4 ms·
There are quite a few similarities. I remember realizing that the typical MBA is essentially indistinguishable from the Soviet "apparatchik." http://en.wikiped
by api 13y ago
There are quite a few similarities. I remember realizing that the typical MBA is essentially indistinguishable from the Soviet "apparatchik."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik
"Members of the "apparat" were frequently transferred between different areas of responsibility, usually with little or no actual training for their new areas of responsibility. Thus, the term apparatchik, or "agent of the apparatus" was usually the best possible description of the person's profession and occupation."
- dotcoma 13y agoBest comparison/definition of MBA guys ever :))
- seclorum 13y agoYou could use the same definition on software developers, too.
- dotcoma 13y agoMaybe so. For mediocre ones, perhaps. I'm not a software developer anyway. Sorry if this will disappoint you, but I'm actually in mktg/sales.
- seclorum 13y agoMeans nothing to me what you personally do for a living. I'm pretty sure there are aparatchik sales people, or at least I'm quite confident I might've dated a few, admittedly rare, in my youth..
- api 13y agoI didn't mean all businesspeople or all anything. I meant the mediocre MBA types who shuffle around from company to company and try to monetize units of... wait... what is it we sell again?
- scarmig 13y agoAnd that makes finance... Gosplan? =) The dominant ideology and paradigm of today is pretty brilliant. Partisans of neoliberalism always portray it as somehow the natural order of things, arising anytime people and institutions are free to self organize. In reality, though, the supposed guiding invisible hand is the veiled fist of the State. Its magic comes from decentralizing and shifting individual and systemic accountability while still allowing for the world to be dominated by a hierarchy of power. The State has created a world where people to effortlessly flow between government and ostensibly private institutions, even when one or the other has failed miserably: free floating MBAs are one manifestation of that tendency. And the resilient network structure of power makes it impossible to effect change by holding any nexus responsible for moral failure. The current world system is a mirror of the 1970s and 1980s USSR, except done much more efficiently. In a way, there was much more transparency in the Brezhnev era USSR: everyone, foreign and domestic, saw clearly through the thin air of lies and perceived directly the systemic corruption of its government. In the USA today, far too many of us chase colorful glamours, ignorant that the world we see is just the passed dispersion of a prism.