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Interesting to see this sort of reflection happening again 80 years after Burnham published The Managerial Revolution. (Something waking people up. What could i

by pnf 4y ago

Interesting to see this sort of reflection happening again 80 years after Burnham published The Managerial Revolution. (Something waking people up. What could it be?) Burnham outlined a lot of the same points about the new ruling class and their ideologies, which were extremely prescient but, it turns out, decades too early. WWII interrupted the trends he was observing in ways he did not forsee in 1941. But today the managerial revolution seems to be completed, without many people even noticing. We talk about a capitalist society when we live under managerialism. (Annoyingly, Burnham is wordy and fussily precise in that book, repeatedly referring to capitalism, socialism, and...managerial society. I'm glad the author corrected that to simply "managerialism".)

drewcoo 4y ago
Bureaucracy, managerial or otherwise, is ossification of a system. Is that a problem? Only when the system itself exhibits even minor problems. With rigid bureaucracy in place, corrections to those problems become major tasks, requiring changes to the bureaucratic structures surrounding them. Frankly, I'm more concerned with mass-marketed ideologies, with people conflating their own identities with something advertised to them. Especially post-WWII, we've rigid, often diametrically opposed, ideologies stopping societal corrections more than bureaucracy could hope to. Both of those traits exist in capitalism and socialism. I think capitalism has the incentives (and inherent competition) in place to really refine marketing better, though. Maybe that's why it seems to be a bigger problem in a capitalist country.
- bshepard 4y ago
  Managerialism can work with both capitalist and state socialist structures. This kind of pragmatism is a great strength of the so-called "manager-fractal" - it doesn't matter, really, what the content of management is, because management is formal -- an absolutely new SHAPE of organizing human beings, one whose novelty and brutality we do not consider enough.
  - pnf 4y ago
    Burnham argues (persuasively, imho) that managerialism is a third type of social structure, and that the argument for only either capitalism OR socialism per Marx is a false dichotomy. That modernized version of that brutality you mention was demostrated for many by the past two years of management. China currently has, arguably, the most explicit and advanced form of managerialism but the West is no slouch and moving further in that direction daily (Managerialism with Western characteristics). The pandemic accelerated the trend.
    - bshepard 4y ago
      Burnham's prediction shows his Marxist background: instead of thinking about social formations as alliances, he sees them inevitably as conflicts with a single dominant victor, in Marx's case the victorious class is the proletariat, in Burnhams, the "manager' --- but what actually seems to have happened is a fusion of managers and the capitalist class to create a new kind of social formation -- something we wrote about here: https://deepsocks.substack.com/p/clocking-out https://deepsocks.substack.com/p/clocking-out
      - pnf 4y ago
        Agree about Burnham's Marxist background showing throughout his analysis and predictions, and tend to find it inadequate in many respects, but he would likely reply that the so-called alliance is a temporary stage in the transition to managerialism and that the alliance is better understood as individual capitalist finding positions within the new managerial ruling class and becoming managers along the same lines as feudal lord's becoming capitalists during the previous social revolution. (Not sure if that is the meaning of your "manager-as-owner" designation.) It seems clearer when one looks at the CCP where the capitalists are clearly subordinate to the manager class. Or in Soviet Russia where the managers eliminated the capitalists and to control over the distribution of productive wealth. (In contemporary oligarchic Russia there was a seeming inversion of the process post-USSR but I understand those positions as being subordinate to the state. Something like "serving at the pleasure of the state". And of course in Nazi Germany there was an apparent alliance of the big capitalists thinking they would have better luck controlling Hitler than the revolutionary labor movements. I understand managerialism to be rule by those who have (or are thought to have) the skill to coordinate the productive capacities complex modern vertically and horizontally integrated economies at scale. TARP was a good example. The Global Pandemic Response is another. It is the updated, digitally enabled, realization of the dreams of Technocracy, as articulated by that early 20th century dream if globally coordinated, centrally planned, supranational managerialism.

by pnf 4y ago

drewcoo 4y ago

Bureaucracy, managerial or otherwise, is ossification of a system. Is that a problem? Only when the system itself exhibits even minor problems. With rigid bureaucracy in place, corrections to those problems become major tasks, requiring changes to the bureaucratic structures surrounding them. Frankly, I'm more concerned with mass-marketed ideologies, with people conflating their own identities with something advertised to them. Especially post-WWII, we've rigid, often diametrically opposed, ideologies stopping societal corrections more than bureaucracy could hope to. Both of those traits exist in capitalism and socialism. I think capitalism has the incentives (and inherent competition) in place to really refine marketing better, though. Maybe that's why it seems to be a bigger problem in a capitalist country.

bshepard 4y ago
Managerialism can work with both capitalist and state socialist structures. This kind of pragmatism is a great strength of the so-called "manager-fractal" - it doesn't matter, really, what the content of management is, because management is formal -- an absolutely new SHAPE of organizing human beings, one whose novelty and brutality we do not consider enough.
- pnf 4y ago
  Burnham argues (persuasively, imho) that managerialism is a third type of social structure, and that the argument for only either capitalism OR socialism per Marx is a false dichotomy. That modernized version of that brutality you mention was demostrated for many by the past two years of management. China currently has, arguably, the most explicit and advanced form of managerialism but the West is no slouch and moving further in that direction daily (Managerialism with Western characteristics). The pandemic accelerated the trend.
  - bshepard 4y ago
    Burnham's prediction shows his Marxist background: instead of thinking about social formations as alliances, he sees them inevitably as conflicts with a single dominant victor, in Marx's case the victorious class is the proletariat, in Burnhams, the "manager' --- but what actually seems to have happened is a fusion of managers and the capitalist class to create a new kind of social formation -- something we wrote about here: https://deepsocks.substack.com/p/clocking-out https://deepsocks.substack.com/p/clocking-out
    - pnf 4y ago
      Agree about Burnham's Marxist background showing throughout his analysis and predictions, and tend to find it inadequate in many respects, but he would likely reply that the so-called alliance is a temporary stage in the transition to managerialism and that the alliance is better understood as individual capitalist finding positions within the new managerial ruling class and becoming managers along the same lines as feudal lord's becoming capitalists during the previous social revolution. (Not sure if that is the meaning of your "manager-as-owner" designation.) It seems clearer when one looks at the CCP where the capitalists are clearly subordinate to the manager class. Or in Soviet Russia where the managers eliminated the capitalists and to control over the distribution of productive wealth. (In contemporary oligarchic Russia there was a seeming inversion of the process post-USSR but I understand those positions as being subordinate to the state. Something like "serving at the pleasure of the state". And of course in Nazi Germany there was an apparent alliance of the big capitalists thinking they would have better luck controlling Hitler than the revolutionary labor movements. I understand managerialism to be rule by those who have (or are thought to have) the skill to coordinate the productive capacities complex modern vertically and horizontally integrated economies at scale. TARP was a good example. The Global Pandemic Response is another. It is the updated, digitally enabled, realization of the dreams of Technocracy, as articulated by that early 20th century dream if globally coordinated, centrally planned, supranational managerialism.