(2 of 3)
More recently, convergence has been taken up with considerable enthusiasm by economists—notably the Dutch Nobel prizewinner Jan Tinbergen and Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith. In The New Industrial State, Galbraith states with his customary élan that technology has an imperative all its own. On the Russian side, advanced industrialization will inevitably lead to greater intellectual curiosity and freedom; in the U.S., it will inexorably lead to more planning and centralized economic controls.
Industrialization v. Ideology
The convergence theory rests on three basic assumptions. One is that industrialization by necessity leads to urbanization and a common culture with uniformities in skills, techniques, organizations and even problems—like the alienation of factory workers from jobs and machines. Because workers and managers in Gary, Ind., and Magnitogorsk perform similar tasks, the argument goes, they tend to develop similar ways of life. The second premise is that industrialization leads to increased diversity and complexity in a society —to a pluralistic condition that overrides all ideologies. The third is that industrialization creates affluence, which undermines political discipline and ideological conformity.
In some areas, especially economics, there is evidence that the U.S. and Russia have a great deal more in common today than they did a generation ago. America now accepts a degree of "socialism," bureaucratic regulation and welfare statism that would have been considered unthinkable not so long ago. The large corporations that dominate the U.S. economy often resemble branches of government far more than they do textbook examples of free-enterprise capitalism.
Since Stalin, Russia has been subjected to a rising tide of consumer expectations, which party planners have periodically had to acknowledge by modifying priorities. In order to make its economy work better, the Soviet government has reluctantly undertaken certain quasi-capitalist reforms. Russia's current five-year plan, for example, provides some managerial incentives and gives individual factories greater freedom from centralized planning.
Despite the surface similarities of Russia and the U.S., critics of convergence answer that economic factors have never played a dominant role in the evolution of societies. Recent history suggests that industrialization and economic progress are compatible with liberty or tyranny, and do not necessarily override cultural or political differences between nations. Witness, for example, parliamentary Britain and autocratic Germany at the turn of the century, or Detroit in the Roosevelt era and Essen under Hitler. The postwar economic progress of Japan has undoubtedly contributed to the viability of its democratic political system; but East Germany, the most technologically advanced of any Eastern European nation, has achieved economic success under the most rigid and doctrinaire of Communist tyrannies.