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Is the Professional Managerial Classes inherently reactionary? (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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To me they're like mere servants of the State, like Lenin talked about in "2. What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine?" in his writing "The State and Revolution"

Under Capitalism, they are its privileged knights that try to deflect and control, if not defend directly its image as "the only option", who have their incentive in doing so, with their class status stake being in their duty to shepherd the means of production and its resulting benefits

However, they don't own the means of production, as they merely manage it for the landholding, industrialist, and financier capitalists

On the other hand, under Socialism, while its privileges will be probably be done away, the PM class on its own would innovated upon, for their new duty of overseeing, managing, and reporting the collectivized cooperatives and state-owned enterprises..

Until the final stage of Communism arrives, I think they're pretty handy

I say this, because I hear such disgusted sentiment in Hexbear against them

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Even under socialism, planning will be done collectively, and the role of the manager will be obsolete.

Let me explain.

In Capitalism, the manager will be developing workflow, task priorities, and internal marketing nudges. Their compensation is directly proportional to the performance of their team, based on how well they meet/exceed benchmarks/quotas.

In socialism, there will be central planning. Ownership is collective, meaning the team will directly have a stake in the success of the project/task. Their own compensation (monetary or otherwise) is directly related to the performance of themselves and their peers. So, how a team will organize their workflow, manage priorities, etc, will be up to the team.

The result is that they will outperform any capitalist manager, because not only do they have a personal stake in meeting the benchmarks/quotas, but they also have the most experience in performing the task. There will be advisors to give them tools and techniques, meaning the team will get management training.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's not clear to me why management would become obsolete. Good management (the coordination of people, resources, and timelines) requires skill and is a science, and the efficiency we get from division of labour/specialization suggests workplaces would be better off if some workers specialized in management roles.

See, for example, Krupskaya:

We, Russians, have hitherto shown little sophistication in this science of management. However, without studying it, without learning to manage, we will not only not make it to communism, but not even to socialism.

https://redsails.org/the-taylor-system/

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You’re talking about project management, (the coordination of people resources and timelines) which is only one of the aspects of management, and is useful for larger projects that you’re only going to build once, like infrastructure or larger experiments.

For these, you would need a coordinator that gathers and prioritizes info, like a planner or project coordinator.

There’s two other components. One of which is workflow optimization, which is for repetitive tasks like manufacturing or information processing. And the other is keeping up employee morale, also known as internal marketing.

For these, a manager is useless for the reasons stated above. However, the workers themselves would need to learn the relevant skills that the managers have.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Workflow optimization and employee morale will still be important under socialism.

Workflow optimization is just management of people/resources/timelines (and is present in non-repetitive jobs too): what processes aren't working well together, what were the root causes of issues we encountered, how do we fix these problems? This, too, gets better with experience and study and some workers should specialize in this sort of management.

Employee morale (and other aspects of emotional work) will also still be a relevant question under socialism: how do you balance a specific worker's development interests with the needs of the job, how do you manage interpersonal conflict, how do you build consensus for or mediate disagreement raising from decisions the group needs to make? Straight-up boring old motivation questions also do not disappear just because workers have a stake in the fruits of their labour.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And I’m not suggesting that it will disappear, only that it will by done by the team itself, not by a manager who only has a stake in the performance of the team.

If you have a conflict between your DND game and a commitment to your family, you don’t need a manager to help you resolve it. Similarly, if your raid group is optimizing runs for your MMORPG, you don’t hire a manager.

Even if you’re a manager for your team, most of what you do is gather data and feedback from your team and observe their workflow, and then pass that information back to them. That’s inefficiency in movement of information right there.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

I think you are very narrowly defining manager as a manager of capital (i.e., seeking to maximize profits without care for what products are being made). I think you should read this: https://redsails.org/the-relationships-between-capitalists/

As Marx later emphasizes, one consequence of the development of management as a distinct category of labor is that the profits still received by owners can no longer be justified as the compensation for organizing the production process. But what about the managers themselves, how should we think about them? Are they really laborers, or capitalists? Well, both — their position is ambiguous. On the one hand, they are performing a social coordination function, that any extended division of labor will require. But on the other hand, they are the representatives of the capitalist class in the coercive, adversarial labor process that is specific to capitalism.

It is only the last part — the coercive, adversarial role played as representatives of capital — that will become obsolete. The coordination part of management (which includes coaching and motivation and conflict resolution) will remain.

My experience with organizations, from families to RPG groups to community associations to capitalist enterprises, is that in a management void, some people will take on management responsibilities. Since these roles require skill and entail responsibility for certain tasks, it's better to formalize it and train people for it. Do you not also see this in the organizations you are part of? Or could you be underestimating the amount of labour others are putting in to managing your community?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

The work of Taylor wasn't just for projects, but its focus was on measuring activities done in production. You can see those ideas being developed later on with Fordism and further in Toyotism, each with their own breakthroughs.

I think scientific management will develop further in communist societies, since labor need to be organized. One of many contributions of capitalism when compared to feudalism was specialization and then breakdown of very complex processes in smaller simpler tasks. However, in communism, the tendency is that the technical aspects of production will remain while the socio-economic relations will change, since there will not be exploiter and exploitable classes anymore.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is the PMC an actual class? Anarchists think so. Some labor organizers think so (especially those with anarchist tendencies). But the PMC are non-owners. They are more akin to petite bourgeoisie, but with even less reason to be reactionary.

Under socialism, I would like to see the responsibility of oversight and reporting to be through elected representative managers, not overseers - elected by the workers from among their peers, based on those who show the greatest potential for reducing the chaos of work through empathy forged in lived experience.

The PMC has changed over the last century, and it has many segments. Many who would be considered a sort of the PMC are actually intellectual workers solving abstract problems and then trying to implement those solutions in real conditions. I don't know that it makes sense to treat it as a real class.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Who even came up with the term "professional managerial class" anyway? Like are we not allowed to have professionals managers under socialism?

Lenin and Engels used the term labor aristocracy, which is much clearer and to the point anyway.