On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 3:06 PM, Örsan Şenalp <orsan1...@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
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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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