Abstract
Paul Adler certainly deserves accolades for presenting so much material within his slim and accessible volume that would help an undergraduate or lay person understand the dilemmas facing the world today. While there already exists a veritable library that critiques contemporary capitalism from any number of perspectives, Adler goes further by explicating the limitations of commonly advocated approaches for reforming the system. No doubt he will be criticized by primarily focusing on the American situation, but even this narrowness is defensible as necessary to reach a very important audience, and one that has always been especially susceptible to Jameson’s (2003) conundrum that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (p. 76).
The most daunting issue Adler grapples with, however, is not “what is wrong with the world?,” or even “where do conventional reforms fall short?” but, to borrow a famous title, “what is to be done?” To his credit, Adler attempts at least a tentative answer to this question by presenting five contemporary organizations that he claims have innovated organizational changes that could contribute, if inadvertently, to the building of socialism. Adler self-identifies as a Marxist, and certainly all shades of Marxism embrace some degree of evolutionary social development, but there has long been broad disagreement among “the tribe” as exactly which contemporary technological and social developments could ultimately contribute to the building of socialism. Adler’s position is at the more Whiggishly optimistic end of this spectrum, a position formally theorized by Cohen (1978), although precedent reaches as far back as the Communist Manifesto. As a factory owner himself, Engels (1877/2017) tended to embrace this position more unambiguously, but even Marx sometimes advanced a “progressive-in-spite-of-themselves” perspective, as with his often-criticized comments regarding British rule in India (Anderson, 1974). However, Adler pushes this perspective well beyond what the available evidence would appear to support.
When it comes to the potential benefits produced by capitalism, it is certainly more straightforward to point to technological innovations rather than social relations. It is not difficult to imagine how, to take two examples, the steam engine or the computer could be reoriented to meet the material needs of humanity. By contrast, deciding which social relations will eventually prove progressive is much more daunting, since it is hard to even distinguish among relations of production, let alone choose those that might generate favored outcomes. Moreover, some of the features of modern life that are widely regarded as improvements are not necessarily attributable specifically to capitalist relations (Wood, 1996). One of Adler’s examples of a progressive trend, the extension of life expectancy, was largely the product of non-commercial developments in antibiotics, pasteurization, and sanitation (Preston and Van de Walle, 1978), sometimes against business opposition, as in the case of milk pasteurization. And even if some capitalist relations can be retrospectively viewed as improving the material conditions of humanity, it does not necessarily follow we can also predict which contemporary relations will generate future progress. It is doubtful that anyone in early modern England advocated renting land to sheep herders and turnip farmers in order to catalyze an industrial revolution. Or to take a more contemporary example, no one foresaw that the legal constraints on how AT&T its spent monopoly rents combined with orchestrated fears of Soviet power would ultimately trigger an electronics revolution (Marens, 2013).
This problem of pinpointing what might prove helpful among contemporary relations of production is only exacerbated when weighing the inherently less concrete managerial practices of contemporary organizations. For one thing, the practice of managing organizations is orders of magnitude older than anything resembling capitalism. The Achaemenids did not need Fayol to solve agency problems, nor did the Egyptians require Taylorism to efficiently build the pyramids. Furthermore, one can find creative management even among contemporary settings largely isolated from capitalism (Burawoy, 1985). Military-oriented managerial innovations are especially prevalent in the history of technology, beginning with government armories in Venice, Woolrich, and Springfield, up through the Manhattan Project, and proceeding through government funded efforts at Colt, RCA, Polaroid, Boeing, Lockheed’s Skunk Works, Bell Labs, and the Lockheed’s Skunkworks (Marens, 2013, 2020). Even the administrators of the sharaskas (labs) within the Soviet Gulag understood that they needed to be more creative than simply relying on terror to encourage the development of nuclear technology. It is therefore Adler’s burden to demonstrate that his examples of contemporary capitalist management of technology have generated practices that are indeed advances over older innovations whose connections to capitalism are tenuous or less.
Unfortunately, he does not demonstrate that his five cases are either progressive or novel, or even particularly successful on their own terms. In addition, Adler undermines his own credibility with anyone familiar with some of these firms by labeling them “high road,” which is actually a moral endorsement, not a synonym for effectiveness or efficiency, and an endorsement that most of them simply do not deserve. IBM and CSC owe their initial hi-tech success to their roles in the morally dubious post-war nuclear arming of the United States, and in recent decades IBM, as part and parcel of its new approach to innovation, has notoriously purged expensive older employees (Gosselin, 2020; Lohr, 2005). As for Adler’s claim that CSC’s Government Service Unit has performed impressively since its reforms, that is difficult to square with its with record of serial scandals “servicing” the taxpayers of United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, and Australia, while being fined for deceiving its own shareholders and losing a lawsuit over unpaid overtime (Neville, 2013; Perera, 2007; Sayer, 2014; Strauch v. CSC, 2020). Moreover, the efforts of IBM and CSC to catch up with more modern competitors has apparently produced little of commercial or technological value, despite—or perhaps because of (Hira and Hira, 2005)—their clear-cut moral failures.
Why then did Adler not choose more convincing examples of successful technologically-based firms such as 1980s Apple Computers or interwar General Electric? The likely explanation is that Adler simply knows more about the firms he chose to highlight, having studied three of the five himself, and a fourth having been investigated by a close colleague. To be fair, he never claims that his examples are exhaustive of the progressive potential of contemporary capitalist relations. Whatever his reasons, however, examining older examples does undermine his larger claim of an implicitly continuous development of social relations within capitalism. A century has passed since General Electric successfully marketed a broad range of innovative technology under the leadership of a former Hull House tutor, who initiated far more progressive employment policies than what one finds today at IBM. If there are indeed somethings “new (and valuable) under the capitalist sun” with regard to the management of technology, Adler does not convincingly portray them here.
Adler also promotes two cases of labor-management cooperation as potential models of progressive social relations, the NUMMI plant co-managed by Toyota with General Motors and the giant Kaiser Permanente health care system. However, both of these have been criticized by knowledgeable labor activists as union sellouts, hardly exemplars of some “new dawn” in industrial relations (Parker & Slaughter, 1988; Winslow, 2010). While it is beyond the scope of this review to weigh conflicting interpretations of either organization, one can at least conclude that these two reform programs join IBM and CSC in their failure to generate very much in the way of even conventional, let alone progressive, success. American labor-management cooperation dates at least as far back as the interwar years in the textile and steel industries (Brooks, 1978; Fraser, 1991; Nadworny, 1955), but such efforts rarely last, either because the firms involved disappear, or because management repudiates the agreement when it no longer serves its interests (e.g. Holusha, 1993). NUMMI followed the former trajectory, with the plant itself ultimately purchased by Tesla, whose operations have since generated a record of union busting, disregard for safety, and indifference to the covid crisis would make a George Pullman blush (Ohnsman, 2019; Siddiqui, 2021a, 2021b). As for union-management cooperation at Kaiser, Adler accurately notes that it was forged under a uniquely complex situation, and it would be unfairly simplistic to label the effort as just another managerial betrayal. Still, Adler’s commentary does not even discuss the four strikes at Kaiser soon after the agreement was in place, nor the bitter intra-union dispute that engulfs Kaiser to this day (Winslow, 2010), and the organization faces the possibility of yet another, more comprehensive strike as in the Autumn of 2021. This suggests, at the very least, that there are structural factors—professional jealousies, union bureaucracy, opportunism?—that require further analysis before putting Kaiser Permanente forward as any kind of model for reform.
The fifth and only non-American model that Adler discusses is the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, encompassing 250 cooperatives and related organizations located primarily in the Bosque region of Spain. Again, Adler fails to evaluate more critical views in regard to both its governance structure and its fidelity to democratic principles (Basterretxea et al., 2019; Kasmir, 1996). Still, a consensus has emerged that Mondragon has proven to be an unusually egalitarian group of successful business enterprises, despite the recent failure of its first and largest cooperative, Fagor Appliances. But it is unclear that its successes offer generalizable lessons. Mondragon was founded in the 1950s, and it began to attract international attention in the 1970s (Oakeshott, 1978). Yet, for all the accolades it has received over decades, it would be difficult to find many organizational offspring larger in scale than the two-store Arizmendi Bakery in San Francisco. Mondragon itself has refused to apply cooperative principles to the factories they have established in other nations (Errasti et al., 2017), and within its home Basque region, membership is restricted by testing and probation to ensure a proper “fit” with cooperative culture, and it even favors nepotistic hiring (Basterretxea et al., 2019). It remains uncertain as to what positive features of the Mondragon experience are actually transferable, and merely listing its well-known features offers no insight into resolving this question, one that has long vexed its boosters.
None of my criticisms are meant to imply that there is no value in looking for models of organizations to emulate, even among those who only inadvertently do “good” as a by-product of trying to make the world even worse. To take an extreme example: the VW “bug,” which had saved countless gallons of oil over several decades, was produced by perhaps the worst regime in history. Nonetheless, it is telling that Adler fails to offer any convincing examples of how contemporary capitalism is generating new social relations that will prove useful for the building of socialism.