Fridoy, September 17, 1571 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five Friay Seteber17 ~91 HL ICIGA DIL America Inc.: The owners B 0 0 K S Morton Mintz and Jerry S. Cohen, AMERICA, INC.: WHO 0 W N S AND OPER- ATES THE UNITED STATES, Dial, $10.00. By BRUCE LEVINE Fifteen years ago, Professor C. Wright Mills wrote a book entitled, The Power Elite. As its name implied, Mills' book set out to explode the myth that American society is a demo- cratic, egalitarian one. In chap- ters entitled, "The Higher Cir- cles," The Chief Executives," "The Warlords," and "The Po- litical Directorate," Mills paint- ed the portrait of an America dominated by a small group of economic, political, and mili- tary aristocrats. The fact that the publication of his book produced the collec- tive howl of rage and pain that it did indicated that in essen- tials Mills had hit his mark. Since then, a whole school of radical sociologists has arisen whose members (such as Wil- liam Domhoff and Gabriel Kol- ko have sought to further the work of the late Professor Mills., All of their books have been informative, many of them well written, but only a few of them have succeeded in improv- ing on The Power Elite itself. America, Inc. is, unfortunately, not among these last few. In- deed. itis not unfair to say that this book is noteworthy Authors Mintz and Cohen - although maintaining a dis- tinctly less militant and con- sciously radical mood than do the Millsians -- follow essen- tially a Millsian method of analysis. The first few chapters of America, Inc. document (once again) the progress of corporate centralization. The second group of chapters is concerned with the extension of corporate control over the poli- tical life of the nation. Mintz and Cohen see the principal mechanism by which this con- trol is exerted in the tremen- dous campaign contributions which the corporations, and only the corporations, are wealthy enough to make to poli- ticians. ("We are not likely to get fundamental reforms" in politics, they declare, "so long as candidates for public office remain indentured to the con- centrated industries that fi- nance their campaigns.") What solutions did C. Wright Mills suggest to the problems which he outlined? Well, as a matter of fact, Mills was never terribly clear on this point. Ei- ther he saw his role purely in exposing the power elite or he was simply unable to formulate a solution. In any case, The Power Elite itself is remark- ably evasive as to solutions. Messrs, Mintz and Cohen, on the other hand, being "prac- tical" liberals, face the mat- ter of solutions squarely. The conclusions which they reach, the social medicines which they prescribe, are (or ought to be eye-openers. They are simulta- neously inadequate and quite sufficient. "Inadequate," we say, because they would be impossible to implement or (if implemented) would fail miserably to solve the broader societal problems to which they are directed. "Suf- ficient," at the same time, be- cause they do, in fact address themselves directly (and sole- ly) to the two aspects of our society's crisis (corporate con- centration and corporate cam- paign contributions) n o t e d above. The Mintz - Cohen solutions are simple. To corporate oligo- poly they would oppose vigorous trust-busting and federal rather than (the weaker) state cor- porate chartering. To curtail corporate political power they propose to limi campaign con- tributions to a set maximum, re- duce the cost of TV time and like measures. Now just what would trust- busting accomplish? The au- thors are crystal clear on this question. By preventing the fur- ther growth of super-corpora- tions, by breaking up those which already exist into smaller units, the authors hope to re- turn us to "a society in which competition is the regulator of the economy." What the authors cannot or will not understand is that it is (and was) competition itself which fosters and, indeed, makes inevitable the trend to- ward monopoly. It is the pur- pose of competition, after all, to drive the less effective com- petitor from the field. Social Darwinism - the glorification and transformation into social morality of the jungle law of "survival of the fittest" - is the purest ideological expression of competitive capitalism. It is clear that the more successful this competition is - the more vigorous it is - the more quick- ly does it pare down the num- ber of competing producers. With the disappearance of each minor company, the re- maining enterprises expand their own markets, become more powerful, and become more "competitive". And it be- comes ever more difficult for new producers to enter that market and to survive there. The Mintz - Cohen protesta- tions to the side, industrial his- tory in both the U.S. and in Europe have shown that it is that the corporations are Amer- ica, as the present book's title suggests. The corporations control the means of production, transpor- tation, communication, and ex- change. In brief, they hold in their hands the very lifelines which sustain the population as a whole. And so long as this state of affairs continues, the well-being and happiness of the corporations (on the one side) andt1 lic office, and this more funda- mental relationship will remain. And while it does, all govern- ment decisions of any conse- quence - no matter who makes them-will have to be tailored to accommodate it. (A grasp of this fact is a prerequisite to un- derstanding why some of the staunchest defenders of the "rights" of Big Business have historically proven to be poli- ticians with no personal ties to industry at all, viz., the Euro- pean social democrats, Ameri- can social-reformers in office, and so on.) The alternatives are clear, as are the political strategies. One can, with Mintz and Cohen, set oneself the task of patching up (but not replacing) the capital- ist system (in their case, by setting it back a century or so). Or, one may work toward over- throwing that system altogether and building in its place a demo- cratic, socialist one. The latter strategy is aimed at placing the giant industrial enterprises at the command exclusively of the population, not at breaking those enterprises down into tiny, war- ring, privately-owned mini-mon- sters. The reformist strategy will usually appear the more "real" because it is the less ambitious. It seems easier to work through the Democratic Party, for ex- ample, get elected to office, and sponsor little bills like those which Mintz and Cohen cham- pion, than to work to build a mass revolutionary movement. But such "realism" is illusory. Once in office, as we have seen, the restrictions imposed by cap- italism and its needs, will be suffocating. And the path to rev- olution, although long, difficult, and paved with constant c16ap- pointments, offers the only pos- sible solution to corporate eih- pire-building, corporate- control- led government, and the havoc which that combination wreaks on mankind. Today's Writer. .. Bruce Levine is a former edi- torial page editor of the Daily and a member of the Interna- tional Socialists. THE ALLEY FRIDAY 2.00 SATURDAY 1.75 330 Maynard SUNDAY 1,50 Commander Cody PINBALL ALLEY IN THE BASEMENT ALWAYS OPEN Advance Tickets at Salvation Records precisely "bigness" which has been the principal characteris- tic of those industries able to survive competition, and it has been "bigness" which that com- petition has stimulated even further. That is how the prb- sent corporate monsters evolv- ed, and a reversion to trust- busting (even could it be ac- complished) would only place us back on the same road, albeit a few squares back. A discussion of trust-bust- ing, though. is purely academic. This country could quite simply not afford, to try it. For the same reasons why size is a determining advantage in inter- national competition. At the present time, American indus- try is struggling desperately simply to retain the share of the world market which it pre- sently controls. The kind of wholesale assault on corporate power which Messrs. Cohen and Mintz prescribe would deal a devastating - probably an irre- parable - blow to American in- dustry's chances in that strug- gle, and it would aggravate most of the ills which now plague our economy: unemployment, trade and payments deficits, and so on. The authors' political reme- dies are similarly impractical. To understand why, we need to examine more closely the real, the fundamental, reason for the business - government "com- munity of interest." As noted above, the Millsians (from the master down through the "right - wing" Millsians, Mintz and Cohen) attribute this phenomenon to the infiltration into government of corporate personnel and money. In short, to what Ralph Nader (in this book's Introduction) calls "an- impressive variety of strata- gems". Thus we have a sort of conspiracy theory of corporate power. Consistently, those who stand by this theory propose so- lutions aimed at foiling con- spiracies. Unfortunately for Messrs. Co- hen and Mintz (unfortunately for us all!) conspiracy is only the smallest, least consequential factor in corporate power-ac- quistion on the political plane. Much more important is the single, central, inescapable fact and the welfare of the nation itself (on the other) will be seen to be indistinguishable. Anything w h i c h weakens the corporations, w h i c h restricts their productivity, which threat- ens their profit margins, which inhibits their further growth, will show up in economic ill-health for the society at large. Break all the conspiracies. remove all the corporate stooges from pub- Pat & Victoria sonsGarvey "One of the most powerful sounds on the contemporary folk scene." "lively and haunting" _N.Y. TimeG 14 1dll$ I ix r a cinch for Miss J. .leather belts with "faces" buckles and the way they pull together today's layered separates. Our suede and split cowhide belts are 1/" to 2" wide with large cast metal buckles. $5-$6 pe operators !: t N -J oj Photos . .. Today's photographs were se- lected from The Middle Ameri- cans, text by Robert Coles and photographs by Jon Erikson (Little, Brown & Co., $12.50). Most of us prefer to ignore our Middle American habitats because we are either trying too hard to escape them or, more often, because their very familiarity occupies our atten- tion so completely. We ignore both the common and the un- common because we cannot bring focus to the significant. This book provides a discern- ing, yet sympathetic, look at the one hundred and thirty million Americans w ho find themselves or, shall we say, ourselves, located within the gravitational middle. Although Coles advises that the Middle Americans he has interviewed for the last five years are neither black, red, or brown, or intellectuals or youth cultists, still, the concerns of his sub- jects involve those perplexities of survival which plague us all. Coles and Erikson, who did their work independently, have joined together in a volume which uniquely counterbalances charity with incisiveness. only because it emphasizes and aggravates - and therefore highlights - precisely the weaknesses of Professor Mills' seminal work. In doing so, au- thors Mintz and Cohen may help us come to understand the general crisis of the Millsian school of analysis and even con- tribuate indirectly to resolving that crisis. The central theme of the books by Mills as well as by his political heirs is the ever-in- creasing centralization of power in fewer and fewer hands. The fact of this centralization they have all documented thorough- ly. This phenomenon is most ap- parent in the economic field, in the ongoing mergers and con- glomerations of the corpora- tions. Parallel to this development, the Millsians discovered. the greater and greater coincidence of corporate interests and gov- ernment policies. They ascribed this perceived "community of interests" to the evident pene- tration into high government positions of corporate execu- tives and their representatives. A healthy chunk of The Power Elite is devoted to documenting this penetration, and for those who followed after Mills (most clearly, Domhoff ) this single factor became the overriding conceirn. r Jaob on LIBERTY AT MAYNARD SHOP TONIGHT UNTIL 9:00 P.M. SATURDAY 9:30 A.M. UNTIL 5:30 P.M. A-7030U STEREO TAPE DECK: An all-solid-state, single- direction, 2-track record/playback/erase, plus -track playback stereo tape deck, the A-7030U is designed for the demanding professional or the discriminating audiophile. This superb deck has a capacity up to the 1012" NAB reel size and operates at 15 or 7 1/2 ips, with performance comparable to that of the finest professional sound studio equipment. Wow and flutter are an exceptionally low 0.05%, frequency response is 30-20,000 Hz/3dB and the signal-to-noise ratio is a high 58 dB. 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