Daniel Bell, 1919-2011

Daniel Bell, 1919-2011

Daniel Bell, 1919-2011

Daniel Bell, sociologist, editor, and public intellectual, died yesterday at age ninety-one. Bell’s books–including The End of Ideology, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism–have remained influential long after their publication, and far beyond the field of sociology. In addition to editing the New Leader and co-founding the Public Interest, Bell wrote numerous articles for Dissent. Here, we present two of those articles.

In his 1959 essay “Meaning in Work–A New Direction,” Bell theorized a way out of the drudgery of labor:

…The root of alienation lies not in the machine–as romantics like William Morris or Friedrich Junger were prone to say–but in the concept of efficiency which underlies the organization of the work process. The idea of efficiency dictates a breakdown of work and a flow of work in accordance with engineering rationality. It seeks to increase output by erasing any “waste”; and waste is defined as those moments of time which are not subject to the impersonal control of the work process itself….In these situations the human being is taken as one more variable in the process, and quite often a very subordinate one. Our emphasis has been on economic growth, increased output, but not on what kind of men are being molded by the work process….The assumption has been made, of course, that if a worker is more satisfied he will increase his output. But what if the costs of satisfaction, involved in reorganizing the work process, mean a decreased output? What then? Which “variable” does one seek to maximize: the satisfaction of the work group, or the productivity of the enterprise?
[….]
The specifics are there: what is needed is a change of fundamental attitude. If one is to say, for example, that the worker is not a commodity, then one should take the step of abolishing piecework and eliminating the distinction whereby one man gets paid on a weekly or annual salary, and another man is paid by the piece or the hour. If one accepts again the heritage of the old socialist and humanist tradition of worker protest, then the work place itself and not the market should be the center of determination of pace and tempo of work. The “flow of demand,” to employ the sociological jargon, must come from the worker himself rather than from the constraints imposed from above. Even if costs were to rise, surely there is an important social gain in that the place where a man spends such a large part of his day becomes a place of meaning and satisfaction rather than of drudgery. Fifty years ago, few enterprises carried safety devices to protect workers’ limbs and lives. Some protested that adoption of such devices would increase costs. Yet few firms today plead that they cannot “afford” to introduce safety devices. Is meaningfulness in work any less important?

Read the entire article here.

Over thirty years later, amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bell remained a champion of the socialist ideal. In “On the Fate of Communism,” he wrote:

Socialism, in the classic sense, has not failed, for it was never tried. It remains, like all ethical creeds, an ideal, a measure of potentiality and possibility, against reality. That has always been the function of utopia. The mistake was to assume that utopia could come down from the mountain and assume human form.

The sociological problem today is the creation of viable social and political entities that give people some control over their lives?in the polity, in the workplace, in the community?a civil society that is tolerant and pluralist. But is that utopia as well?

Read the rest here.