), and to develop the technique of arbitration into a science.
Planning for freedom gives the elite the freedom to plan and the planned the freedom to accept it. The masses must learn once more that whatever is, is right. Just as during the Age of Reason their submission to the actual and ideological rule of the capitalist class spelled social peace and co-operation, so now in the planned society cooperation and peace are established by submission to the rulings of the planners. In order cheerfully to accept situations created for them, the masses have only to understand that the powers of the elite are really necessary for their welfare. Just as before they were convinced that without the capitalists society could not exist, so now they must recognize in the elite an unavoidable requirement for the social life-process. To overcome the feeling and the fact of oppression it is only necessary to begin to like it. At a later stage the masses themselves may again be consulted, the plebiscite may possibly be re-introduced. With the proper elite at the helm, with economic life fairly well planned, with new progress made, new social problems and those that remain may then be solved with the help of a truly sociological psychology.
It is true that freedom in an abstract sense can never be realized. Marx for instance, pointed out[9] that freedom in socialism “cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it”. For Mannheim the “realm of necessity” to which according to Marx all freedom in the working society is subjected, includes, besides nature, a “second nature” restricting the scope of freedom still further. “Technique”, he says, “while freeing us from the tyranny of nature, gives rise to two new forms of dependence. All progress in technique is bound up with additional social organization” (373). Thus “freedom in man’s direct struggle with nature is something entirely different from freedom in his struggle with “second nature”, that is, a “nature” characterized at this stage of development by the lack of poer “both theoretically and practically to master the cumulative effect of mass psychology or of the trade cycle, or of maladjusted institutions” (375). It is true tha this “second nature”, caused not by the development of technique as Mannheim puts it, but by a socio-economic and technical development of the class society, must me mastered first to allow for a greater mastery over nature. The class struggle, by releasing productive forces unable to be developed under capitalistic conditions, is for Marx the pre-requisite for a greater freedom. But for Mannheim “second nature” takes on such a rigidity and persistency that the “realm of necessity”, which determines the possible freedoms, becomes so enlarged that by comparison with it even a mere reorganization of the existing system of exploitation and the development of additional control techniques for the sake of social peace in spite of class relations looks like a new set of liberties accompanying the never-ending struggle of mankind for further progress.
X
“Liberties” within Mannheim’s “realm of necessity” demand a variety of compulsions. Planning has to take this into consideration and becomes at once both planning for and against the planned. The planners find themselves at all times opposed to those groups that attempt to take their place. The ruling elite, to remain such and to maintain the ability to “plan for society”, is forced to continue the concentration process initiated by capitalist accumulation. But, as Mannheim has noticed before, “society is in its very nature based on an increasing internal differentiation, so that its lesser units cannot all be controlled by the central body” (49). The ruling elite however, can counteract the increasing inaccessibility to control only by way of still further centralization. Thus the more planning there is, the more difficult it becomes to assure the control of the planned. Finally, planning which started as an attempt to solve social problems, reduces itself to a planning of ways and means of keeping the ruling elite in power at whatever cost to society.
The control over the ruled is in need of continuous improvements as planning proceeds. The fear of the planners grows as the complexities of social life under modern conditions contradict in increasing measure the planner’s narrowing schemes. The whole hierarchy of systems of control as employed in fascist states is inherently insecure. The permanent terror exercised wherever this system rules betrays its insecurity. It is, in addition, uneconomical and much too rigid to satisfy the real needs of modern processes of production and distribution. It destroys initiative and adaptability and necessitates further organizational improvements which become obsolete as soon as introduced. The accumulation of capital changes into the accumulation of organizations. The latter, instead of raising the productivity and satisfying social needs, become a source for new social insecurities and a hindrance to the unfolding of production.
The weapon of terror and psychological control can, it is true, be succesfully employed only if the “baser needs” of the masses can also be somehow taken care of. But what are these “baser needs”? Endurance is the most remarkable quality of human beings. It nervertheless defies calculation. It is not possible to say when, where, and how endurance ends. Thus a great variety of control techniques must be simultaneously engaged to cope with every possibility that may arise. Any kind of independence which does not serve the ruling class must be prevented. The psychological control must be all-embracing. It can be more embracing than some other control techniques, which may be in need of leniencies in order not to lose their usefulness. Thus the vogue of psychology must be understood in connection with the transformation of the liberal into the totalitarian society.
Totalitarian institutions like the Catholic Church always extensively employed psychological methods of control. We may also recall here that the philosopher of the super-man believed quite consistently that “psychology shall once more be recognized as the queen of the sciences, for whose service and equipment the other sciences exist”[10]. It is no wonder that the “anti-fascists” of today point with great exitement to the fascist application of psychology (all schools included) and ask for similar weapons in order to defeat fascism[11]. For all theoreticians who want to solve social problems independent of the class nature of present-day society, psychology becomes of the greatest importance[12]. However, all political activity becomes thereby a sort of gigantic hog-calling contest and the successful leaders must be celebrated as great animal-trainers.
Because present-day social struggles seem to Mannheim to be no more than the competitive fight between party-organizations and industrialists for the control of labor, the importance he gives to psychology, both in its present crude form and as promissing control and planning instrument of the future, becomes quite plausible. On our part there is no need to deny the present importance and the future possibilities of psychology for purposes of propaganda and control. We do not need, however, to bother about the psychology problems involved in Mannheim’s question as to how the controllers can be controlled and the planners planned. If we replace these questions that are based on the unwarranted assumptions that the division of society into rulers and ruled is unalterable by an investigation of the practical measures by which the planned could become the planners and the controlled abolish control, the emphasis shifts back from the psychological to the economic and class aspects of the problem, that is, to inquiries and actions concerned with altering social relationships in the sphere of production. Marxism’s overwhelming interest is the more objective aspects of the social processes has not only methological reasons, but is also explained by its revolutionary character. After a thorough inconceivable that any real solution short of the abolition of society’s class structure can be found for the problems that beset the working class. Consistent Marxists have thus always steered clear of “scientific” sociology as it has been developed by an optimistic bourgeoisie who thought that their own forgotten revolution had solved once and for all the problems of society.
Bourgeois sociology, now that the capitalist concentration process which destroyed the particular brand of optimism connected with the market-regulated economy is completed, is slowly transformed into a king of pseudo-scientific psychology for the defense of the ruling class. This change of function is camouflaged by ideas such as that of the “multi-dimensional” character of the social life process. This apparent widenin of the field of sociological theory is, however, mainly of a verbal nature. As G. von Gontard has said, the psychologists “have created in their minds a cosmos in itself which cannot be attacked because its integrity is guarded by terminological precautions”[13]. The cosmos is decoration. In so far as sociology and psychology are put to use they serve the very narrow function of supplementing the various instruments needed to perpetuate the existing conditions of exploitation.
The applicability of social psychology, furthermore, is closely bound up with the material apparatus, or, rather, with the people who control the apparatus which distributes the ideological requirements for the coordination of individual wills. To control and influence individual minds, the press, school, church, cinema and radio must be controlled. Effective psychological control presupposes that the control instruments are securely in the hands of the controllers. And so they are, which means that psychological controle remains the exclusive weapon of the ruling class unless it is overthrown with weapons stronger than theirs, with weapons and methods not given to the control of the controllers. The possibility, previously open to different capitalistic groups and political movements, to employ to a greater or lesser extent the usual propaganda means disappeared in the totalitarian state. If the revolutionist continues to think that the whole question of social change is one of opposing one ideology with another and that the only medium for social transformation is the displacement of one set of rulers by another, he certainly must despair. The present stage of development demonstrates with utmost clarity that the ways and means of gaining political influence and control within bourgeois democracy have definitely ceased to exist. All that is left to such people, still thought of as “revolutionists”, is to demand, in so far as they are still able to voice their opinions, that the present rulership of the still “democratic” nations itself carry through the needed social revolution[14].
“The only way in which dictatorial solutions to social crisis can be permanently successful”, Mannheim writes, “is by centralizing the control of individual wills. The real problem, however, is to know how far these attempts are counteracted by the conditions of life in modern industrial society” (46). Unfortunately, though consistent with his own point of view, Mannheim concerned himself more with the “centralized control of individual wills” than with the “conditions of life” which may counteract its effect. Conditions of life in modern society have now created, however, a situation where economic and political issues demonstrate their primacy and their outstanding importance daily with the utmost, with almost unbearable, clarity. What was on the part of Marx a revelation of things-to-come is now naked reality. There is no longer in evidence that bewildering variety os groups and interests which beclouded the essentially two-class character of capitalist society. There exists now just one organization, one class, one group – the totalitarian state as the controller and therewith the owner of all that spells power in society. There is, on the other side, all the rest of the population subjected to this totalitarian rule. It is true that this whole mass is still artificially divided through ideological distinctions and is still actually split by the continued competition for better positions not yet brought to a close by total conscription of all labor. It is a powerless, will-less mass, absolutely at the mercy of the ruling elite. There is also the new world-war, still in its beginnings, able only to further complicate the unsolvable problem of squaring the class-nature of society with the real needs of the majority of mankind.
The fact of the existence of the proletariat as the largest class in industrial society[15], the fact of the complete monopolization and centralization of all power centers excludes – at this time – any class struggles of a directly revolutionary character. There seems to be only the imperialist war, covered up by all sorts of phrases. But within the setting of this war there is developing, already incorporated, and being unconsciousy fought the civil war against the classes in power. This civil war within the imperialistic war will become the more dominating the further the disruption of all social life proceeds with the further unfolding and extension of the present world conflagration. It will finally become the sole content of the present struggle, for it has incorporated in itself the only solution which is able to end the struggle and abolish its causes. If it becomes the only social reality it will leave far behind all illusory goals of yesterday and today.
The continuation of class-rule and exploitation means death and hunger. There are at present no real problems in the world except ending this murderous situation. Both death and hunger demand their human toll because classes, leaders, elites, privileged groups defend their narrow interests against the urgent need to socialize society, that is, to remove its class structure. Death and hunger may spread for a considerable time; within limits their miseries can be compensated for by terror and propaganda. Within limits the anger and bewilderent they cause may be canalized and utilized for one or another national interest behind which lingers no more than the class interests of the ruling bodies of different states. Essentially, however, death and hunger are more determining and more forceful than all ideological issues and all control instruments, however cleverly devised.
There is not the slightest reason to assume that this war will or can be kept within the borders desired by the centralization bodies waging it. Rather, the spreading of the war seems to be a certainty. Thus there comes in view once more and on a much greater scale than during the last world war, a situtation which offers the powerless the opportunity – provided as they are with weapons, thanks to the contradictory and self-defeating class necessities of the ruling elites – to use their new powerful positions for pursuing the narrowest of interests – that of preserving their very lives and of satisfying their hunger. They will proceed, as they have to, undisturbed by the multi-dimensional nature of the social processes and they will serve their purposes without regard to “society as a whole”, that is, without regard for the interests of the fascist and semi-fascist elites. What Mannheim attempts to do only symbolically, they must accomplish actually.
[1] Kegan Paul, London. Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York. (469pp., 16s.6d. – $3.50) 1940. The book, which carries the substitle “Studies in Modern Social Structure”, is divided into six parts dealing with rational and irrational elements in contemporary society, the social causes of the crisis in culture, the questions of crisis, dictatorship and war, with thought at the level of planning and with questions of planning and freedom it contains, besides an introduction, a 72-page bibliography and indices of names and subject matter. It should be clear that the reviewer will hardly be able to do justice to the whole content of this ambitious work, embodying as it does its author’s reflections over a period of six years. He will not deal wih its social epistemology and its sociological analysis of ideas otherwise than indirectly. He feels justified in so doing because of the fact that the issues neglected were widely dealt with at the time of the appearance of Dr. Mannheim’s previous book “Ideology and Utopia”. Attaching more importance to the political than to the sociological aspects of the work, the reviewer concerns himself only with its main theses and its “message” as regards existing social problems.
[2] All figures in parantheses refer to pages in Dr. Mannheim’s book.
[3] We might as wel leave the “spirits” out of it as Mannheim is aware of the fact that not only in the countries thus beset, but in all highly industrial states a “transition is taking place because all are suffering from the same dislocation of their normal existence”. The fact “that some show obvious symptoms of the crisis and others are experiencing similar changes at slower-speed under cover of social peace”, he says “is due merely to an uneven distribution of pressure on different states, and to the existence of greater mental and material resources in certain countries” (12).
[4] “It is becoming more and more obvious”, Mannheim says, “that the enjoyment of income and interests and the right to dispose of capital are two different things… It is possible that in the future things will so develop that by appropriate taxation and compulsory charity this unrestricted use could be curtailed, and the disposition of capital could be guided from the centre by credit control. Fascism is making unwillingly an interesting experiment in its unacknowledged expropriation of the capitalists. It has maaged to socialize the power of disposition without ejecting the former industrial elite from their posts. Transformation of the original form of capitalism does not consists in abolishing the claims of property, but in withdrawing certain functions of the ownership of capital from the competence of the capitalists” (350).
[5] In the magazine MASS UND WERT (October 1937; p. 113) Mannheim wrote: “The fascistic labor camps, though not a pleasant solution for the crisis under which the permanently unemployed suffer, are nevertheless, from the view point of social technique, a better method if compared with those of liberalism which tried to solve the social-psychology problem of unemployment by way of the dole”.
[6] Adler, Dewey, Durkheim, Freud, Durbin, Hegel, Hobson, Gumplovicz, Le Bon, Michels, Mill, Nietzsche, Oppenheimer, Pareto, Pavlov, Sorel, Spengler, Scheler, Summer, Tawney, Veblen, Weber, and others.
[7] Because there exists for Mannheim “a complete parallel between the factors making for the growth and collapse of rationality in the intellectual sphere and those making for the growth and collapse of morality” (66) we need not deal especially with the questions of morality raised in his book. With certain modifications – of little concern for our purpose – Mannheim uses again in the sphere of moral discipline the distinction between the functional and substantial points of view. “The functional aspect of a given type of moral discipline consists of those standards which, when realized in conduct, guarantee the smoth working of society. Substantial morality consists of certain concrete values, such as dictates of faith and different kinds of feelings, standards which may be completely irrational in quality. The more modern society if functionally rationalized the more it tends to neutralize substantial morality, or side-track it into the private sphere”.
The dual-morality (moralistic in private life – violent in the public sphere), thus far the privilege of the ruling classes, may be adopted by the masses. “Once the acceptance of violence becomes the general principle of social morality, the fruits of long moral training in the sphere of labor and competition will be destroyed almost automatically” (72). The fruits so destroyed were results of the stage of “superindividual group solidarity” dealt with in the text above. In other words, morality collapses when the masses meet their rulers on their own ground and thus destroy the class-value of the dual-morality. They may become as immoral as their masters, and may even disregard the good work of their organizations which helped to maintain the dual-morality by strengthening the illusion that group solidarity is possible in the capitalistic world.
[8] This is Veblen carried to the extreme; the psychology of the petty-bourgeoisie is generalized. It seems odd, however, that generally those who have sufficient food and good housing have also the badges and titles.
[9] Capital; Vol. III., p. 954.
[10] Beyond Good and Evil. The Philosophy of Nietzsche. Modern Library Edition, p. 27.
[11] For example: S. Chakotin, The Rape of The Masses. New York 1940.
[12] The marginal utility theory in economics is here another example.
[13] In Defense of Love. New York, 1940, p. 292.
[14] See, for example, H. J. Laski’s new book “Where do we go From Here?”, which pleads for a SOCIAL REVOLUTION BY CONSENT! The consent, naturally, is to be given by the ruling classes, to whose reason and magnanimity Laski appeals.
[15] This fact is often denied with the argument that – numerically – the proletarian class loses importance in relation to the more rapidly growing, so-called new middle-class of white-collar workers. This argument is nonsensical, for the bulk of the white collar workers are proletarians. They do not need to be “proletarianized” as is often suggested. Their present ideological idiosyncracies are no formidable force which could effectively interfere with the fundamental trend of society to impoverish and to suppress all layers of the laboring population and thus them into a uniform class-frame.
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