Re: <nettime> managerialism

On 8 Jan 2018, at 11:55, Keith Hart <keith@thememorybank.co.uk> wrote:

I don't get what is new about this or how the book places itself in the history of the idea. I wonder if they consider, even within Marxist texts, Charles Bettelheim Economic Calculation and the Forms of Property. Monthly Review Press, 1975 (1963 in French) which argued that the Soviet Union was state capitalist, not socialist and indusrial management there hardly different at all from the US. This argument was put forward the other way round in Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick H. Harbison, and Charles A. Myers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problem of Labor and Management in Economic Growth. Harvard University Press, 1960. Kerr was UC Berkeley’s first Chancellor, so I suppose that disqualifies him. And what about Peter Drucker who wrote over 40 books on and around this topic from 1932 to 2008 (posthumous). See Peter Drucker, The Essential Drucker, Harper Busness, 2001. Drucker was vilified for claiming that GM was a badly run company while it is was still apparently successful and long before it collapsed.

The book is not out yet, but arguments the authors make in their recent articles sound very important to me, when rethinking different versions of corporatism as managerial class mediated consensus projects; since the progressive era, new medievalism, guildism, institutionalism, Fabianism, social democracy, state-capitalism (socialism), Keynesianism, fascism, as well as third-way, or today's tech-technocracy, new-networked fascism and nazism (http://www.cepremap.fr/membres/dlevy/biblioa.htm).

In the long 20th cc managerial class fractions played a mediator role, between the ruling and ruled classes; capitalist and workers. They mediated their ideologies; liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and communism. By making alliances and formulating consensus based on compromise between them. Since the 90s with the emergence of ICTs neo-liberal managerialism and authoritarianism it erect as a dominant class candidate, for itself, able to promote its own agenda, as a new mode of production. Managerial capitalism (or platform capitalism) refers this so-called and so-promoted post-capitalism of managerial class.

The below recent piece, by Kees Van der Pijl, is complementary to their argument I think:

https://www.academia.edu/35601607/Surveillance_Capitalism_and_Crisis

Best,

Orsan