A Machine Can Do That
Yes. I am struggling.
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
That’s Peter Drucker talking back in the days when it was easy to discuss the future. He was full of what seem trite sayings about what was ahead of us, after all he was fundamental to the development of modern management capitalism. There is an air of optimism about his work that looks odd in juxtaposition with contemporary angst. The road he portrayed with its reliance on rational methods, the search for efficiency, professional management, and his urge to us to “create our own futures” has led us, inevitably to here.
Which is where?
James Burnham was before him in predicting that capitalism would morph away from the old textbook laissez-faire version toward a controlled and highly managed version. That was when the capitalist world was suffering from a deep lack of confidence and the new thinking was suggesting a historic shift towards a socialist future. The collapse of the Soviet Union lay decades in the future. The inability of authoritarian Marxism to produce mass affluence on the same scale as postwar managerial capitalism was still something for academics to debate, as they always do. Burnham made a name for himself by arguing that neither utopias — that of the left and that of the right — would actually manifest themselves. Utopias never do. What we would witness, he suggested, was governance by technocrats and managers ruled only by a method indifferent to democratic desire.
There have been diversions along the way since then.
The postwar boom convinced many that there was a magic in the Western mix of modest democracy, individual freedom, and capitalist energy. That trinity was, as we now know, an unstable force riven through with social and political tensions that would, inevitably, decompose it back to its older predecessor of relative laissez-faire, massive inequality, and elitist rule. The people, having been marshaled to battle in two world wars and having populated the rise of mass manufacturing, were summarily dumped back into their ancient subservient role where they could be ignored whilst the elite went about its educated and energetic accumulation of a disproportion of incomes, wealth, and consumption. The only remaining purpose of the people being to act as fodder or filler for business plans as customers — the elite being insufficient alone in the provision of consumption.
Alternatively put, the middle class having been created in order to support postwar business activity and profit generation was gradually squeezed of its remaining rent payments and left with less opportunity for continued growth. It was altogether too bourgeois and demanding for an elite bent on domination. It wanted a share of whatever pie was being baked. It wanted to reduce its risk by acquiring safety nets and insurance against the volatility that haunts capitalist cycles. Such insurance costs money and reduces the rents that flow upward. So after a decade or two of pandering to it, the elite reacted with force and imposed radical individualism in the form of the neoliberal politics of the 1980s and 1990s.
Those decades were the heyday of the libertarian utopians. Markets, whatever they are, were said to be more “efficient” than governments which were pilloried as bastions of inefficiency, corruption, and, worse, policies that were the road to serfdom. Those decades were also the apogee of modern economic ideas put into practice where they merged with the managerialism of people like Drucker to displace the state as the most active agent in the socioeconomic landscape. Burnham was right. Big business with its emphasis solely on the power of shareholders set to work to undermine democracy, to dilute politics, and to assert the superiority of capital over everything else.
That’s when America ceased being a true democracy and slipped, instead, into being a shadow version with vestiges such as elections and various institutions lurking as possible obstructions to outright elite control.
Democracy, to be real, must be cultural. It is not institutional. “We the people” is an expression of collective cultural cohesion. It is not aspirational. Nor is it a political rallying cry. It is a description of day-to-day behavior. It assumes that we are, indeed, a people. We are more than a collection of individuals. We are more than a plurality of identities. Our histories and individual trajectories entwine into one, albeit messy, single movement through time. Like it or not, we are one not many.
Such culturally based democracy — what I call really existing democracy — is an affront to our elite. Which is why so much effort has been poured into attacking and undermining it.
Yes. I am struggling.
I just said that business set out to dilute politics in order to assert the superiority of capital.
This is simply a continuation of the optimism of the late 1800s when rational methods were thought to offer an escape from the turgid turbulence of political strife and confrontation. The rise of the modern economic system we now accept as normal brought with it the corporation. Massive. Bureaucratic. Systematic. Overwhelming. Unprecedented. Exerting asymmetrical power over society as employer and provider of goods and services it organized and shaped lives that had been subject to older orders for centuries. It shook society to its core. And it caused social unrest as it rose to prominence.
The modern corporation is the cornerstone of modern prosperity. So much so that we have all adapted to its structure and preferences as both employees and customers. The struggle to tame the corporation is one of the defining characteristics of the twentieth century. Power has ebbed and flowed from people back and forth to the corporation with the state acting as proxy or guardian of people and the corporation acting as spearhead for the wealthy elite.
Yes I am struggling.
Read this:
“Wriston’s willingness to put his ideas into action changed the world. As he explained in 1979, the ‘current banking network, with its Euromarkets and its automated payments system’ seemed dull and technical, but it had immense political consequences. He believed that if many could move rapidly from country to country, it could no longer be mastered by states. Instead it might master them, replacing the whimsical tyranny of political rules with the austere rigor of market discipline”
That is early in the Farrell and Newman book, “Under Ground Empire — How America Weaponized the World Economy”.
Digest it.
Why would business want to replace the whimsy of politicians? Not because it is actually whimsical, but because it suggests a power beyond the market where capital enforces the rules. It suggests an alternative narrative — that politics in our modern era involves many voices and not simply that of wealth. There are, it says, many threads to be entwined into our singular history not only that of money.
And that, to big business leaders like Wriston, is abhorrent. Where is the “discipline”? Where is the “efficiency”? Where is the profit? It infringes on the ability of business to wander the globe looking for low costs, cheap labor, and thus higher margins.
And that “dull and technical” activity Wriston mentioned is the articulation of people like Drucker — and Taylor before him. Dull, dry, technical, rational, inevitable. Like the great irresistible unwinding of forces or laws that economists imagine, business has its own logic and rules. The principle purpose being to rob economic activity of space for resistance or argument. The goal is precisely to reduce economic activity to a series of steps in a preordained dance none of which can be defied rationally. Economics has its “laws” that cannot be resisted. Business has its “methods” that also demand adherence.
The paradox of establishing these two parallel sets of logic as dry, dull, but inevitable, is to sanitize economic activity of political debate and thus potential resistance, and yet, simultaneously, to establish a political regime that makes the state subservient to capital. The goal being to make the nation state obsolete in the context of global capital flows. We replace the politics of the people with the politics of capital.
Yes. I am struggling.
Because Wriston and his ilk won. They devastated democracy by setting capital free to roam the world where it answered not to democratically elected politicians but only to shareholders, speculators, and private wealth holders.
All this was envisaged back in the 1980s and 1990s. The elite victory was total. So much so that an erstwhile left of center political could proclaim the era of big government as being over. Our current malaise is a direct consequence of the victory of technocracy and management — of bureaucracy — over politics. We the people do not matter in such a world. Policy is simply a vehicle for easing the movement of capital and freeing up ever more space for commodification.
So you can all indulge in the illusion that America is a democracy. I cannot.
Yes. I am struggling.
Or as Tooze would say: “what time is it”?
Because it all went wrong.
The hyper rationality of the technocratic method fell apart when it came into contact with reality over an extended period. Supply chains were built with an indifference to political reality or locality. They were built by technocrats ignorant of reality because they had been educated in the dryness and dullness of economics and management. They truly believed that capital and its logic ruled. Rationality, they thought, would drive everyone through the gateway of transactional logic and accept its inevitability. Their world of incentives and profit motive would, they imagined, overwhelm the chaos of politics. We the people everywhere would submit to the calculus of economics.
But it blew up.
It blew up in the Great Recession and the instability of finance.
It blew up in the subsequent failure to build the wishes of regular people into the recovery.
And it blew up because it basic premise was always built on abstraction and not an understanding of the real world.
The architects of the dominance of technocracy over people fell foul of their own conceit once they truly believed that the dry dullness of economics and management could govern a world of people. Yes, they achieved their goal: they undermined democracy and raised their elite mentors to power. But, by so doing they undid the promise of modernity and the endless opportunity it once appeared to offer. Their goal was never to understand the world but to create a model upon which their rule could be based. It was necessarily sterilized, stylized, and sanitized. It was carefully constructed to achieve a very narrow goal: elite dominance.
But it blew up.
False narratives always do. History intrudes along with its messy and confusing lapses of memory and hallucinations of what we imagine was there but never was.
The technocratic victory of the late 1900s has led us to the inequality of today and the destruction of the collective coherence necessary to sustain the upward trajectory of the postwar years. Stagnation has led to disillusionment. The optimism that capitalism requires to cast its spell has fallen away. The world is fragmenting. The notion that free movement of capital can govern the world is being rejected. A retreat has begun. Confusion reigns.
And yet.
And yet capital carries on generating new technologies with which to rule us all. This time its machinery will do our thinking as well as our labor. There will be no haven. Our minds are being watched and mimicked by unrelenting and unregulated overlords who imagine they can resurrect the technocratic narrative from its recent failures.
When the only logic in play is the logic of raw power technocratic actors themselves are subjects to be devoured in the scramble for wealth. Artificial intelligence is enemy of those whose livelihood depends on being the executors of the dry and the dull. A machine can do that.
A machine can do that.
Which was the rallying cry of the methodological minds that built the modern corporation and powered modern managerial capitalism towards its day in the sun.
A machine can do that.
So why do we need corporations?
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”
A machine can do that.
So why do we need corporations?
Check your logic. On your way out.
Yes. I am struggling.
