On 09/17/2017 05:28 PM, Örsan Şenalp wrote:
The agency of managerial class, which is preparing to claim full economic
and political power, unified, absolute is Musk, and Schmidt.
The way Trump translates such thrust, and by reversing towards national
capitalists, sounds and looks like fascism
Which was a form of managerial class power-claim; though was not aiming
absolute power.
Orsan, just in the spirit of good debate, I'd like to say that I see
only one country in the world right now where "managerial capitalism" is
in the ascendant, that's China. Everywhere else the state-corporate
connection has eroded and private ownership has come back seriously to
the fore.
Probably most nettimers never heard of James Burnham's 1941 book, "The
Managerial Revolution." In it, Burnham described the eclipse of the
nineteenth-century owner-entrepreneur and the rise of corporate
bureaucratic structures working in close cooperation with the state. The
idea had already been formulated as early as 1932 by A.A. Berle and
Gardiner Means in their book "The Modern Corporation and Private
Property." They found that the rise of shareholding "has destroyed the
unity that we commonly call property," transferring control from de jure
owners to de facto managers. The notion that modern corporations
represented a form of social property was used in turn by the Roosevelt
administration to justify vast new regulatory powers of the state, which
were legitimated by the rather obvious need for an adequate steering
mechanism to get through the Great Depression. Burnham, even though he
was in the process of becoming a reactionary, asserted in substance that
the New Deal was now the universal form of the mid-twentieth-century
state, visible also in the total mobilization of the Nazis and in the
Soviet five year plans. During the war (1942-45 for the Yanks) the
American state took direct control of corporate activity, to the point
where the new look of capitalism became a lot harder to ignore. In the
decades that followed, liberal commentators such as Galbraith or Raymond
Aron agreed in substance with Burnham, as did the British Trotskyist
Tony Cliff, in his 1955 book "State Capitalism in Russia."
OK, end of history lesson. Let's talk about the present.
In the Brexit and Trump campaigns, massive nostalgia was expressed for
the prosperity of the 1950s, with flag-waving nationalism standing in
for the unutterable reality of state capitalism. In the US, Steve Bannon
represented the demand for "economic nationalism." That demand remains
the centerpiece of Trump's rhetoric, but otherwise it's going nowhere.
The news is full of owner-entrepreneurs: Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, Brin,
Page, Koch (times 3), Buffet, etc. Their rise is the culmination of a
deliberate plan to reverse the New Deal, carried out by the libertarian
capitalists of the 1960s and 70s whose names we all now know (if you
don't, just check out Jane Meyer's "Dark Money," in that book the US
libertarian contingent is characterized in all its gory details).
Shareholder activism and the imperative of return on investment has put
an end to the comfortable distance between managers and owners.
Government Sachs (I mean, the preponderance of major bankers in US and
European administrations) appears much more as a hostile takeover than
as a merger of equals. What's missing in this equation is just Hillary:
the chance for the oligarchs to make an enduring political deal. But
it's not there, the instrumental rationalism that characterized Cold War
varieties of state capitalism is nowhere to be found. What you have
instead is the classic plague that Marx denounced: uncoordinated market
chaos.
Today in his speech at the United Nations, Trump declared unlimited
national sovereignty - to the point of nuking North Korea if necessary.
Is it managerial capitalism? Hardly. For that you need good old
bureaucratic deliberation, which is what put the chill in the Cold War.
Instead, hot Trump at the UN is just the rantings of a psycopathic
narcissist appealing to all the Americans who have been left in the
lurch by the arbitrary market-based evolution of chaotic neoliberal
capitalism, where rationality is a quaint relic of how your grandfather
did things.
The hallmarks of contemporary society are the daily quest for maximum
profit, plus blind navigation with no care for the future. The
mid-twentieth century attempt to create a steering mechanism has been
entirely abandoned. Obviously populations (including myself by the way)
are absolutely terrified about what might happen next. Many are even
stupid enough to vote for fools who promise whatever, a return to the
good old days. However, only one country continues to deploy the steady
deliberate power that everyone else rejected sometime in the late 1960s.
Alone among governing elites, the Chinese Communist Party continues to
apply reason to reality. The problems with its ratio are obvious: it was
"glorious" (ie rational) to get rich in the 1980s and 90s, according to
the famous axiom of Deng Xioaping. Except unfortunately that meant that
China became the low-wage, high-pollution manufacturing platform for
Western corporations, or the "imperial handmaid" of the US, as one New
Left Review article put it. In 2008 the Chinese elites realized their
folly and set about correcting their course, so as to develop their own
middle-class consumer base and start moving their industries up the
value chain. Now, with the "One Belt, One Road" policy, they want to
extend their brand of industrial civilization along a Central Asian
transportation corridor stretching all the way to the biggest consumer
market in the world, namely the European Union. The point of their new
plan is to do like the US managerial capitalists did in the 1950s: use
geopolitical domination to ensure vast corporate markets, not only for
light consumer goods but also for heavy producer goods. This is what an
integrated state-corporate complex does. It's the time-honored,
twentieth-century way of resolving a major crisis.
I don't believe in the Chinese Communist Party any more than I believed
in Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan. However I do see the CCP practicing a
form of managerial capitalism, and I think that if they were able to
bring ecological imperatives into their state-led pattern of development
(as they seem to be trying to do) that might have real benefits for
humanity and maybe even other species. As for the rest, I think that the
gap between the rhetoric of economic nationalism and the reality of
owner-entrepreneurialism is simply the proof that in the so-called West,
the crisis that emerged in 2008 continues on unabated. How could it not?
No Western polity has invented any new power of collective governance on
the scale of the nation, let alone on the global scale. The postwar
liberal world-order is broken and nothing has replaced it. China may
well invent something new, beyond managerial capitalism. It's normal,
they're the new hegemon. Meanwhile the so-called West has regressed to a
chaotic owner-entrepreneurialism, and if no new steering mechanism is
found we will all sink into an ersatz fascism without a plan, which is
just the panic response to market chaos.
Is panic a synonym of managerial capitalism? I don't think so. But maybe
I have misunderstood you, Orsan. The point of all good debate is to
thrash out understandings, misunderstandings and counter-understandings,
until some sharable form of clarity emerges. I aim at nothing else.
all the best, Brian
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