Branko Milanovic --
When I arrived in the United States, coming from the worker-management world of Titoist Yugoslavia, I was somewhat surprised how Americans took the strongly hierarchical, quasi dictatorial relations in the business world as fully “normal”. I was half expecting that workers would have a say in the choice of their “managers” (actually, for a long time, I could not even figure out who exactly is a “manager”) but of course they did not. The promotions were made by cooption or even direct appointment of lower echelons by the higher echelons. And of course, the management was selected by the owners themselves. So the system was entirely top-down: the top selected the down it liked to have. It was remarkably similar to the political system from which I came. There too the Central Committee coopted its new members; these selected their replacements and so forth down to the lowest level of Communist Party cell. Formally speaking, American companies were organized like the Communist Party. In both cases, to paraphrase Bertold Brecht, the leadership selected their employees, or their citizens. In one case the dictatorship was in the social sphere, in another in the work sphere.
This point is important. There is a further implication. The similarity of the Communist Party and American companies was reflected in the shared emergence of a managerial class; these were very complicated entities without internal market signals, and it takes a lot of managerial capacity to run such organizations. And those people emerge as a class with their own interests.
"The New Class" as the Yugoslav dissident (eventually) Milovan Djilas labelled them.
There is a lineage from the realization of 1950s Communism that something new had emerged, to noticing the same feature of large corporations in "the West," to the rise of an upper middle class in Europe and North America organized around credentials, consultancy / management / professions, to the Peak Bobo presidency of Barack Obama. And the backlash, the reveling in ignorance and the ostensible appeal to "physical" work of Donald Trump and his fellow strongman populists. Who are neither strong, nor populist, but anyway.
When I arrived in the United States, coming from the worker-management world of Titoist Yugoslavia, I was somewhat surprised how Americans took the strongly hierarchical, quasi dictatorial relations in the business world as fully “normal”. I was half expecting that workers would have a say in the choice of their “managers” (actually, for a long time, I could not even figure out who exactly is a “manager”) but of course they did not. The promotions were made by cooption or even direct appointment of lower echelons by the higher echelons. And of course, the management was selected by the owners themselves. So the system was entirely top-down: the top selected the down it liked to have. It was remarkably similar to the political system from which I came. There too the Central Committee coopted its new members; these selected their replacements and so forth down to the lowest level of Communist Party cell. Formally speaking, American companies were organized like the Communist Party. In both cases, to paraphrase Bertold Brecht, the leadership selected their employees, or their citizens. In one case the dictatorship was in the social sphere, in another in the work sphere.
This point is important. There is a further implication. The similarity of the Communist Party and American companies was reflected in the shared emergence of a managerial class; these were very complicated entities without internal market signals, and it takes a lot of managerial capacity to run such organizations. And those people emerge as a class with their own interests.
"The New Class" as the Yugoslav dissident (eventually) Milovan Djilas labelled them.
There is a lineage from the realization of 1950s Communism that something new had emerged, to noticing the same feature of large corporations in "the West," to the rise of an upper middle class in Europe and North America organized around credentials, consultancy / management / professions, to the Peak Bobo presidency of Barack Obama. And the backlash, the reveling in ignorance and the ostensible appeal to "physical" work of Donald Trump and his fellow strongman populists. Who are neither strong, nor populist, but anyway.
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