Seymour Melman: An Appreciation

August 15, 2005

By Jonathan Michael Feldman

Champion of Fundamental Reconstruction

On December 16 of last year Seymour Melman, friend and mentor, passed away.  Born in 1917 at the time of the Russian revolution, Melman shared the hope for creating a better world that spurred many activists on the left during the 20th century. A Professor of Industrial Engineering at Columbia University, Melman had served as the Chairman of SANE and later as Chair of the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament.  A periodic contributor to The Nation, he was the author of numerous books, pamphlets, and articles including: Decision Making and Productivity (1958), The Peace Race (1962), Pentagon Capitalism (1970), The Permanent War Economy (1974), Profits without Production (1983), The Demilitarized Society (1988), and (most recently) After Capitalism (2001).  The readers of these books included a wide variety of political leaders including George McGovern, Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader. Melman was an inspiration to dozens of students, a fact confirmed by his winning Columbia University’s “Great Teacher Award” in 1981.

In many ways, Seymour Melman was the conscience of the American peace movement. He was a strong proponent of the view that the term “peace” was not operational and that a systematic program of disarmament was essential. Therefore he felt that organizing opposition to the latest war was an insufficient strategy for making any progress.  What was required is something bigger, a sustained program for the gradual elimination of the permanent war economy and the permanent war society.  This program would include: a comprehensive treaty in support of disarmament; the economic conversion of military firms; new budget priorities promoting needed civilian investments; and the implementation of democracy in the workplace, giving working people more control over their lives.  Economic democracy was an alternative to the growing power and influence of state capitalism, a system in which the warfare state extended its sphere of control over industrial enterprises, local communities, universities and research laboratories across the nation. 

Historical and Intellectual Origins

Seymour Melman came of age in the late 1930s in New York City. A student at City College, he was a contemporary of Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol and others who were part New York’s “left wing hothouse.” After the Second World War,  these intellectuals came closer to the American system because of their dislike of Stalinism and Leninism, as described  in Joseph Dorman’s film and book, Arguing the World.  Vanderbilt University Professor Robert Barsky notes that while Howe remained critical of some aspects of American capitalism, Kristol moved to the far right. Bell was a critic but Glazer grew increasingly conservative.  Unlike this group, however, Seymour Melman saw similarities between the limited systems of American state capitalism and Soviet state capitalism  envisioning and emphasizing an alternative to both.   Seymour Melman never changed his mind about the need for radical reform. He became part of a circle of intellectuals prior to the rise of the New Left who set to work envisioning an alternative to both Leninism and capitalism.  As part of this circle and activities beyond, Melman became an important link between the institutional radicalism of the 1930s and the non-Communist, independent Left. 

One actor in this circle and a key mentor was Zellig Harris, a promoter of the Kibbutz as a model for decentralized economic democracy.  Harris was a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and a leader in the Avukah group in Philadelphia (chronicled in Robert F. Barsky’s biography of Noam Chomsky and a forthcoming study of Harris).  The group’s members included Seymour Melman and a key influence was Arthur Rosenberg, the German historian who wrote about the limits of Bolshevism.  Paul Mattick, another critic of the Bolsheviks, was also important. This circle was sympathetic to many ideas expressed by the anarchists and were influenced by, but never embraced, Trotskyism. Barsky explains that “the Harris circle was much closer to Council Communism than anarchism (a critical difference from Chomsky).” Harris, Melman and Lawrence Berel Cohen were key principals in the Frame of Reference group (known as “FOR”).  Cohen says that many of Melman’s ideas about economic democracy came from Harris who was also a mentor to Noam Chomsky. Cohen became a Professor at Columbia University.  His dissertation on how worker decision making promotes cooperative economic relations and collective empowerment is a seminal but still unpublished study that also strongly influenced Melman’s work.  

The FOR group outlined how various “control systems” operated to sustain capitalism and began to explore ways to transcend these systems by means of economic democracy.  The FOR group was remarkable for its anti-Leninist ideology and attempts to move beyond Marxism by promoting a more detailed theory of the practice of alternative social relations.   They also shared a common opposition to militarism.  The legacy of FOR lives on in Zellig Harris’s book The Transformation of Capitalist Society, published studies by William M. Evan, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, and various books by Melman, particularly Pentagon Capitalism which details the military control system.

Seymour Melman regarded Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen as foundational thinkers.  In his presidential address at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Evolutionary Economics in 1975, he explained their impact: “Even the dedicated reformers of the civilian New Deal were unable to resolve the problem of economic stagnation…In the context of the Great Depression, theories of market regulated economy seemed to function as ideological masks for the class interests of private and government managers.  Therefore, the ideas of Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen had greater interest to me as vantage points than those of Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, and John Maynard Keynes.  Theories focusing on the economics of production, including its allied decision making, have held my imagination as against theories of exchange economy, with or without state intervention.”  Veblen’s writings on war, non-productive consumption and financiers, “trained incapacities,” absentee ownership, and the productive capacities of engineers resonated in the work of Melman.  

Marx and Veblen shaped his belief in an institutional approach to economics that was never clouded by mathematic symbols, technical jargon or ideological abstractions. In his words, “a little Marx is a good thing…not too much, but a little.”  His book After Capitalism extended Marx’s notion of alienation, or the separation of people from one and another and their removal from key decisions, and summarized his ideas about economic democracy.  Melman built on Cohen’s ideas and explained how cooperatives, trade union organization, and community ownership could promote de-alienation. His thinking about the military economy and society was strongly influenced by his readings of Dwight MacDonald’s journal Politics.  One key essay there, written by Walter J. Oakes, was called, “Toward a Permanent War Economy” and published in 1944.  Melman also read the work of economist Louis Faina (aka Lewis Corey), a critic of Stalinism and big business control of the military. 

Walter Rautenstrauch, Melman’s doctoral advisor and Chairman of Columbia’s Industrial Engineering Department, was another important source of ideas.  Rautenstrauch was an advocate of the economic democracy who took a dim view of the service economy.  He was a Quaker with anti-militarist views as well.  He was an important support system for Melman’s career at Columbia for he shared with him similar values and interests.  Melman’s doctoral work combined three key fields: industrial engineering, economics and sociology.  Rautenstrauch, Joseph Dorfman an economist and the biographer of Thorstein Veblen, and the sociologist Robert Lynd, author of the classic “Middletown” studies, were then a critical part of the Columbia milieu that shaped Melman.

Lynd was a key force at Columbia promoting an anti-militarist analysis of American society.  He not only supported Melman but also was a key backer of the grand anti-militarist sociologist C. Wright Mills.  Yet, prior to Mills’ work in the 1950s warning about “the power elite” linked to militarism, Lynd himself in the 1940s expressed strong concerns about the concentration of corporate and military power that threatened American democracy.  In an essay published in 1943, Lynd wrote that the means of fighting World War II would could come to haunt American democracy:

The already half-accepted formula that “You can’t fight this war democratically” is both factually incorrect and a one-way ticket to American fascism.  If democracy is suspended now, it will not reappear at the peace conference.  If during the war we avoid the development of genuine democratic organization and participation, if we curtail the partial organization of labor we now have instead of moving forward to its thoroughgoing democratic extension, we can know for certain fact that democratic people’s organizations will be similarly frustrated after the war.  Both during the war and after, the issue is identical: Who controls, and to what ends?

Lynd’s fears reflected the faustian bargain represented by Roosevelt’s alliance with corporate interests to further the war effort.  While an alliance with business interests was necessary for pursuing the aims of the war economy, this alliance came at the cost of control over the economy by centralized interests unaccountable to popular control.   Melman shared with Lynd an appreciation of alternative economic planning as a key foundation for both extending popular control over the state and for pushing it in an anti-militarist direction.

Another key economist and influence was John Maurice Clark, a professor of economics at Columbia University and champion of the institutionalist school.  Clark is an interesting and important figure.  Like Veblen whose work he followed, Clark advocated social reconstruction.  He was born in 1884 and died in 1963, representing the second generation of institutional economists. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1910, thirty-nine years earlier than Melman. Clark wrote about the economic costs of war and the rise of administrative overheads in business; the latter was the subject of Melman’s dissertation.  For Melman, the gradual rise of bureaucracy and managerial control functions in overhead growth (manifested in rules, bureaucrats and clerical administrators) was the other side of economic waste and systems of control that limited independent decision making from below. Melman’s work extended that of Clark’s and advanced his intellectual agenda over a fifty year period.

In 1926, Clark published his book Social Control of Business in which he promoted an agenda for managing enterprises along democratic lines. Like the FOR group, Clark was concerned with the rise of control systems that grew up in large corporate organizations.  In articulating an alternative he wrote, “we want democracy, and we hold that decentralized power is at least an important adjunct of it.  Yet since the adoption of the Federal Constitution we have been moving toward greater centralization, under the pressure of the things government has had to do.”  Clark saw fundamentally that democracy must extend into decision-making governing production: “Another phase of self-government is the vote, not on men, but on measures: a direct voice in what is to be done.  Without discussing all the phases of this or all the difficulties in the way, it seems clear that some measure of this kind of self-government is becoming a necessary thing in modern industry.  In simpler conditions, personal contact with the right kind of boss was enough to fill the need, but in large-scale industry it must be planned and provided for in the constitution of the shop.”  The crisis of the Great Depression, linked in part to decision making by “the controllers,” helped advance fundamental thinking about political changes in the 1930s.  Melman echoed these hopes in his intellectual and political work. 

Action from Below and Above

Seymour Melman was not simply a “utopian dreamer,” but more of a “utopian realist.”  Like Paul Goodman, he believed that only comprehensive solutions could promote progress and that piecemeal solutions would ultimately fail.  His ideas were not simply abstractions, but always tied to actions.  His network spanned not only activist political intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, John Kenneth Galbraith and Marcus Raskin, but philosophers like Sidney Morgenbesser, political activists like Harlem Fight Back organizer Jim Haugton, trade union presidents like William W. Winpisinger of the International Association of Machinists, and congressional leaders.  Melman, like Harris, understood that political change would come not only from “organizing” and independent action “from below,” but also from the actions and organizing of business and political organization “from above.” 

Seymour Melman was a speaker in the huge 1982 demonstration in New York against nuclear weapons.  Yet, he thought the nuclear freeze movement was limited by its fetishizing nuclear weapons, its “politics of fear” that was trumphed by Reagan’s Star Wars program, and its inability to articulate a broader notion of multi-lateral and comprehensive planning to reduce arms and convert the military economy.  He also rejected notions of “political resistance” when this meant an endless cycle of short-term protests divorced from long-term institutional reconstruction and systematic disarmament of “war making institutions.” He castigated attempts of self-proclaimed left elites to manage political change and (in his words) “replace one set of managers with another.”  Instead, his goal was to promote an alternative system by which economic and political power could be accumulated and democracy advanced.  Instead of a “political supermarket” in which the Movement pursued dozens of un-related causes, he favored a more systematic emphasis on linking short-term strategies to long-term objectives (particularly disarmament, economic conversion, and economic democracy).  He worried about “a peace movement safe for the Pentagon.” 

Seymour Melman was also concerned about changes in higher education that created barriers to social change and enlightenment.  He thought that various university departments were becoming parts of the “control system.”  After World War Two, a revisionist turn in the universities took place—away  from institutionalist economics of the kind Clark had represented. Marcus Raskin, a close friend and colleague, says that Melman believed that much of the economics profession had become degraded, attempting to “mask itself as a ‘neutral science,’ serving as a tool for justifying “the powerful and inter selfish purposes” and defining the “‘choices’ for the very well heeled.”  He constantly warned about ideological myths perpetuating deindustrialization, arms control, and militarism in the media and universities. Instead, he worked to promote an alternative curriculum in the schools of political science, engineering, business and economics.  Melman was schooled in Thorstein Veblen’s notion of engineers as part of the vanguard that produced social change.  Raskin explains Melman’s lament, however, that “engineering had become linked inextricably to the high tech of the arms race; thereby defeating for him and us a moral purpose to what engineering is beyond the manipulation of materials.” In contrast, Melman thought economics should “aid the wretched through study (and action),” a vision lately embraced by Joseph Stiglitz and in the New Left by “radical economists.” 

While an early supporter of the Union of Radical Political Economists, Melman nevertheless thought that even some radical economists had engaged in mathematical fetishism and believed in the inevitability of militarism.  One problem was that some on the Left thought that militiarism could not be eliminated without getting rid of capitalism first.  Yet, Melman recognized that capitalism was a changing system, with trajectories pointing either towards economic democracy or fascist militarism. In any event, he was insistent that overcoming the “state capitalist” system required demilitarization. Like Leninism and Stalinism, the Pentagon has centralized military, economic and political power.  Moreover, some Left economists had overlooked the full opportunity costs of the military economy and failed to link their studies to how basic social institutions could be redesigned.

Nevertheless, Melman helped sustain a critical impulse within the economics profession. Robert Schwarz, founder of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction (which will soon be called Economists for Peace and Security), recalls that Melman “was a very important” influence “in the development of peace economics” and strongly influenced many students and coworkers.  Melman helped train dozens of industrial engineers and scholars concerned with issues related to industrial development, militarism and economic democracy.  His legacy continues in the work of these scholars and close colleagues who worked with him over the years. The fellowship program he sponsored at the Institute for Policy Studies continues to attract activist minded scholars concerned about militarism and economic democracy.  His work is profiled on the website: www.aftercapitalism.org.

Disarmament

For Seymour Melman, disarmament meant the gradual but systematic elimination on a global basis of a militarized society.   He sought to eliminate the economic and political logic that favored military approaches to foreign policy and perpetuated a U.S. state and economy addicted to military spending.  In one public exchange over a decade ago, Melman confronted the militarist ideology that had become common place. In March of 1988 Kenneth Adelman, former chief of the Arms Control and Disarmament under President Reagan, told an audience at the University of Idaho that they must learn to live with nuclear weapons.  He argued that nuclear weapons, delivery systems and strategies could not be “uninvented,” once invented.  After hearing this, Melman writes that he “quickly rose and stated that slavery was once invented, and it got uninvented.”  In the preface to The Demilitarized Society, he elaborated on his core belief: “I can't get myself to accept the war system and its economy as unavoidable.”  In later explaining what it would take to promote comprehensive disarmament, he wrote: “The size of the political movement needed to cause Congress to pass an economic conversion bill and take allied disarmament and economic development action must involve as much as two-thirds of the American population.  Such a majority, organized in support of well-defined concrete measures, is the right order of magnitude for political effect.” 

In the field of disarmament, Melman’s actions resonated at the highest levels. Raskin summarizes some of these contributions as follows: “Seymour from time to time lectured at the National War college, was respected at the Pentagon and had a coterie of admirers there. His use of the word ‘overkill’ gave people a slogan and an understanding of the collective madness we continue to accept.” In 1955, President Eisenhower had argued that “disarmament agreements without adequate reciprocal inspection increase the dangers of war and do not brighten the prospects of peace.” Yet, a research team that Melman led in the 1950s showed how to practically advance disarmament through various inspection systems.  Their research was widely covered throughout the press and reported on the front cover of July 23, 1958 edition of The New York Times.

In one of Seymour Melman’s early books, The Peace Race, published in 1962, he described the various trade offs associated with military expenditures that he would later repeat in other books and Op-Ed articles for The New York Times.  In this book (and in a February 11, 1961 article for The Nation) he critiqued “the arms control doctrine,” writing that “arms control has been given meaning so broad as to include all action and policy, from limitations on armaments as a first step in a disarming process, to arms increases in the context of continued reliance on the military as a primary instrument in international relations.”  Melman’s book had a concrete impact.  It inspired future political leaders of America, including United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young.  It led the Kennedy Administration to borrow the title of Melman’s book for a disarmament pamphlet they published called “Blueprint for the Peace Race.”   The opening to this pamphlet quotes President Kennedy with these words: “not to an arms race but to a peace race—to advance together, step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved.” 

Melman was not naïve about the limits of Kennedy’s dovish side.  He would latter document the limits to Kennedy’s “missile gap.” Melman also told me the story of how a high level official in the Eisenhower Administration sought him out after the 1960 election.  The official complained bitterly to Melman about how Kennedy had had disrespected Eisenhower by calling him militarily weak. The episode revealed that like Kennedy, Eisenhower had two sides.Melman not only popularized Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech on the “military industrial complex,” but also noted in an Appendix to Pentagon Capitalism that Eisenhower in some ways authored the “birth certificate” of this same complex years earlier as a General in 1946.  In his capacity as Chief of Staff of the United States Army, Eisenhower authored a memo which formulated “the idea of a close, continuing relationship between the Army and civilian scientists, industry, technologists and the universities.”

Melman believed that conversion and disarmament were central to what he referred to as breaking the “economic log jam” that created a serious barrier to resolving various social problems in America.  Like Martin Luther King, with whom he once discussed conversion issues, Melman saw a connection between equitable economic development and disarmament.  In a 1994 article for USA Today, Melman recalled a visit to the White House ten days after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in.  He was accompanied by James Farmer, the President of the Congress of Racial Equality: “Johnson wanted a memorandum defining what should be done by way of major economic development and compensatory spending for black Americans and a statement of where the money could come from. I delivered such a memorandum a few days later. It now is known that the Great Society program, launched by Johnson with much fanfare, accounted for a mere eight percent of the government's combined expenditures for its war in Vietnam and its ‘war’ on poverty.” 

Melman argued that “Johnson and his associates” belived in various “core political myths of American society.”  First, “the U.S. has indefinitely large resources and therefore can afford both guns and butter.” Second,  “money is wealth.”  Third, “the money value of what is bought and sold is the proper measure of growth, independently of the absence of use-values for consumption or further production.” Finally, “concentration of income among the very wealthy is a spur to productive investment and therefore to increased employment and production of new wealth.”  Meman linked the failures of the Johnson Administration to an inability “to take into account one of the points in Eisenhower’s Farewell Address–that the military budget had become the largest capital fund in the American economy, each year exceeding the net profits of all U.S. corporations.”

Melman’s belief in the feasability of disarmament was based on his understanding of how the military economy was associated with the deterioration of the machine tool industry, the diversion of engineering talent into military pursuits, and a failure to invest in the educational and physical infrastructure that sustains competitiveness.  His faith in disarmament was also sustained by his recognition of “the limits of military power.” For example, in The Permanent War Economy, he wrote: “As a result of the diversity of technological options that have been developed for weaponry, as in biological warfare, military dominance is not assured even by overwhelming military expenditures.”  He also noted a finding he later applied to the Iraq war, “conventional military forces wielding superior firepower cannot necessarily subdue a military opponent organized along guerrilla lines.”

Economic Conversion and the Peace Dividend

Seymour Melman supported the economic conversion of military industries as a means of achieving disarmament, to limit the pernicious impact of the military on the economy, and to promote employment alternatives for industrial workers and engineers.  He supported “alternative use committees” in which workers and communities would develop alternative civilian plans for their military workplaces.  This vision of democratic planning resonated with an idea promoted by  John Maurice Clark.  As Laurence Shute explains in John Maurice Clark: A Social Economics for the Twenty-First Century, Clark saw that World War I had put an end to the long period of individualism and the war had led to “experiments in new types of control.”  As a result, “Clark devoted attention at several other poitns to the issue of transition from a war-time economy to a peace-time system; he saw in the adjustment period an opportunity for the reexamination of systems of control.”

In advancing the conversion agenda, Melman worked closely with then Senator George McGovern to promote legislation and hearings to promote economic planning in support of disarmament in the 1960s and 1970s. In his autobiography, Grassroots, George McGovern recalls working with Melman: “I drafted the National Economic Conversion Act and introduced it in the Senate on October 31, 1963.  The measure won the co-sponsorship of thirty-one other senators and the support of prominent editors, labor leaders and business groups.  It would have set in motion planning mechanisms at the federal, state and local levels to assist in the transition from war to peacetime production.  It would also have required defense contractors to allocate a portion of their own budgets to planning their own contingencies in case of conversion.”  McGovern explains that Melman “convinced me that with proper planning and wise public investment we could actually increase the number of jobs by reallocating excessive arms spending to housing, transportation and urban development.”  Twenty-five years later, Melman convinced Jim Wright, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, to promote economic conversion legislation. Wright’s bill built on the conversion legislation of Representative Theodore Weiss which originated in proposals developed earlier for McGovern by Melman and his then Columbia University colleague Lloyd J. Dumas. Wright gave the new  legislation the number H.R. 101, which reflected the number of the Congress about to open.  Melman explained that Wright believed that this designation “would have both symbolic and dramatic effect,” and indicated the level of importance which Wright placed in the legislation.

While the Vietnam War had diminished the Great Society peace dividend, the end of the Cold War created an historic opportunity for not only disarmament and economic conversion but the embrace of Seymour Melman’s ideas.  His work was featured in a lengthy television profile with Bill Moyers, a major Business Week article on the peace dividend, in op-eds in The New York Times, and in other newspapers like the Chicago Tribune.   Leading up to these activities, Melman joined forces with a network of scholars, political leaders and activists to establish the National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament in the in the late 1980s. In 1990, this network organized a National Town Meeting and radio broadcast called, “The U.S. After the Cold War: Claiming the Peace Dividend,” aired by about forty radio stations linked to about sixty local face to face town meetings discussing how military budget reductions could promote civilian needs. In a build up to the meeting, Melman and I attended an annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors where we lobbied mayors to embrace political organizing around the peace dividend.  Melman was surprised that we were the only progressive political organizing voice represented. It was one sign that a small group of individuals could make a difference and that Melman was ready to leave his Columbia University office to jump into action when necessary.

At the town meeting, Melman was joined by various political leaders including George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Barry Commoner, Richard Celeste, the Governor of Ohio, Claiborne Pell, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the mayors of several cities including New York, Boston, Altanta, Philadelphia, and Seattle.  The event was kicked off when Melman announced the meeting on NBC’s Today Show with an 800 number, “1-800-SAVEUSA,” to the utter horror of the program’s host, Bryant Gumbel.   Melman had been invited to the show to discuss themes raised in a December 17, 1989 New York Times Op-Ed article on the peace dividend.  Melman was not invited on too many television programs after that, but his intervention was but yet another example of his seizing the opportunities which history had presented.  Seymour Melman was a “committed intellectual,” not simply an academic out to score points in his career. 

Economic Democracy and Reindustrialization

In the field of economic democracy, Seymour Melman spent a year working on a kibbutz in Israel at the close of the 1930s.   Before the birth of Israel, he was Secretary of the Student Zionist Federation and worked to promote Jewish and Arab cooperation under the framework of a bi-national solution to the  “Palestine question.”  Like Zellig Harris, in the 1940s Melman believed that the common class interests of Jews and Arabs should take priority over divisive nationalist interests. 
Melman wrote several books outlining how cooperative economic relations could contribute to economic growth, productivity and job security.  These books showed, in the expression made popular by Marxist scholar C. L. R. James, that “the Future is in the Present,” i.e., parts of the new society of democratic cooperation could already be witnessed in present day capitalist relations.  If one example was the Israeli kibbutz, another was the vast cooperative network of Mondragon in Spain that joined over a hundred cooperatives and employed thousands. This future society also bore witness in the “gang system” in which workers cooperated on the factory floor, in cooperative decision-making in which worker oversight reduced defects and improved the quality and speed of productive output.  These productivity benefits, together with the potential advantages of worker ownership, provided a “materialist” basis for believing in the extension of a new, more democratic, economy. In his studies of labor-management cooperation in the 1950s, he had already foreseen the productivity benefits of labor management cooperation in what was called “the Toyota system” some twenty to thirty years later.  Yet, Melman was not an economic growth technocrat.  In his books and in public meetings, he often referred to the need for alternative energy, mass transportation and an environmentally sustainable “means of production.”  Melman was an early pioneer in the “alternative technology” movement.

In this era of globalization and rapid capital mobility, Seymour Melman was a committed internationalist but also feared the destruction of basic industry. Melman worked with and trained an international network of researchers whose studies included investigations of the military economy and conversion alternatives in Russia, Sweden, Italy, Israel and Great Britain among other countries.  In a United Nations sponsored investigation of economic conversion, Melman toured the globe promoting an analysis of these questions. 

During the Vietnam War and a cycle of conversion organizing that took place in the early 1980s, Melman’s ideas gained a foothold in Europe.  In Sweden, for example, long time peace advocate Bernt Jonsson, recalls Melman’s influence. Jonsson worked closely with Inga Thorsson and Maj-Britt Theorin, two of the leading Social Democratic politicians promoting economic conversion in Sweden.   Thorsson was the author of the landmark conversion study, In Pursuit of Disarmament: Conversion from Military to Civil Production in Sweden, published in 1984.  Jonsson explains that Melman “was a great asset in our discussions during the 1970s and 1980s.”  The arguments in The Permanent War Economy were used to inform the Swedish debate about disarmament. He was “a great inspiration for us who were politically involved in the conversion discussions.”   Thorsson and Theorin had close contact  with Melman.  These Swedish conversion leaders “met him both in New York and in Sweden.”

Strongly opposed to the idea of achieving a “post-industrial society” as championed by his contemporary Daniel Bell, Seymour Melman warned about the dangers of plant closings and capital flight back in the early 1960s.  In The Peace Race (1962), Melman wrote: “There are coal-mining areas, cotton textile towns of New England and cities all over the country which bear the burden of abandonment by managements who have moved factories to more advantageous places.  The result is often a record of contradiction between private commercial interest and public welfare.  Poverty is [extensive] in the 100 industrial areas and 300 rural counties that are chronically depressed. All together about 20 million people live in these depressed areas.” 

Forty years later, Seymour Melman argued that managerial control systems “alienating” workers from control over their jobs were not only costing blue collar jobs, but also white collar and engineering jobs.  In a monograph on the Mondragon cooperative published in 2002, he described the potential impacts of the Daimler Benz take over of the U.S. Chrysler Corporation. He noted his expectation that “the German central offices and facilities will become increasingly important for the design of products that will be produced and marketing in the U.S. as Chrysler products.  This means that there will be less employment of engineers and technicians in the United States.”  In his book, After Capitalism, Melman warned about the growing outsourcing of white collar workers, for example the shift of engineering jobs at Boeing to countries like China. 

Recently, Melman organized with colleague Jonathan Rynn, a conference at Columbia University outlining the benefits of reindustrialization and the multi-billion dollar benefits of New York City’s ability to capture some of the jobs attached to producing its own subway cars. Melman saw manufacturing as a bedrock of employment opportunities and vital to economic vitality. The other side of Post Industrial ideology was the reality that no manufacturer of subway cars exists today in the United States.  While some see this reality as validating Bell’s claim, others see a dangerous turn that is not economically sustainable.  Like his colleague Professor John Ullmann of Hofstra University, Melman saw evidence that parts of the United States (particularly its rotting infrastructure and depleted industrial capacity) resembled conditions found in a Third World country.  These conditions were wrought by the diversion of scientific talent, industrial assets, and budgetary resources into “depletionary” military spending (an important theme addressed by Ullmann and Lloyd J. Dumas of the University of Texas at Dallas, another colleague of Melman’s).  The “depletionary” school of thought saw that the military was only good for a small segment of military capitalists and in the long run hurt the larger economy and even defense workers vulnerable to the “boom and bust” cycle of defense procurement.

A Vision of Politics

Seymour Melman was of two minds about the role of intellectuals and organizing in producing social change.  On the one hand, he believed that when it came to making the economy more democratic, working people organizing “from below” had devised new systems of democratic participation, worker ownership and cooperation that did not require the intervention of intellectuals.  He believed that the role of intellectuals was often “limited to telling the truth” and exposing the evils of militarism, deindustrialization, and related social ills.  On the other hand, Melman recognized that the leaders of many social movements were short-sighted.  For example, he was particularly troubled by how the peace movement would often ignore social science knowledge and the need for systematic reforms related to the dismantling the warfare state through a comprehensive disarmament process and economic conversion.  He was therefore a strong believer in bridging the gap between theory and practice (between academics and organizers), through direct involvement with grassroots organizations, teach-ins, and scholarship.  Hence, his contacts with various political leaders and lectures to trade union and peace groups across the country.

Melman supported principled candidates from both Third Parties and the Democratic Party.  Thus, in 1948 he supported Norman Thomas, candidate of the Socialist Party over Henry Wallace, candidate of the Progressive Party, and Harry Truman, Cold War architect and Democratic Party candidate.  In 1972, he backed George McGovern, leader of economic conversion efforts in the Senate.  Nevertheless, his commitments to the more restrictive sense of “politics” reflected his belief that fundamental change depended upon active citizen involvement and democratizing the economy.  While state capitalism had made trade unions highly dependent on defense procurement, Melman believed that the extension of economic democracy could create an alternative system of accumulating power from below, independent of Pentagon largess.  In recent years, he was contacted by a Republican Congressman fearful that outsourcing by the Pentagon was hurting his district and the larger defense industrial base.  Thus, as military managers abdicated the organization of military work, a further crack emerged in corporatist coalitions sustaining military Keynesianism.  Ultimately, Melman believed that these and other contradictions could create a space for the systematic program of conversion and disarmament that he supported.  As noted, he repeatedly intervened when such opportunities to influence politics presented themselves.

An opponent of both the Iraq war and the rapidly growing industrial deterioration of the United States, Seymour Melman was in the end an optimist.  In one of our last conversations this past December, I had called him about a Business Week article relaying the competitive failures of the U.S. against Chinese producers.  As we discussed the long-term political dangers of the deteriorating U.S. economy and the Bush failures in Iraq, Melman said that he was “optimistic” that the waste, fraud and incompetence of Bush’s disastrous political and economic policies would prove unsustainable.  The regime of economic depletion promoted by accelerated military spending would not live forever.  Melman’s last book, currently in press with Common Courage Press, War Inc., is a testament to this optimism.  It describes the possibilities for revitalized manufacturing and analyzes how mobilization around infrastructure needs could help trigger an alternative to the permanent war economy.

The author was a graduate fellow who studied at Columbia University under Seymour Melman’s direction from 1986-1987 and worked with him as a Program Director and Senior Fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based National Commission for Economic Conversion and Disarmament (1987-1990). He has written widely about economic and political alternatives to the permanent war economy.  The author would like to thank Ben Abrams, Robert Barksky, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence B. Cohen, Lloyd J. Dumas, Bernt Jonsson, Robert Krinsky, Marcus Raskin and John Ullmann for their help in preparing this essay.

The author can be reached at JonathanMFeldman@hotmail.com.
Phone: 46707981634.