Are the Managers Really in Control? Part Two (1981)

From the February 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1. 

In Part One (Socialist Standard, January 1981 ) we discussed James Burnham’s clearly expressed  argument that class society could exist without property titles vested in individuals. He was of course proved wrong by events: industrial managers have not replaced private capitalists as the possessing, ruling class, on the basis of the state ownership of the means of production (for Burnham never expected the managers to come to power within the legal framework of private capitalism).

Burnham gave as the reason why the “managers”, by which he meant those who actually managed the process of production, would be the new ruling class the alleged fact that a ruling class must have some function in the process of production :

“Social rule . . . depends on de facto control of the instruments of production—the means whereby society lives; and such control can be held only by some group which plays a direct and integral role in production” (The Managerial Revolution, p. 232).

In the past when the means of production were small-scale and scattered this was so. At that time the various means and instruments of production could be, and were, controlled individually. But today, due precisely to the development of modern industry brought about by capitalism, this is no longer so; the production of wealth has become socialised. The wealth of modern society is produced by the co-operative labour of those who work. In this sense the point of production is not the individual mine or factory, but society. Thus it is those who control society, not those who manage production at factory level, who are really in a position to control the use of today’s means of production.

It is the state which is the centre of social control so that whoever controls the state controls society and so, potentially at least, the means of production. This is so even in Western capitalism with its legal property titles. The private capitalists of the West, just as much as the possessing class in Russia (which in fact is also a capitalist class), now possess the means of production because they control the state rather than vice-versa. They use this control to back up their historically-inherited legal property titles, having long ceased to have any necessary productive function. Whereas in Russia the possessing class own the means of production directly through the state, in the West this is done indirectly through individual property titles ultimately enforceable by the state. In the end this amounts to the same thing: today’s socially-operated means of production are possessed and controlled by a minority class socially, through the state, the centre of social control.

Actually, Burnham himself unwittingly recognisedthat access to the modern means of production can only be controlled socially when he argued that managerial rule would be based on the state ownership of the means of production. For, on the basis of state ownership, any group which established its exclusive stable control over the state would become a collective possessing class precisely because it would therefore control the use of the means of production. If industrial managers were to organiseas a group, win popular support or acquiescence, and come to gain control of state power they would indeed become the ruling and possessing class—but  by virtue of controlling the state not of being managers.

Burnham was wrong, then, in assuming that the managers’ technical function in production was a compelling reason why they should emerge as such a group whereas in fact they were no more, or less, likely than any other group to do so.

State Capitalism

Both Rizzi and Burnham (and, indeed, Wittfogel also) rejected the view that Russia could be described as state capitalism. Both of them regarded Russia as a new class society: “bureaucratic collectivism” for Rizzi and “managerial society” for Burnham. This rejection of a state capitalist analysis of Russia was an inheritance from their Trotskyist past where they had learned to identify capitalism with private capitalism. For Trotsky, capitalism could not exist without private property titles vested in individuals; for him “state capitalism” was state control of private capitalist industry.

Capitalism, however, is not characterised by the legal form that class possession of the means of production takes, but by the social fact that those who “possess” the means of production exploit wage-labour and accumulate the surplus-value thus obtained as capital. An examination of “the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers” in Russia shows this to be the case there. The excluded majority live by selling their labour-power to various state enterprises; the products of these enterprises are sold on the market with a view to profit; and the difference between the wages of the producers and the value of what they produce is surplus value which is used for capital accumulation and the consumption of the privileged class. Russia is thus capitalist and its possessing, ruling, privileged class a capitalist class.

Russia can be described as state capitalist in order to distinguish the form of capitalist class possession of the means of production there from the legal property-holding of the West. It should not be forgotten, however, that private property titles do still exist in Russia (though, admittedly, not as the predominant form) and that this could grow in the future. Equally, elements of non-legal de facto class possession through the state exist in Western countries, though the capitalist title-holders are able through their control of Parliament to prevent politicians and state officials gaining a permanent and widespread privileged consumption at their expense.

We see, then, that in East and West alike control of the use of today’s socially-operated means of production rests ultimately in the hands of those who control the state. It is clear that on the basis of class possession of the means of production a variety of such forms—both with regard to control of production and to the allocation of consumer goods among the privileged class—are possible. Each particular case needs to be examined on its own in the light of the historical and social facts. It is not possible to lay down a priori, as Burnham tried to do, which particular group would be most likely to emerge as the ruling class on the basis of state-owned industry. Nor can it be said that there is any particular reason why there should be any tendency for individual property titles to be abolished and replaced by de facto possession through the state.

Classless Society

The above analysis has certain practical implications. Since the state is the organ of social control, and since it is through controlling this organ that the capitalist class, East and West, is able to maintain its possession of the means of production, it is clear that the excluded producing class of wage and salary earners must, in order to establish a classless society, begin by gaining control of the state. Not, be it quickly added, to form a “socialist government” or a “workers state” (both absurd contradictions; when there is socialism there will be no state and where there is a state there is no socialism), but simply and solely to take state power out of the hands of the capitalist class, so removing the last obstacle to society establishing common ownership and democratic social control over the means of production. This presupposes both a widespread desire and understanding among the working class to establish a classless, socialist society and that the working class have democratically organised themselves, without political or industrial leaders, to carry out this desire. In the absence of such majority socialist understanding any attempt to establish socialism would inevitably fail and most probably lead to the sort of state capitalist society, based on de facto class possession of the means of production which we have been discussing.

The essence of class possession is precisely control over the use of the means of production by a section only of society. Once the use of the means of production is under the democratic control of the whole of society then “class possession”, “private property”, “class ownership”, call it what you will, has been abolished. The means of production could still be said to “belong” to those who controlled their use—in other words, to be “commonly owned” by the democratically-organised community.

But to talk of “common property”, “social property”, and the like can be misleading in that these terms do not fully bring out the fact that the transfer to society of the power to control the production of wealth makes the whole concept of “property” redundant. The question “who would own the means of production in socialist society?” can be answered just as correctly by saying “nobody” as by saying “everybody”, or “society”, or the “community”.

What social control over production will mean in practice is that every member of society will be free to take part, on equal terms with every other member, in deciding how the means of production should be used. As Burnham put it:

“For society to be ‘classless’ would mean that within society there would be no group (with the exception, perhaps, of temporary delegate bodies, freely elected by the community and subject always to recall) which would exercise, as a group, any special degree of control over access to the instruments of production; and no group receiving, as a group, preferential treatment in distribution” (The Managerial Revolution, p.55).

Society’s power to control production would be embodied in various democratic institutions. “Common ownership” and “democratic social control” of the means of production are merely, as we have said, two different ways of describing the same situation. This is why discussion as to whether one could exist without the other is quite meaningless.

Socialism is democratic or it is not socialism. A society where the means of production were formally the common property of society but where only a minority took part in deciding how they should be used would be one in which “common property” was merely a fiction since in practice the means of production would be the sectional possession of the decision-making minority.

In the end the only guarantee in socialist society against the emergence of a new ruling class which would negate the common ownership of the means of production is people using the democratic institutions—the actual democratic participation of all the people in the running of society. This is why it is absolutely essential that those who establish socialism—the majority working class who will constitute also the major part of the people of socialist society—must be fully aware of its implications, being prepared and organised to participate not only in its establishment but also in its subsequent running.

Adam Buick

Letter: Explaining Wages (1976)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Explaining Wages

Socialists know the Marxian labour theory of value: that wages is the price of labour-power or cost of production of the one commodity that overproduces itself, i.e. the ability to work and create useful things.

But how is the figure of £10,000 and upwards a year for managerial class arrived at? Directors’ fees and in several companies at once, many of them absentees, and golden handshakes on retirement or redundancy?

Is their cost of production so steep or is it that the working class having produced such a vast amount of surplus-value it must be squandered on useless luxury for the few?

Harold Shaw

Tetbury

Reply:

As you point out, labour-power is a commodity and wages are its price. Price is the monetary expression of value, i.e. it indicates the amount of labour-time embodied in a commodity, and this applies to labour-power as to everything else. Wages correspond, in general, with what it takes to produce, maintain and reproduce particular kinds of workers.

Some workers’ labour-power is a relatively cheap commodity. It requires the minimum of education and training, and does not need to be sustained by a high standard of living. Other workers sell a comparatively more expensive product. They have had to acquire special skills or knowledge, perhaps be educated much longer; it is expected that they should live fittingly and that their children be schooled for a similar future. This is the difference between wages of £2,000 and £10,000 a year.

The price of labour-power can be affected, in common with other prices, by supply and demand. Another factor is the strength of trade-union organization in particular industries and professions and its success in getting wage increases under favourable conditions. Higher-paid workers are not a separate class and are as much at the mercy of the wages system as the rest. In recent years executives and managers have been losing their jobs, having to change the life-style they may have thought was divinely ordained for them, and going to the Social Security office.

Directors’ fees are a different matter from wages. Since changes in the taxation laws made “unearned income’’ subject to heavier tax rates, it has become the practice for capitalists to have nominal occupations of which “director” is the most common one.

Editors

Finance and Industry: How many millionaires (1962)

The Finance and Industry column from the March 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

How many millionaires

When the Inland Revenue Report for the year 1960-61 was published in January it showed that while in the previous year there had been 66 individuals with incomes above £100,000 a year, the number has now dropped to 60. The Evening News called it “Britain’s Vanishing Millionaires.”

It is not the Inland Revenue officials who are responsible for calling these people millionaires, but the newspapers nave long worked on the assumption that when a man’s income, before payment of tax, gets above the £100,000 mark (roughly £2,000 a week) his property of all kinds is probably above £1,000,000.

The number has varied a great deal. In 1938 it was 99. Then it dropped more or less steadily till it touched 38 in 1949 and 37 in 1952. Then it started rising again and reached 67 in 1958 before declining to 66 and now to 60.

In this century the peak seems to have been reached in 1921 when they numbered 208. As taxation is much higher and the purchasing power of each pound is much less than it was then, the very rich must find that things aren’t what they used to be. Even so, taking the official figures for 1958-9, the 2,700 people who had incomes over £20,000 had an average income of about £34,400 before paying tax and were left with an average of about £5,550 after paying tax —about £100 a week.

But Mr. Bernard Harris, city editor of the Sunday Express (5/11/62) gave it as his view that the number of people in the millionaire class as regards ownership of property far exceeds the number with incomes above £100,000 a year. His explanation is that in order avoid high death duties most of the very rich take steps in time to hand over the bulk of their property to their heirs.

“. . . for every one who died a millionaire there were probably 10 who divested themselves of part of their wealth in order to lose that distinction and qualify for smaller death duties. So it is a pretty safe conjecture that the number of millionaires and tax-conscious ex-millionaires ill Britain today is well over a thousand.”

As an example of this business of transferring property to escape heavy death duties the Daily Express (8/2/62) had the following:

“The Earl of St. Germans, 48, who has had a remarkable success with a London bookmaking firm called Nicholas Eliot, is to make over all his family estates, worth around £1,000,000, to his 21 year old son and heir Lord Eliot.”

The estates to be transferred include 6,000 acres in Cornwall, but not the turf accounting business.

A nice job

In the House of Commons on January 30 the Assistant Postmaster General, Miss Mervin Pike, was asked what is the weekly wage of Post Office men, Cleaners, Doorkeepers and Liftmen. She replied: “£8 16s. a week. The rates in outer and inner London are greater by 10s. to £1 respectively. This is the same as is paid to non-industrial male cleaners in the Civil Service generally.”

“. . . Asked if this wage is not ridiculously low” Miss Pike,, who clearly lacked the inclination to attempt lo justify it, took refuge in the argument that inquiry had shown Post Office cleaners to be getting more than is paid in industry generally.

These cleaners and others are among the Post Office workers whose claim for higher pay the Government rejected last year.

Accidents

This century has witnessed a great increase in the number of industrial accidents, that is to say, in the number of accidents that have to be reported and become recorded in official publications. But what of those that do not have to be reported?

The reportable accidents are those which are fatal or which disable the worker for more than three days from earning full wages for the work at which he is employed.

Within this definition the Ministry of Labour reported 217 deaths and 16,934 accidents in the building trades in the year 1960 (Labour Gazette, April, 1961).

But, according to a building trade employer, Mr. Peter Trench, the total number of accidents is enormously greater.

Writing in the Financial Times Building and Contracting Supplement recently, Mr. Trench, who is Director of the National Federation of Building Trades Employers, estimates that for every reported accident there are 30 or 40 that do not have to be reported. And he puts the total number of accidents in the building trades at 500,000 a year or nearly 10,000 a week.

He records that accidents have been increasing in spite of propaganda designed to lessen the number. He gave his opinion as to the reason:

“Despite all the publicity and propaganda there are still far too many building firms in which little or no direct responsibility is accepted for seeing that accidents are prevented from happening; and there are still two many operatives adopting the metaphorically fatal attitude of ‘couldn’t care less’ which all too often becomes fatal in reality.”

He records the opinion of others that one of the causes is the greater size and complexity of modern buildings.

The New Men in Russian Industry

The emergence of a new social group is not necessarily dramatic or even at first obvious, but there are clear signs that new men are entering on to the political stage in Russia. In an article “New Pressures are growing up in Russia,” the Soviet Correspondent of the Financial Times recently noted that among the people who backed and to some extent forced Kruschev’s denunciation of Stalinist Terror at last year’s Party Congress in Moscow are “the younger professional managers.”

“These Party Professionals have as their principal job, the supervision of the running of the economy in their respective areas of the country. Like other young educated people in the Soviet Union, they enjoy a good standard of living, and are in a position to know that the country’s economic position can be improved much further still if sensible policies are assured. An obvious prerequisite of stable life for everyone is that there should be no repetition of the police rule, with arbitrary arrests and executions of Stalin’s time.”

David Floyd, in the Sunday Telegraph (26/11/61), expressing a similar view, quoted from a recent book on the history of the Russian Security Services, by Boris Lewytzkyj:

“The worker or technician responsible with the aid of the most up-to-date machinery for the whole industrial process, cannot carry out his duties properly unless he has considerable freedom of decision. No scientist can make progress with his terribly difficult intellectual work if he is constantly aware that the failure of an experiment may be labelled as an act of sabotage by some primitive policeman.

The ‘historical role’ of the terror in the Soviet Union is finished. At the present time the Soviet leaders could achieve nothing by terror, at the best they could destroy the foundations of their own power.”

The Manager’s Life

On the same subject, interesting details about the life of a factory manager were given some time ago in articles written by a Russian factory manager and his English-born wife who recently left Russia.

He and his wife had no complaint about their financial position in Russia, though the husband, Ignat Ovsyannikov, did remark that sometimes a skilled worker in the factory might take home more pay than he did as manager.

As a manager he had

“the very comfortable living of 6,000 roubles per month, six times a Soviet working man’s wage, and as much as the salary paid to a Minister of a Soviet Republic.”

One of the features of the life of the factory manager and other people “in authority” is the way they are cut off from contact with the ordinary workers outside the factory:

“Anyone who has any authority at all in the Soviet Union is cut off from the ordinary people. it is, for example, impossible for a factory manager or party secretary to use the ordinary restaurants in his town. He would be likely to meet his employees on equal terms and that would not do. The managerial class is isolated from the rest of society. If a man is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party he will ever have a personal bodyguard to accompany him everywhere.”

Arrangements are made for the manager’s family to buy food at special stores, and to eat in closed restaurants They also have special medical services “for the upper class of Soviet society. They have their own clinics and sanatoria where they get the best of treatment. Members of the Central Committee and the Government have luxurious rest homes on the Black Sea coast.” (Sunday Telegraph, 13/7/61).

It is all remarkably like life as it is lived by the favoured few here or anywhere else in the world.

Edgar Hardcastle

Class War (1991)

From the February 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

What class you are in is defined by the position in which you stand with regard to the means of production. In capitalist society there are two basic classes: those who own and control the means of production and those who own no productive resources apart from their ability to work.

The working class in capitalist society is made up of all those who are obliged through economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary. If this is your position then you are a member of the working class. The job you do and the status it might have, the pay you receive and how you chose to spent it, are irrelevant as long as you are dependent on working for a wage or salary in order to live.

In Britain over 90 percent of the population are members of the working class. Of the rest only about 2-3 per cent are members of the exploiting, capitalist class who enjoy a privileged non-work income derived from the surplus value produced by the working class over and above what they are paid as wages and salaries.  The others are the self-employed—small shopkeepers, independent workers, professional people—whose income is derived from selling some service or other directly to the consumer rather than from selling their labour power to an employer. And many of these can be assimilated, in terms of income, to the ordinary worker.

What this means is that essentially we are living in a two-class society of capitalists and workers. But what about the "middle class”? The existence of such a middle class is one of the greatest myths of the twentieth century. In the last century, the term was used by the up-and-coming industrial section of the capitalist class in Britain to describe themselves; they were the class between the landed aristocracy (who at that time dominated political power) and the working class. Eventually, however, the middle class of industrial capitalists replaced the landed aristocracy as the ruling class and the two classes merged into the capitalist class we know today. In other words, the 19th century middle class became part of the upper class and disappeared as a “middle” class.

The term, however, lived on and came to be applied to civil servants, teachers and other such white-collar workers. But there was no justification for this, as such people were clearly workers just as much obliged by economic necessity to sell their ability to work as were factory workers, miners, engine drivers and dockers. The only difference was the type of job they were employed to do—and a certain amount of snobbery attached to it. .

It is not just the Daily Mail persists in believing that there is a middle class. So does the SWP which has come forward with a theory of the “new middle class”. This “class” is said to be composed of higher-grade white collar workers and to make up between 10 and 20 percent of the workforce (The Changing Working Class by SWP leaders Alex Callinicos and Chris Harman, p. 37). The reason given for excluding these people from the working class is that they exercise some degree of control over the use of the means of production and/or authority over other workers; in short, because they perform some managerial role.

To adopt this view is to abandon the relationship-to-the-means-of-production theory of class for one based on occupation. Socialists have always maintained that, as far as the actual production of wealth is concerned, the capitalist class are redundant. They play no part in production, which is run from top to bottom by hired workers of one sort or another. This means that all jobs, including those concerned with managing production and/or disciplining other members of the working class, are performed by members of the working class. To exclude from the working class workers with no productive resources of their own who are paid, among other things, to exercise authority of behalf of the employing class over other workers is to give more importance to the job done (occupation) than to the economic necessity  of having to sell labour power for a wage or salary which for Marxists is the defining feature of the working class.

Of course not everybody who receives an income in the form of a salary is necessarily a member of the working class. Some capitalists chose to manage their own businesses and pay themselves a “salary” for doing this. Although a part of this might correspond to the price of labour power (the part corresponding to what the capitalist would have to pay to hire a professional manager to do the same job), usually most of it is only a disguised way of distributing some of the surplus value at the expense of the other shareholders. What makes a salary-earner a member of the working class is not the mere receipt of a salary but being economically dependent on it for a living.

Having to work for an employer was not only how Marx defined the working class. It is also, and more importantly, the view of many workers who have never heard of Marx. When asked, as in a number of recent radio broadcasts, a surprising –and pleasing –number have replied that anyone who has to work for a living is a worker. Which makes them more sensible than both the Daily Mail and the SWP.

Adam Buick

A confused professor (2026)

From the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vivek Chibber is a well-known figure on the American left. A professor of sociology at New York University, he regards himself as a Marxist and is seen by some as an important social theorist. The April 2023 edition of the Socialist Standard carried a review of a book he had recently published with the ambitious title Confronting Capitalism. How the World Works and How to Change It. The review recognised the author’s clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works. In particular it endorsed the book’s explanation of capitalism’s relationship with the state and the struggle it inevitably generates between the two classes in society – capitalists and workers – and how it dictates that governments, no matter what their stated ideology, cannot have a mediating role between workers and capitalists but have no choice but to govern on behalf of the capitalist class and in their collective profit-making interest. In the same way, the review approved the book’s further observation that individual capitalists, regardless of their personal character or values, are compelled by the nature of the system they operate in to minimise costs and seek profit, wherever possible and whatever the consequences, the result being that a tiny minority of the population are able to live in luxury while billions struggle to keep their heads above water and experience life as a daily grind.

Chasing reforms

So far, so good, and, as explanations of capitalism go, pretty lucid. But, as the review then went on to point out, Chibber’s prescription for remedying the situation he correctly analyses was not to get rid of the capitalist system and replace it with a different one but rather to chase reforms of various kinds to try and make that system more palatable. And this, puzzingly, after having told us that the imperatives of capitalism make that impossible. Arguably even more puzzling then was his final call to ‘start down the road of social democracy and market socialism’, even though, by any standards, ‘market socialism’ is a contradiction in terms.

Since all book reviews that appear in the Socialist Standard are sent to the book’s author, Chibber should at least be aware of the Socialist Party’s view and criticisms of his ideas. So when an extended interview with him appeared recently in the Jacobin magazine on aspects of his Confronting Capitalism book, it could only be of interest to see whether he seemed to have taken on board any of the points raised in our criticism of his ideas.

Though it’s clear from the start of that conversation both interviewer and interviewee see themselves as Marxists and socialists, there is virtually no reference made to what socialism might mean and nothing at all is said about the kind of socialist society that Marx advocated – one based not on the market and buying and selling but on the abolition of the money and wages system and free access to all goods and services. There is, however, an approving reference to two major 20th century practitioners of authoritarian state capitalism, Lenin and Mao, which seems to echo the line taken in Confronting Capitalism about a Leninist party model with a centralised leadership. So no change here then. But what about his book’s advocacy of reforms of various kinds within capitalism – ‘non-reformist reforms’, as he calls them? Well nothing seems different here either. He refers to struggles for ‘workplace rights, a universal basic income grant, or pensions’ echoing the need expressed in his book for ‘a combination of electoral and mobilizational politics’ and ‘a gradualist approach’.

How many classes?

To be fair, however, the main focus of the Jacobin interview is not how capitalism could be improved or what comes after it but rather its class structure. And here, initially at least, Chibber seems to be living up to the Marxist analysis of class explained in Confronting Capitalism, ie, the existence of two classes in society – capitalists (a tiny minority) and workers (the overwhelming majority) – with irreconcilable interests, and the state being not some kind of mediating body but rather an instrument of support for the capitalist class. But then, in the second part of the interview, what can be described as a variation on this perspective emerges. Here he moves from seeing capitalism as a two-class structure to stating the existence of a third class, a ‘middle class’. This of course is a term commonly used by social analysts seeking to categorise workers in terms of such things as their backgrounds, outlooks, living styles or levels of pay. But should such a ‘third’ category have a place in any claimed Marxist analysis of class? Well, it didn’t in Confronting Capitalism, but now, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it does here. To be precise, Chibber has this to say: ‘So the two “fundamental” classes, workers and capitalists, account probably for around 75 percent of the labor force. What’s the other remaining 25 percent? That’s what we call the middle class.’ But who are this ‘middle class’? According to him, they fall into two groups – the self-employed (‘owner operators, the traditional petty bourgeoisie’, he calls them) and ‘the salariat’.

What to respond to this? Well, we can accept – because it corresponds to observable reality – that in capitalism there has always been a small minority of individuals, who wish ‘to be their own boss’ and to set up their own small businesses of one kind or another. A small proportion of these turn out to be lucrative and may result in their creator becoming rich to the point of not having to work, But the vast majority of them are not particularly successful. Sometimes they procure a precarious living for those who run them, but more often they fail and plunge their owners into the world of seeking to sell their energies to another employer for a wage or salary. Of course, such people, at least for as long as they are in business, can be categorised as wannabe-capitalists, but the vast majority of them (those, for example, that Chibber calls ‘owner-operator shopkeepers’) still have to carry out labour on a daily basis themselves in order to survive and to support their families. So it can’t be meaningfully maintained that the existence of small ‘entrepreneurs’ somehow means that there are three classes in society rather than two.

Still less can it be said that there is, in Chibber’s words, ‘a second group’ helping to make up that ‘middle class’, consisting of those he calls ‘the professional classes and the managerial classes’. An example he gives of this is ‘a mid-level manager’ to whom certain duties are ‘outsourced’. ‘What do they do?’, he goes on. ‘They’re keeping the books, they’re designing the labor process, but they’re also managing and supervising labor. Managers are workers but who carry out the functions of capital and whose own well-being depends on the successful exploitation of labor. So they are caught between the two worlds. That’s why they’re middle class.’ He goes even further, including in this middle class ‘sections of the professoriate and the professional strata’, those with ‘a lot of autonomy’, or ‘salaried people in the professions’, though ‘some are shading into the working class: same occupation, different classes’ (eg, teachers or ‘a professor working at a community college’). To this we would have to respond that all those in Chibber’s ‘second group’, though they may have more autonomy and more pay than other workers, are no less members of the working class for their position of subordination to a system that makes them dependent on the wage or salary they receive. In addition, despite the greater security their role may appear to give them, they can never be sure that the stresses and strains of the capitalist system will not make them just as expendable in the future as workers in other occupations, ie that capitalism’s constant need for cheapness and reorganisation will not make them just as insecure in their jobs or just as surplus to requirements as any other workers.

In short the ‘Marxist’ theorist and professor not only seems not to have taken on board any of the points made in this journal’s review of his book about what replacing capitalism means and about the futility of reformist activity, but to have now rendered his previously ‘clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works’ distinctly less clear and less accessible.

Howard Moss

The Capitalists’ “Directive Ability”. (1914)

From the July 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some Lessons from recent happenings.

The Need for the Parasite.

One of the stock arguments of the anti-Socialist is that the worker will be unable to control industry under Socialism, as, in order to enable affairs to run smoothly, men are required with some weird, mysterious and miracle-working power called “directive ability.” The “anties” contend that we could not get along without these powerful individuals, and that (grande finale) these men are the ones who to-day possess wealth and position, i.e., the Rockefellers, Liptons, Devonports, and so on.

Let us just test this contention with a few facts and see how the miracle-workers run this system.

During the last few months a case has been attracting much attention in the courts. In this case certain civilians (past or present employees of Liptons, Ltd.) and some Army officers have been accused under the Bribery and Corruption Acts. In the evidence it transpired that Liptons have been in the habit of giving inducements to Army officers to secure Army canteen contracts. One of the defendants, Col. Whitaker, had received £540 from a firm of brewers, who supplied the beer to Col. Whitaker’s regiment at Malta. The Colonel said that he received the greater part of the money for using his influence to secure a contract from a colonel of a regiment at Crete. It also turned in the evidence that a member of the Government, Lord Saye and Sele, had written advising Col. Whitaker to take a holiday and go to Crete to “smooth a ruffled bird” (Col. Bird) for a consideration !

In summing up the case the judge said : “I am bound to say that the evidence before the Court satisfies me that these defendants, employed by Lipton’s, in so far as they made payments for the bribery of persons capable of influencing contracts in favour of Lipton’s, were acting on a system which was known to the directorate, encouraged by the directorate, and persisted in by the directorate, after there had been consideration given as to whether to stop that system or not.” (“Times,” 28.5.14.)

Now is this the way the capitalists run the show ? Is this the way they pile up their fortunes ? Is this the line “Directive Ability” takes ? When the capitalists themselves are faced with these facts and called to account, what do they answer ? Just what Lipton would have answered : “We do not know anything about it ; we did not attend to the business. You must blame our managers.'”

Tarred with the Same Brush.

Those who have memories a little longer than the usual working-class memory will recollect that when the directors of the company con­cerned in the Putumayo rubber atrocities were brought before the commission, four of them admitted that they did not even know the lan­guage in which the business at board meetings was conducted !

Let us now turn to another recent instance of “Directive Ability.”

The coalfields of Colorado have lately been drenched with the blood of miners who struck against the conditions obtaining in the mines of the Trinidad Coal and Iron Co. A condition of affairs was in operation out there similar to what existed in England before the factory legislation began. The miners were compelled to trade at the company’s store, paying 25 to 50 per cent. more than outside prices, to buy coal off the company, pay the company’s doctor, and live in the company’s shacks.

When the miners struck on September 3rd last wholesale evictions followed, and men, women, and children were turned into the streets with their few belongings, to go where they could in the rain and snow that kept falling through the next two days.

A Heroic (Rocke)feller.

During the strike the mine-owners, following their usual custom, imported as mine guards riff-raff of every description—armed thugs who could be depended upon to commit without hesitation the most cold-blooded of murders. “No authentic account,” says the “New York World” in a candid moment, “of anything that has happened in Mexico compares in cold-blooded brutality with what took place at Ludlow, Colorado. Dr. A. S. Harvey, a physician who testified at the inquest, said that while the “women and children lay in the safety pits which had been dug under the tents, the militiamen applied torches to the canvas and burned the structure over the heads of the terrified refugees. He declared that one ranch-house, in which dozens of women and children had taken refuge, was under fire from the militiamen the whole day.” The militia mounted machine guns and swept the strikers’ quarters with bullets. Over 200 lives were lost in this mine war.

We now come to the “directive ability” side of the matter. As a result of the allegation that the rioting was caused by agents provocateur, and that the troops acted with great brutality in charging and shooting down men, women, and children indiscriminately, a Congressional inquiry into the matter was ordered. When John D. Rockefeller, Jun., who is a director of the Trinidad Coal and Iron Co., was questioned he “blandly professed entire ignorance as to the details of the rioting and causes of the strike. He admitted that his father owned 40 per cent. of the company’s stock, but declared that neither of them interfered with the management of affairs, and they knew very little about the matter. ‘We have so many interests that it is impossible for us to supervise personally everything.'”— (“Leader,” 7.4.14.)

An Obliging Conscience.

How they get out of it when anything is brought up against them ! Capitalists, say our opponents, supervise industry, therefore deserve their profits. Charge Rockefeller with the murder of the Colorado miners, however, and he immediately begins to squirm, and says he knows nothing about the matter. He does not “supervise personally” when the butcheries have to be accounted for, but only when the “swag” is divided.

When one of the committee very pertinently pointed out that Rockefeller found plenty of time for “social uplift” work and vice investigation, and asked him why he did not investigate the conditions in his own business, the canting, hypocritical scoundrel at once replied : “My conscience acquits me of any responsibility in the matter.”—(“Leader,” 7.4.14.)

The Rockefellers, by the way, seem to be rather accomplished hypocrites, and, incidentally, men after God’s own heart. The father of the aforementioned unctuous humbug, John D. Rockefeller, Sen., was referred to last June by Mr. Bustard, the pastor of the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, Cleveland (of the congregation of which Rockefeller is one of the oldest members) as “one of the rose bushes in God’s garden.” The same reverend soft-soap and chloroform dispenser also paid a tribute to those faithful followers in the church who, like Mr. Rockefeller, “have for years lead religious lives and been steadfast in the Lord’s work.” Comment on this is needless.

Before leaving for his father’s Pocantico Hills Estate young Rockefeller “issued a statement, in which he admitted that his investigations into the riots had disclosed conditions more terrible than have yet occurred in that or any other State.”—(“Reynolds’s,” 3.5.14.) In his concluding statement before the commission, however, he disclosed his true capitalistic soul, and showed himself as the advocate of free and unfettered sweating. “He got rather angry when it was pointed out that the newspapers had given plenty of details as to the working conditions in Trinidad, and that a word from his father would have stopped the bloodshed and ended the strike. He declined to agree to submit to arbitration, and declared that the company would rather sacrifice the whole of its property in Colorado than recognize the miners’ union if it hampered the company’s freedom.”— (“Leader,” 7.4.14.)

The Company’s Freedom.

Well, what about “directive ability” now ? As a matter of fact, about the only directive ability the masters ever exercise is in employing managers, foremen, etc. to run their concerns for them while they are enjoying themselves, and if it large enough dividend is not regularly forthcoming they want to know the reason why ; if a sufficient reason is not given the official gets the sack. Owing to the contradictory nature of present society the workers are compelled to fight each other for jobs. The overlooker and manager are working men like the rest of us, dependent on their jobs for their livelihood and just as likely to get the sack at any moment. Their particular job consists in using every method they can to get the greatest possible amount of work out of their fellow-workers. Thus on the industrial field workers find themselves compelled to fight, not only their masters, but also each other in order to get a living. When the workers take over production then the “directive ability” of our fellow-workers (the absent bond-holding capitalist does no work in production at all), will be employed for the common good instead of, as to-day, for the misery of their fellows.

G. McClatchie

A manager gets his cards (1953)

From the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Dear Sir,  it is with deep regret! ”

 

A man has written to the newspapers to make a complaint. His complaint is that his employers have given him the sack. A popular week-end paper gave it prominence, with the comment that “its the hidden tragedy that makes it worth the reading.”

As this is something happening to people every day, the reader may wonder what all the fuss is about The answer is that the complainant was not an ordinary man. By this, we do not mean that he had double joints, or second sight He was a works manager.

"If you are earning, as I was £1,500 or so a year, the men in the workshops envy you. They call themselves the under dogs. They think you've got it easy, ordering them about . . . But if the Company gets into difficulties, the first thing that comes under scrutiny is the higher salary list. . . They (the under dogs) have chances of several hundreds to my one of getting another post because there's only one works manager and 200 or more hands.” (News of the World, 5/4/53).

Our well-educated and expensively-trained manager who, of course, is not a mere “hand,” but a highly qualified “brain,” with technical qualifications, two degrees, and thirty years" administrative experience, has made some important discoveries.

“ Nobody wants a man of 53 whose job has collapsed under him,” he says.

And yet his own letter tells us that he knew what the end would be, “I had, in fact, spent the last twelve months in pruning the factory staff to the extent that if the firm ever got busy again it would be very short of skilled operatives.”

But even a common hand, without degrees, would know that “pruning” staff (giving other people the sack) is hardly likely to prove a permanent occupation, even in a large factory.

What would you do ? he asks, and answers, first you apply to your professional institute. No good, too old. Second, you go to the Special Appointments Bureau of the Ministry of Labour. No good, “things are quiet just now."" Meanwhile, your six months' cheque is being exhausted, you will have to live on your savings. Savings! You had to live up to the job, dress Well, run a car, entertain. What savings ?

Next, worry all your business friends. “ I should think 25 per cent. of British industry is bearing my name in mind,” he says sardonically. “Gone by now are the hopes of a job at the kind of salary I used to enjoy. Half the amount—I’d jump at it—go anywhere —do anything. Anyone want a secretary-stooge ? Or a butler-valet cum gardener-handyman, or a chauffeur?”

“The story of a man who climbed the ladder of success only to have it fall under him at the age of 53,” says the Editor’s blurb. A commonplace story, you think.

“I wonder what the remedy is for cases like mine ? Is it just rotten luck or is there something else wrong somewhere ? 1 cannot decide,” says our unhappy ex-staff pruner.

These are the most valuable lines of his long statement.

The first thing is the pathetic folly of imagining that anyone is immune from the hazards and blows of the profit system. There is no escape. There are no special cases. Whether a man is manager at £1,500, or messenger at £200, anybody employed by somebody, or something else, like Public Corporation, Company or Board, or just a “ guv’nor,” can be dis-employed (sacked) by those employers at will. Leering round the shoulder of every employed person, Dustman or Duke of Windsor, War-Lord, or Warehouseman is the malevolent demon called the Threat of the Sack, making the eternal dream of the employee “ security ” (Welfare State and all), a weary nightmare.

Employment is dependence and subservience of members of the property-less class upon the owners of wealth. Whether these workers are well-paid managers or low-paid domestic helots is irrelevant “Improvements” in the conditions of wage-takers, as our manager has now discovered, frequently turn out, in the finish, to be the reverse. The fact that a job carries £1,500 a year allows the employer to pick the youthful and energetic suitably-qualified man and burn him up quickly.

Small consolation for the employee, having gone for the big lot, to find it does not last. This is the simple explanation of the fabulous (?) salaries of actresses, athletic champions and boxers, whose fortunes and life may hang on one blow.

It also explains the basis of so-called “permanent” and “regular” employment, such as that of State employees, Civil Servants, Railwaymen, Teachers and Postmen as opposed to casual labour subject to rapid fluctuation in alternating trade movements (Dockers, Building, Snow-clearers, Canvassers).

So it is that the Postal Authorities, by offering “Establishment” in “permanent” employment, can take their pick of a larger bunch, without high wages. Thus the great “progress” of the workers under Capitalism is to find themselves raised higher up, only to be smashed harder down.

Having got his motor-driver’s or gardener’s job (and he will be by no means the first degree’d man to sweep the streets), our manager must now, at 53, start a stiff course in a new tricky subject, Marxian economics. There he will find the answer to his questions, and stop wondering.

He will read in Volume I of “Capital” these pregnant lines

“Just as little as better clothing, food and treatment, and a larger allowance do away with the exploitation of the slave so little do they set aside that of the wageworker. A rise in the price of labour as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of tension of it.” (“Capital" Page 127. Dawson Edition).

Socialists work to break this chain of gold, replacing even well-paid employment by voluntary cooperative free labour.

Horatio.

Who are the ‘Middle Class’? (2025)

"Man the barricades, Jerry."

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Autonomous Voice, a contributor to the Facebook site ‘A Global Group Where We Are Active Against Capitalism’, recently put up a 15-minute YouTube clip, entitled ‘The Middle Class: a Working Class Anarchist Perspective’. The speaker attempts to define and analyse what he refers to as ‘the intermediate position’ in capitalist society’ held by ‘middle-class people, particularly those in professorial, managerial or small business roles’ (youtu.be/AZl55qEWILk). While his illustration points to the same ultimate goal as proposed by the Socialist Party, the analysis of how that can be achieved is very different.

In particular there are indications of a need for ‘violent uprising’ and of this needing to come from the ‘working class’, seen as those who do forms of manual work in society. This concept, outdated as it is, is still clung to by many, but it fails to appreciate that all those who need to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary and so remain dependent on their next wage or salary payment are in the same fundamental economic position. This means not only manual workers, tradespeople, nurses, service workers, etc., but also so-called middle-class workers such as teachers, administrators, engineers, medics, tech workers, and others, all those in fact who are often described as ‘professionals’. All these workers, whether considered working class or middle class, have a common interest that is diametrically opposed to that of the other small class of people in society (we would call them the capitalist class) who own enough wealth not to need to sell their energies in order to survive. And this is the case even if, as things stand, the vast majority of wage and salary earners of all descriptions fail to perceive their subjugation to the system they are tied to.

So while ‘Autonomous Voice’ is quite correct in stating that the role of many ‘professionals’ is ‘to administer the system of exploitation and keep it running smoothly’ and that they have an attitude of complicity towards that system, he is quite wrong to suggest that this somehow takes them out of the game and that they are not themselves exploited and entirely dependent upon the ups and downs of the economic forces of capitalism. True, they – or many of them – may have conventional, indeed docile, attitudes towards capitalist society and the way it works and may seem to be, as the video puts it, ‘a buffer preventing radical change’. But the same also applies to the vast majority of those the video sees as members of the ‘working class’. All in fact are locked into the wages system and have to live with the insecurity of the monthly pay slip.

So while we would agree with the need for the kind of society advocated by this video, it confuses and derails the argument by suggesting that some workers have different interests to others. Whatever their line of work, all workers scramble to sell their energies under conditions of duress, and are usually denied the ability to control how they work and whether that work – and pay – will continue. There is a global division between the vast majority, who need to sell their energies for a wage or salary, and the tiny minority that choose to buy those energies. In the end all members of that vast majority have the same class interest – to establish a wageless, money-free society that the Socialist Party exists to campaign for and that will provide the means for all to live free and autonomous lives.

Currently very few wage and salary earners are contemplating being part of any such movement. Yet, it is the only way to transcend the capitalist system that dominates all our lives, and it can be readily voted into being if enough of us want it. It will provide a means whereby democratic associations of women and men will be able to organise on the basis of voluntary work and have free access to whatever goods and services they need, because the whole society will then collectively own and control all the resources that provide these. People will no longer have to do jobs they do not enjoy – or even hate – just because they need money. They will be able to do work they want to do and enjoy. People will cooperate to do the work that makes society function and they will make decisions democratically – in their workplaces, local communities, regions and, if circumstances require, globally. Above all there will be no more top-down control, no leaders or governments, and no more money controlling people’s lives. Only when this happens will we have a society where the freedom to develop and express our needs and potential is equal for all kinds of workers and where the material needs of all are satisfied.

Howard Moss

What’s happening in China (1965)

From the November 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The so-called communist rulers of China are in trouble. They are trying to achieve two impossible feats; to make exploitation popular with the Chinese workers and to kid them along that the form of capitalism which is developing there is socialism.

The latest campaign to accomplish this is called the “Socialist Education Campaign”, now in full swing, which was recently commended by the Chinese premier as being “of great revolutionary and historical significance”. Such campaigns are no novelty in “communist” China, where the workers seem to need a lot of convincing.

Previous campaigns have been passed off as methods of getting rid of the remains of capitalism or as part of the building-up of a “communist” system of society, or as the eradication of specific errors and failings of the Old China. They were represented as a necessary process of cleaning up and modernising the social structure and they dealt largely with problems that were laid at the door of the old era.

But this time it is different, in that the government leaders have to deal with problems which, they frankly proclaim arise directly from the present system of society. The “Socialist Education Campaign” is teaching workers, both in industry and the civil service, to deal with the new problems caused by the creation of a modern, technically developed state from a recently backward country. It is this which enables Premier Chou-En-lai to assign “historical significance” to the current campaign.

To enable them to reconcile awkward facts with an incorrect interpretation of society, the Chinese have to be dosed with plenty of “communist” education.

One problem with which they have to deal is that of the new “managerial class”. Mao-Tze-tung, Chou-En-lai and the rest of the old die-hards of the Communist Party, were tough, unscrupulous but courageous labour leaders tested in battle and called upon for great personal sacrifices in prompting the Communist Party to the leadership of what they may have once believed was a different system of society.

But the old guard are getting older, and they are finding it difficult to select their successors from the ranks of the new business bureaucracy who seem to be taking their place. These young people are slick, well educated executive types who are rising to the top in the nationalised concerns and government departments. They have little understanding of political theory, little desire to make personal sacrifices, but, like business executives the world over, are ambitious to rise in the hierarchy and enjoy the luxuries which only the possession of money makes possible. Such is a thumb-nail sketch of one of the groups that the die-hards are trying to impregnate with so-called communist ideology. But the die-hards are as horrified at this developing class, as the swan was when it found it had hatched a duckling. Capitalist society develops along its own lines, irrespective of the muddled thinking of its apologists.

An Tzu-wen, Director of the Organisation Department of the Party’s Central Committee, considered the nature of some of these groups in some detail in an article which appeared in the Party journal Red Flag on 22/9/64 and which was reported in the China Quarterly April/June 1965. An is primarily concerned with the campaign to train successors to the present leadership. He distinguishes between the older cadres of pre-liberation vintage who have failed to adapt themselves to the technical and organisational development going on, and the younger ones who have not the political benefit of those who went through the Civil War.

It is from An’s article that it is possible to build up a picture of the various groups he sees developing around him. His criticisms have been publicised to the greatest extent possible in the Chinese national press and on the radio. He said that the gravest dilemma for the Chinese leaders may be the conflict between their own background and the need for modernisation in economic planning.

Chou-En-lai made it clear in his report last December that one of the main motives behind the “Socialist Education Movement’’ was the need to prepare the country for economic expansion. He speaks of the need for a “scientific and realistic approach”. An calls on the older cadres to adapt themselves and he describes the movement as “a mass movement for studying Marxist-Leninist and Mao Tse-tung ideology with emphasis in its flexible interpretation and application”.

The Chinese Government are training the new managerial class to a degree which must involve contact with the thinking of the outside world and they are at the same time inducing the old die-hards to work efficiently in the fervent atmosphere of industrial capitalism, misnamed “socialist expansion”.

Another section being “educated” are the Chinese followers of the Russian communist party. Since it now seems that many of the interests of the Chinese ruling class are opposed to those of .the Russian, Chinese supporters must be “re-educated” to enable them to make an intellectual somersault. China is living in a capitalist world jungle and must be prepared, in its own interests, to support a war against its erstwhile “comrades”. There must be no fifth column in the Chinese camp.

Another homegrown problem is the rise of the wealthy farmer, a new economic group since the seizure of governmental power by the Chinese “communists”. With their surpluses of commodity crops they have made a mockery of the food and clothing rationing which still obtains in China. The black market is now known as the free market and is officially recognised by the Government. Any of the rationed goods can be obtained at a higher price and this is part of a process whereby the rural rich are becoming richer. Universal rationing for all has become rationing by price, officially lauded by the authorities. This, of course, is the state of affairs to which the workers of the rest of the world are accustomed, whether they are starving in the backward countries or the “affluent” of western capitalism.

China has had a somewhat different history of social development to the West over the centuries, so that capitalism there is a little different from capitalism here in some of the details. But Chinese workers have basically the same economic interests as the workers here; and the so-called communist government there behaves domestically and in its foreign policies, like the capitalist power that in fact it is.

Frank Offord

Letter: Eye of a needle (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eye of a needle

While I believe that the SPGB have a closer understanding of Socialism than most other groups in this country, I completely fail to understand how they can ever visualize a majority of the working class—with such famous members as bankers, debt collectors, hired hooligans of the law enforcement racket etc. all rushing to the polls to vote it in!

When that day comes they must surely be beaten to the post by the "bored with wealth” brigade.

It will be the lower strata of the working class who will finally establish Socialism—not those so-called socialists of the “upper working class", those “middle-class-working-class” intellectuals of Somnambulistic Enterprises Ltd. Socialism will always remain the prerogative of the poor— never of the "managers” of the wealthy!

J. W. Pitt

Worthing

Reply:

If what you say were correct, the most poverty-stricken city areas would be full of Socialists; manifestly, they are not. As an example, at the time of writing there is a by-election in Ladywood, Birmingham, which was described in The Times of 13th August as "one of the worst environments of any big European city”—yet the chief interest in the campaign is the possibility of the Tory candidate being elected. Further, if what you say were correct the Socialist Party would have an interest in obstructing the "lower strata of the working class” from trying to improve their standard of living.

Your point of view is the understandable one that managers, administrative workers and law-enforcers perform anti-working-class functions and therefore cannot act as Socialists. Yet these people are themselves exploited. Marx said of them: “the labour of superintendence, entirely separated from the ownership of capital, walks the streets” (and more about this in Volume 3 of Capital, second half of the chapter headed "Interest and Profit of Enterprise”). Dire poverty is one but certainly not the sole source of Socialist consciousness; many workers become Socialists through other frustrations and perceptions of the hopelessness of capitalism. To whoever does, it means he has acquired class consciousness which over-rides the capitalist-conditioned outlook he previously had (if he is in an anti-working-class job, what he does about it is up to him). Don’t say that certain people are beyond the reach of class consciousness; in a class-divided society, nobody is.

There is another way of looking at this. According to National Income and Expenditure 1965-75, published by the Central Statistical Office, out of 28,123 tax units (i.e. incomes) in Britain in 1973-74, 24,251 were under £2,500 net and 20,496 were under £2,000. So if Socialism were dependent on low incomes the great majority of the working class would qualify anyway. Those who have you worried are a small proportion; the “lower strata" is (most of us.

Editors.

Industrial Democracy. (1907)

From the July 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

The logic of events has altered somewhat the character of the opposition that is made to the Socialist. He is now seldom told that the personal management of the capitalist is essential to the working of industry, for it is precisely those concerns in which the personal supervision of the capitalist is lacking that are driving the personally managed businesses to the wall.

It is acknowledged that the small master man has every year an increasing difficulty in making his way in the world. Each year sees an enormous number of bankruptcies, largely among the personally managed businesses, and each year sees private businesses turned into companies, and companies combined into rings, cartels, and trusts. The reason for this is not far to seek.

It is only the small businesses that can in any real sense of the word be said to be personally directed, and the small concern is in a parlous way beside the great public company. The large firm is able to considerably reduce the proportion of management expenses by distributing them over a larger volume of work. It is also able to extend the division of labour and to introduce and suitably employ the most efficient machinery. It is able to buy in large quantities and therefore more cheaply ; to make consignment of goods in bulk and therefore at lower rates ; and in many ways both in buying and in selling to overreach its smaller rival.

Though the working capitalist resort to sweating methods of the worst kind and work his men long hours and use all the petty tricks of trade, yet he can rarely successfully compete with the great company that makes profit for owners who know nothing of the processes and who take no part in the labour involved.

The sweating underground master-baker is out-competed by the eight hours day machine bakery. The struggling tobacconist, tea dealer, and the like are being crushed by the branches of the great distributing trusts. The small cycle maker is losing ground before the great Coventry companies, and on all sides a similar process is going on. The number of trusts in this country is already very great, and their number grows apace. And this fact, though it sounds the knell of the middle class, rings nevertheless with the promise of deliverance for those who toil.

It means that associated production is vastly more efficient and economical than individual or small scale wealth production. It demonstrates that the personal supervision of the capitalist is unnecessary to the carrying on of industry. It means that the workers run the main industries of the country, though it is true that they now do so for others’ gain.

In the company and trust, some of the black-coated proletariat are hired and placed in positions of authority ; the manager is given a larger salary and perhaps a percentage on the profits in order that his interests may be more closely identified with those of his masters, the capitalist class, rather than with those of his dusty coated brethren ; but nevertheless the fact remains that the most efficient concerns are run by proletarian hirelings and the profits are handed over by them to the idle and useless owners of the plant.

The growth of company and trust each year demonstrates more plainly the uselessness of the capitalist. The working class now runs industry to its own misery for the profit of its oppressors, but the day is near when it should take those industries that have been built up with its blood and sweat and transform them from means of profit for a handful of parasites into the means of its deliverance from slavery and degradation. The economic foundation is being laid, and as industry after industry ripens to the trust stage, so approaches the time when those who labour, having driven their exploiters from the political entrenchments, must seize the industrial machinery their labour has created and use it for the well-being of all.

W.

Pathfinders: Attack of the zombies (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The US presidential election campaign is set to move into high gear this year with both sides attacking the mental capacities of the other side’s leader, one as senile and the other deranged. There is something zombie-like about Biden and Trump, the one peering through screwed-up eyelids as if half-asleep and always baffled, the other pontificating on his own magnificence in the strangulated voice of hubris at full stretch. But it’s not as if US workers would be any better off if two different capitalist zombies were battling it out for leadership, the whole concept of leadership itself is a kind of zombie cult.

New research from Queensland University has identified a problem of ‘zombie leadership’, a set of ideas about leadership that remain popular while being generally ‘poisonous for organizations and society’. ‘It’s known as ‘zombie leadership’ because despite being demonstrably false, these claims refuse to die,’ says Professor Haslam, of the University’s School of Psychology. ‘One example is the assumption that leadership is exclusive to people with special qualities which set them apart from the masses’ (tinyurl.com/2s4b833z).

This is self-evidently a false assumption, when you look at the calibre of most political leaders. The only special quality many of them have is a narcissistic sense of Divine Right which is impervious to criticism or even rational thought. But zombie leaders make for zombie followers, who refuse to believe the evidence of their senses and remain convinced that leaders in general are a superior species.

The researchers point to other noxious but unchallenged preconceptions, like the idea that people can’t manage without leaders, and that leadership is somehow good by definition. They argue that these ideas have no evidential base but persist because they flatter ruling elites (of course) and also appeal to anxious people who feel they have no control in the world, with the result that they help to ‘justify inequalities of esteem, recognition, and reward.’

They are correct on all counts. But they don’t say that all leadership is bad. They see ‘good’ leadership as an inclusive group process in which people feel appreciated, ‘grounded in relationships and connections between leaders and those they influence.’

Recently the Economist ran a podcast series called Boss Class, which aimed to offer useful advice to managers trying to improve their game and get better results out of their workers. Much of the discussion revolved around similar ideas of democratic participation, listening, appreciating, and recognising what individuals are good at and what they’re not good at.

The problem with all this, from a socialist perspective, is that it’s largely pious bullshit which either does not understand or refuses to admit the basic realities of capitalist employment. While it’s undoubtedly better to have a nice boss than a nasty one, the fact is that workers are not there by choice, they are coerced by economic necessity into labouring to make someone else rich, and no amount of smarmy management-speak can disguise the conflict of interests between workers and management that is an integral part of the class war. Many workers instinctively recognise this, and are not fooled into working harder or for free just because the boss smiles at them and calls them by their first name. Unfortunately though, many other workers are conned into thinking that the boss is their friend, and they are consequently hit very hard when the cost of living goes up but their wages don’t, or when they suddenly face redundancy after years of loyal service.

It really doesn’t take much to find examples of people cooperating perfectly well without leaders. One recent news article looked at a Suffolk commune that’s been going successfully for fifty years with everyone pitching in and nobody feeling the need to be Napoleon, although the place looks palatial so the buy-in would no doubt exclude the average sans-culotte (tinyurl.com/3xpdhajr). Even without doing any reading at all, most people can probably call to mind incidents from past experience where they worked cooperatively with other people on a common goal without anyone taking a leadership role. It’s really not hard. People do it all the time. That’s why socialism will work.

Surprisingly, there are even some capitalist companies which have got rid of management structures and have no actual bosses, like the Morning Star tomato processing company in California (tinyurl.com/mstnuhdr). But these tend to work in practice like cooperatives, where workers essentially have to exploit themselves if the entity is going to compete successfully in the marketplace against other companies with no tender scruples about screwing their own workers. And screw their workers they must, even if they’re nice and polite bosses who know everyone’s name, because the logic of capitalism is to grow or die, and that means skinning the workforce every chance they get.

Socialists have an understanding of leadership which is somewhat different even from that suggested by the Queensland study. We don’t have leaders and we regard hierarchies as intrinsically anti-democratic. But to say we don’t believe in leadership under any circumstances is not accurate. In fact, as Engels pointed out in response to some people fetishising anti-authority, there are times when it would be damned silly and even dangerous not to have an expert in charge, like on a ship at sea (On Authority, 1872).

In fact we think leadership should be encouraged in everyone – if by leadership we mean a willingness to take the initiative, problem solve, show others the way, and inspire them to take part in a collective cause or a project. That’s how we’ll get socialism, after all, by you and everyone else having the courage to stand up and be first, not sitting and waiting like a zombie for someone else to tell you what to do.

Paddy Shannon

The Myth of Management (1974)

From the February 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

'We are a happy team here, I treat my workers as human beings and they appreciate that’

Many managers in industry and commerce today, when pushed to explain their rôle, will define management very simply and starkly as: “Getting other people to do what we want them to.” Implicit in this is the idea that most people would not be doing the things managers want them to if they had a free choice. It is not difficult to understand why.

If you have ever had to get up at some unearthly hour of the morning, and journey to work simply to face the prospect of eight hours or more as the victim of an “efficient” system, you will know why. You have little control over what goes on, your time perspective is short, you are a passive instrument of production, you are dependent on those who have authority over you, and so on. Basically you are an adult being forced to behave as a child.

You might think that under these circumstances capitalist bosses and owners would have a difficult time persuading people to work for them, specially as the workers are not producing to fulfil sensible needs but just to supply markets. In one way you would be right; but capitalism has forceful ways of getting people to act against their best interests and produce wealth that will be accumulated to further ensnare workers in wage-slavery. For a start, working people under capitalism need wages to buy the necessities of life. In addition, advertizing implores and persuades everyone to buy more of this and that; with the result that every worker hopes to find a job that pays as much as possible and offers “advancement”, i.'e. the prospect of competing against other workers to somehow get more than they.

Research

Once a worker is engaged, how does capitalism ensure that it gets the maximum possible out of him? This is where management comes in. Capitalism, in order to produce and grow, has no alternative but to devote much attention to management to control workforces and persuade workers to take part in the corporate madness. On the surface it may look as if it has been successful: the majority of workers are persuaded most of the time to behave in a way that is profitable for the enterprise and to accept that managers have “the right” — as trained specialists — to control the machinery and the lives of those who work at it.

In developing the “craft” of management a great amount of effort has been expended, particularly in the universities; today no self-respecting university is without its Management Studies department. Here, students are trained and research is carried out to discover newer and more promising ways to achieve management’s end. It is enlightening to know that the Russians have been among other capitalist countries who have fallen over themselves to gain the latest information on management methods from the gurus at the universities in Britain and America.

Historically, the “Scientific Management” principles of F. W. Taylor in the early 1900s can be seen as among the first efforts by industrial capitalists to control workers otherwise than by force and the fear of dismissal. Essentially, these principles maintained that if firms selected their workers, trained them in the most efficient ways, and appeared to be rewarding them accordingly, the workers would behave in a way that was satisfactory to the management. (The wage-worker’s satisfaction would come from the supposition that he received high earnings.) This view of industrial man has become known as the “Rational-Economic” view and has given rise to work-study, personnel selection and systematic training techniques in industry.

What is a Human Being ?

It rapidly became apparent that this view was inadequate, and soon another factor in the industrial situation was named by researchers in the United States of America. It was discovered from the deservedly famous Hawthorne researches of Elton Mayo and others that there was a social factor to take into account in the workplace. Workers left to congregate did so in what were termed “informal groups”; in these they operated norms of behaviour and restricted production — not always in the best interests of the management and owners but in their own interests as workers. The management teaching which emanated from these researches became known as the “Human Relations” school, and was concerned to show that leadership at work was very important in order to get workers’ behaviour to coincide with the wishes of management.

This doctrine was very acceptable to capitalists, not only because of its timely appearance but because it seemed to fit in with Christian ethics and thereby reinforced management’s responsibility to control the enterprise. It has given rise to innumerable supervisory management courses, and the theatricals of treating workers as “real people” to give them motivation to produce for the benefit of the owners. In the immortal words of an unnamed industrial supervisor: “We are a happy team here, I treat my workers as human beings and they appreciate that.”

After the Second World War, in the developed capitalist countries there was a tremendous upsurge of study in the “social sciences” of psychology, sociology, social anthropology, political science, etc. To gain money for research in the USA, researchers removed the tainted word “social” and substituted “behavioral”. This name-change had the tempting implication of learning how to predict, control and manipulate the behaviour of human beings. Needless to say, plenty of money was then forthcoming to pursue these “sciences” and to feed resulting information to management so that it would be utilized to increase industrial stability and efficiency.

Inventing a Meaning

Management studies “discovered” what Marx had known long before: that man looked for meaning in his work, and the chance to develop and mature. Bureaucracies and other traditional forms of organization took away the likelihood of finding meaning except in the top echelons of the hierarchy. It was said also that bureaucracies produced immature behaviour and conflict among themselves because of the workings of internal politics and career structure. Therefore people were looking for their satisfaction outside the workplace and becoming apathetic and non-involved towards work. Management badly needed an ideology to cope with these problems. Lo and behold, it was produced in the guise of “Organization Development”.

“Organization Development” is the requirement for a firm to keep pace with technical and social changes inside and outside itself. It makes use of such trendy techniques as “participative management”, “job enrichment”, etc. What it means for management is seeking the commitment of the work-force by devising and designing jobs which offer people a challenge, and offer the worker more positive opportunities to “fulfil himself as an individual” at work. The supporting logic is that given these opportunities the individual will gain more satisfaction at work; his defences, brought into action to combat the immature manner in which he had to behave at work formerly, would be eroded — and consequently organizational effectiveness would be increased.

It is precisely this logic and ideology that is behind the much-publicized reorganization of production at Volvo in Sweden into teams of workers producing whole cars themselves, not on assembly lines but in what are termed “villages”. Volvo’s boss has been quoted as saying that if the experiment fails and output falls, the whole system can soon be re-transformed to the assembly line. So much for concern with “human satisfaction” !

Scientific Management was rape but Organization Development, with its techniques of “participation” and “enrichment”, is seduction. The end result is the same, a violated human being and society.

Why it will not Work

The Behavioural Science techniques have been and are being used by management to meet the continual difficulty of getting people to accept wage-slavery. It is the latest fad in a long line of panaceas for the problems of the capitalist system. We may take for granted that it will be as unsuccessful as all the other rearguard actions of capitalism and will not for long dupe workers into believing it is in their interests to acquiesce. The dilemma for management is that responsibility given to a person or group means a loss of managerial control. Therefore, management could not go far in creating true enrichment and participation without undermining its own control of the means of production. They will not do that.

All these attempts then have failed and will fail to deliver the goods. From the capitalists’ point of view, people remain “unmanageable” — but the capitalist class must go on seeking ways to manage, training people for leadership (and presumably followership).

It may appear that managers themselves have a vested interest in the continuance of capitalism because it gives apparent power and status. It should be remembered that they too are workers, anxious to be hired and liable to be fired. While perhaps lording-it over their “workforces”, they are themselves just as much aware of their own insecurity: they share the same problems. From that point of view the so-called leader is likely to be conscious that leadership is a myth.

Socialists do everything possible to destroy that myth and the necessity for people to be “managed”. The idea of management and leadership is an industrial as well as a political fallacy. In a Socialist society people will be able to decide democratically how labour is to be applied for the common good. The need for management is obsolete in such a society. No wages or status, but democratic decision-making and free access to goods and services. Who needs managers ?

D. G. Bishop