Category: Book Reviews

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.