Re: <nettime> managerialism

On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 3:06 PM, Örsan Şenalp <orsan1234@gmail.com> wrote:

Marx's analysis of society has traditionally advanced a two-class
framework; of worker and capitalist. In Managerial Capitalism, Gerard
Dumenil and Dominique Levy argue that a transition is underway towards
a new mode of production, shaped by a third, intermediary class:
managerialism. With a focus on the US and Europe in particular, the
authors provide a historically rooted interpretation of major current
economic and political trends. They argue that the transition towards
managerialism as a new mode of production is much more advanced than
usually understood, especially in the US. While reasserting the
explanatory power of Marx's theory of history and political economy,
they update the Marxian framework to incorporate the transformation
of relations of production and class patterns whose main _expression_
has been the rise of managerial features. The book makes the case for
a revision of Marxist analysis on analytical as well as political
grounds, to demonstrate that capitalism is entering a new period based
on managerialism.

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.

Keith

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