ABSTRACT
The development of industrial capitalism has involved a massive expansion in the scale of economic activity. Through internal growth and through amalgamation large business enterprises have concentrated ever larger portions of national output and employment in their hands. For the theory of industrial society this is an inevitable consequence of the technical ‘logic of industrialism’, and the growing power of the large enterprises is rendered benign by the countervailing power of worker and consumer groups (Galbraith 1952; Kerr et al. 1960). For the theory of capitalist society, on the other hand, the monopolization of production through cartels, trusts, and other business associations only serves to reinforce the power held by those at the head of the large enterprises. The theory of capitalist society also relates national monopolization to a process of internationalization: as capitalist interests seek to overcome declining domestic profitability by investing overseas, so competition is displaced from the national to the international level. The struggle between rival imperialist powers replaces the struggle between competing national enterprises. In this struggle private businesses become more closely allied with nation states, as centralized state power intervenes to buttress the concentrated economic power of the monopolies (Lenin 1917a; Ryndina and Chernikov 1974, p. 198). This vision of an increasingly centralized state dominated by private capital is rejected by the theory of industrial society in favour of an image of ‘pluralistic democracy’: all power generates countervailing power, and the state becomes simply an arena for the interplay of power relations. Government policy is the outcome of negotiations and comprises among a plurality of more or less equal pressure groups.
