p Some sociologists have propounded theories which eclectically combine many.factors including technology and economics.

p One such theory is Walt Rostow’s theory of the stages of growth, expounded by him in his book The Stages of Economic Growth. A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960). 105 According to this theory, the history of human society goes through the following five stages: a) the Traditional Society, b) the Preconditions for Take-Off, c) the Take-Off, d) the Drive to Maturity, e) the Age of High Mass Consumption.

p Rostow believes the first stage in the development of society to be the traditional society which is somewhat analogous to the Marxist idea of feudal society, but differs in that it includes a number of features superimposed on it by modern civilisation. The traditional society is based on ancient traditions inherited from preceding generations. Traditionalism simply means that traditions dominate in attempts to resolve social problems. Rostow cites Africa as an example of traditional society.

p It is true that Africa contains many regions, tribes and peoples that are in a semi-feudal or feudal stage of development. These societies have extremely primitive techniques. But the low level of social and economic development of the African countries has been due not to their “blind” adherence to “traditions”, as Rostow claims, but to the ruthless imperialist exploitation.

p The transitional society is a transitional stage between traditional and maturing society. According to Rostow, the colonies or the countries dependent on foreign capital are an example of this stage. As a bourgeois ideologist he idealises colonialist activities of imperialism and maintains that the “traditional societies" have entered the age of development only “under the influence of an outside impetus”. The imperialist powers have presumably changed the thinking, knowledge, institutions and formation of social capital, and consequently impelled the traditional societies to embark on the “transitional path”. But abundant historical evidence exists to show that the developing countries owe their very low level of development primarily to imperialism. According to UNO data, from 1946 to 1951 American capital invested 1,629 million dollars in Latin American countries yet received from the same countries 3,078 million dollars during the same period.

p The main features of the maturing or industrial society are, according to Rostow, as follows: a) it is neither capitalist nor socialist; the former class contradictions have gradually lost significance; b) the place of workers and 106 capitalists has been taken by highly skilled technical specialists and managers; c) the decisive role is played by a state which relies on an enormous apparatus of employees and bureaucrats. This society apparently deals with social problems which neither Marx nor his opponents could have foreseen.

p But evidence is adduced to support these propositions. Rostow asserts that “neither political, not social, nor yet even economic power is directly associated with private ownership" [80; 152].

p Under capitalism private ownership has not only failed to lose significance, but, on the contrary, has greatly increased in strength. Today, for example, the Standard Oil Company has assets amounting to $10,000 million, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company $8,000 million. At the turn of the century Rockefeller and Morgan had a capital of $2,500 million, whereas today their joint funds amount to $126,000 million.

p Rostow spreads the myth that in “industrial society" the working class is being “deproletarianised”, that the proletariat is gradually disappearing together with the social contradictions which caused class nattles. The class struggle, he says, “ceases to be the moving force of the development of human history”. Moreover, the capitalist class is also disappearing. The cotton, railway, steel and oil magnates are being replaced by professional managers.

p It is undeniable that a hierarchy of executives exists under imperialism, but this does not alter the capitalist essence of the monopolies. Ford, Rockefeller, Morgan or Mellon may be philatelists, philominists, art collectors and globetrotters; they do not have to manage either individual enterprises or even the largest syndicates. This is done for them by hired employees.

p But by virtue of their legal right to private property the owners of the monopolies supervise the work of the managers. The monopolists, not the technical executives hold economic power. At the summit of American society, 120 people have an annual income of more than one million dollars, 379 persons have an income of more than half a million dollars, and 11,490 persons have an income of more than 100,000 dollars. Sixty-five per cent of these people live on lucrative incomes from inherited private 107 property. The rest of the population of the U.S.A. has less abundant means. Only 7,5 per cent of American families have an income exceeding 7,500 dollars a year. The income of 47 per cent of the families ranges from 3,000 to 7,500 dollars, while 46 per cent of the families, i.e., about half the population, have an income of less than 3,000 dollars a year.

p The American publicist F. Lundberg writes: “The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of sixty of the richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth. ... These families are the living centre of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States, functioning discreetly under a de jure democratic form of government behind which a de facto government, absolutist and plutocratic in its lineaments, has gradually taken form since the Civil War. This de facto government is actually the government of the United States—informal, invisible, shadowy. It is the government of money in a dollar democracy" [81; 3].

p The notorious “sixty families" are unlimited dictators of American policy. It was at their bidding that the TaftHurtley Act was passed in 1947, thereby greatly reducing the economic rights of American workers, depriving them of their right to strike, preventing them from concluding collective agreements with factory owners. The McCarranWood Act, aimed at suppressing the slightest manifestation of freedom, was passed in 1950. The monopolists own all the means of shaping public opinion in the country: 99.5 per cent of all the press in the U.S.A. is owned or controlled by the monopolies.

p Yet Rostow and his adherents consider that the diminishing popular participation in political and social life is typical of industrial society. The British sociologist Prof. Robert McKenzie maintains that participation in political life may do enormous harm to the working class. He claims that workers who vote Conservatives are more active in politics than workers who vote Labourites; workers who vote Labourites are more passive, do not know their leaders and are concerned only with their personal affairs, whereas workers who vote Conservatives are concerned about foreign policy and the public interest.

p Raymond Aron supports the idea of isolating workers 108 from political life. At the Fifth World Congress of Sociology he stated: “We are discussing the problem of popular participation in political life. We proceed from the thesis that popular participation is progressive. It seems to me that we cannot draw such a conclusion because, when general elections were held in France, the most reactionary government was elected. Rationally, it is therefore absurd to talk of the need for popular participation in political life.”

p Rostow terms the ultimate stage of development of modern society as the society of high mass consumption in which the values of the market and the demands associated with the mastery of new techniques lose their exclusive power over the minds of men [see 80]. This society, he says, does not as yet exist. Its aim is to create the welfare state, improve social security, redistribute income and mitigate social conditions. It will expand consumption levels and provide better food, shelter and clothing, increase mass consumption of durable consumer goods and services. The society will increase leisure, cushion the hardships of the trade cycle and shorten the working day [see 80; 73, 74].

p These aims are utterly Utopian. They are at variance with the facts of modern capitalist reality. The “expansion of consumption levels" and the other tasks mentioned by Rostow are incompatible with the operation of the objective economic laws of modern capitalism.

p Rostow distorts Marx by asserting that whereas Marx’s sociological theory is a “set of logical deductions from the notion of profit maximisation”, his (Rostow’s) “stages- of-growth" theory views man as a more complex unit, also seeking power, leisure, adventure, continuity of experience and security, displaying concern for his family, the familiar values of his regional and national culture, and beyond these diverse homely attachments also being capable of being moved by a sense of connection with human beings everywhere. Human behaviour is seen not as an act of maximisation, but as an act of balancing alternative and often conflicting human objectives. From this more complex idea Rostow draws the conclusion not of a series of rigid and inevitable stages of history, but of patterns of choice permitted by the changing setting of society [see 80; 149).

p But Marx never said that “profit maximisation" is characteristic of all men.

p In an attempt to prove his propositions at all costs W. Rostow often resorts to sophisms. Thus he deliberately refers diametrically opposed social and economic structures to one and the same stage of social development, and societies of the same type—to different stages. He tries to prove that in the development of modern capitalist society property ownership has lost its former significance. Its development is presumably determined by leading branches of the economy “whose highest rates of development have brought the economy to maturity" and “ concrete methods of distributing the income chosen by each society that has reached the stage of a high level of national distribution".

p Rostow highlights the role of the technical factor in history, making the development of society dependent on the productivity of labour and wholly conditioning the latter by the level of technological development. At the same time, however, he interprets the processes of social development idealistically, maintaining that each society has the right, independent of the material factors, to choose the economic system and “methods of distributing the income" it may deem necessary. Rostow recognises the significance of the economic factor in history, but defines it as a result of free choice. By examining the general outlines of each stage of development, he says, we study not only the structure of the changing branches of the economy, but the whole chain of strategic decisions taken by whole societies [see 80].

p Rostow formulated the social aims of his theory at the banquet given in honour of the participants of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology. By striving to concentrate your attention on the underdeveloped countries, he said, we are also strengthening the forces within their society, which are the most capable of retaining a minimum of unity and integrity during the period of inevitable stress and strife issuing from the dynamics of the very process of modernisation. . .. By concentrating our policy around the conception of independence in its ultimate connection with modernisation we feel that we not only reflect the permanent interests of the U.S.A., but also make a certain contribution to the maintenance of a minimum of stability at the time of the inevitable revolutionary process [see 17].

p He sees the modern epoch not in terms of the transition 110 of all countries and peoples to socialism and communism, but of a “single stream" of transition of all countries and peoples to “modern (modernised or industrial) society".

This theory of a “single stream" or “single social development" attests to a certain change in the forms of bourgeois ideological propaganda. In the recent past bourgeois sociologists opposed the people of the West to Afro-Asia. Today they speak of the “unity” of historical fates of the capitalist West and the Afro-Asian countries which have obtained political independence.