Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

68 How It Worksof the powers of governmental and market elites. To a significantdegree both elites reveal a hostility to mass control.They often believe that they know best what mass shouldhave. More than that, members of both elites enjoy specialpowers, opportunities, wealth, positions of prestige, anddeference that mass demands slowly erode. Elites resist theerosion. Have they ever not done so?Elites usually deny their hostility to popular control,and in fact they do not always recognize it in themselves.The lords and bishops of sixteenth-century Western Europeconvinced themselves that their controls over the peasantrybenefited rather than exploited them. They maintainedthis in the face of gross deprivation of the peasantryin contrast to their own wealth and privileges. In England,eighteenth- and nineteenth-century upper-class citizenshostile to the Chartists and to other advocates of democraticmovements defended inequality and poverty as necessaryto English society. Charles Dickens’s portraits in fictionof deprivation and misery did not sway them to thecontrary. Although contemporary elites do not try to justifythese earlier positions, now often denounced as inhumane,they defend today’s elite positions: hostility to organized labor,defense of inequalities of wealth, and attacks on thewelfare state. They publicly defend their positions againnot as advantageous to elites but as for the common good.The hostility of market elites to mass is, however, directedfar less at customers than at employees. The historicalrecord is one of dogged, harsh, and often bloody entrepreneurialresistance to employee demands for better payand working conditions, protection against arbitrary managerialauthority, and—sometimes—employee participationin management. Market elites are vulnerable to chal-