I have recently started reading Sam T Francis' Leviathan and its enemies.
In the first chapter he is laying out the case that since the start of the 20th
century 'capitalism' has morphed from its older bourgeoisie form (his
words not mine) with its focus on the ascetic individual, which included
sublimation of the individuals desires to duty, work as an ends rather than the
pursuit of an aristocratic ideal of 'genteel leisure' and individual
virtue, into the monstrosity he describes as 'managerial capitalism'.
Managerial capitalism or Managerialism is the product of 'mass and
scale', where you require many managers to run corporation sized businesses
who are detached from any sense of real ownership because the ownership is
dispersed through the share holders, the property moving into a state of
'dematerialized property', I will get back to this. Anyway the morphing
into managerialism has created a new set of self interested elites who are
selected through "merit" (haha I know, it was written in 1995) these
are primarily recruited into three fields, managers, technical experts and
sophists (my words not his), leaving the other two aside I'd like to focus
on the 'technical experts', these are the types you see who create their
'cooperatives'.
Now if we leave aside the obvious economic problems with cooperatives that
make them less competitive than their entrepreneurial counterparts, I would like
to ask owners of coops or those who plan on starting coops how the means of
collective ownership combats any of the issues of managerialism? It seems to me
that a cooperative that is run by the anti hierarchy, egalitarian types, agree
with managerial capital on almost every issue. Lets us compare and then we can
contrast it with the positions of bourgeoisie capitalism, the capitalism the
coop thinks they are fighting.
Megacorps do not explicitly believe in private property but rather in the
dematerialized property, I will paraphrase the Joseph Schumpeter quote from page
52, "..Dematerialized, defunctionalized and absentee ownership does not
impress and call forth moral allegiance as the vital form of property did.
Eventually there will be nobody left who really cares to stand for it, nobody
within and nobody without the precincts of the big concerns." as Sam T
Francis explains in the next page that a managers wealth is not extracted from
the property rather from the salaries they garner from their specialized skills.
Now what is the cooperatives position on this? Well that is in the name
'cooperative', they believe in the collective ownership, or as I like to
say the collective disownership as no one can be truly held accountable when
everyone votes on decisions, just like the managers who do not own the megacorp.
Due to the dematerialization of private property the megacorp is not against
regulation, regulation that achieves another one of its ends this is an end
shared with the coop, the destruction of entrepreneurial capitalist, the old
school type. Now this is a much worse position for the coop to take because A)
its an absolute self own for the coop (making it harder for them to compete) and
B) the megacorps position is purely material, it needs to crush its competition
in order to perpetuate the managerial cycle, the coop cannot say the same, the
coop does it out of spite for the perceived enemy.
Both the coop and the megacorp want to bring about the destruction of the old
borgeuousie morallity that I described above, the megacorp works with mass
advertising to sell a stereotypical consumer, for the obvious ends of creating a
new class of people whose identities are defined by what they consume. While the
coop wishes the same destruction because 'man was born free and is forever
in chains', they see it as arbitrary constriction of human nature or
effectively just "oppression". They both up with the same ends,
materialistic hedonism.
The leftist coop and the megacorp agree on every social issue, whether its
women in the work force, racial justice movements like BLM, or abortion, if you
took a middle manager from Google and a member of one of these leftist coops you
would be hard pressed to find a social issue they do not agree on, this is
despite the fact that the lefist would claim that Google is their enemy. The
megacorp holds these positions because it needs to homogenize the workforce and
the consumer base, and not in a good way. Rather than having an order that
exists as a local and decentralized society, a homogenous society where everyone
is defined by what international product they have consumed or what netflix show
they have watched, is susceptible to more generalized advertising (see globohomo
blog art). The coop agrees on the social issues because they believe in
overarching narratives of oppression, each new issue is a new imagined chain to
break.
Both the megacorp and the coop demand the absolute sublimation of the
individual into the collective metastructure, all individual ambitions, values
and eccentricities must be moved aside and in its place the goals of the
megacorp must be put in its place. Individual success is barely rewarded and
excellence is often frowned upon, the megacorp is no place for the great man. In
the coop the individuals will is ignored in favour of the collective will.
The final point is that both the megacorp and the coop think that capitalism
is bad, there is quite a difference here as the coop thinks that capitalism is
oppressive and the solution is cooperatives, while the megacorp, or at least
their supposed representatives think that the solution lies in 'stakeholder
capitalism' see the WEF.
My final point is that they are of the same stock. The coop recruits from the
same pool of 'technical experts' that the megacorp does, there is no
difference, in fact I imagine you could replace the average member of the coop
with the average member of the megacorp, replaceable like drones due to the
collective conformity of the mass corporation and the coop, as mentioned by Sam
T Francis on page 48-49 "the collective conformity that the “organization
man” of the mass corporation exhibits in his professional life is reflected in
his social life as well in dress, tastes, uses of leisure, community, and
home." colloquially we call these people 'bugmen'
Traditional capitalism
Nope didn't finish.