Deleuze & Guattari, Zizek on Arendt (More from Brennan)

joanna bujes joanna.bujes at sun.com
Sun Jan 26 17:12:42 PST 2003


At 07:48 PM 01/26/2003 -0500, Gar wrote:
>So you need a class in between labor capital, a middle class, a
>bureaucratic/technical/managerial/academic class. This class performs a
>great many functions. There is directly policing workers to extract work
>from them. There is shaping the work environment, both to increase
>productivity per hour, but also to deskill labor and make it more
>measurable, easier to police. There is the shaping of the workers,
>suppressing some types of creativity while encouraging others - with the
>aim of making obedient little agents, but something more than drones,
>something that does not require micro management.

One thing I have noticed over the last twenty years...as a technical writer in relationship to a coordinating class/management....is that this hierarchical arrangement makes work much less efficient. The managers wind up making decisions about all kinds of things they don't really understand because they're not doing the work. The workers are unhappy because they're made to work in ways that are clearly inefficient/wasteful/inferior. As companies get bigger, they add more layers of management ...compounding this problem. Then, in steps "Globalization" where in addition to the multiplicity of management layers you have the additional wrinkle of coordinating work with people half-way around the world.....while the decision makers are farther and farther away from the work itself. This may be a lot of things....but efficient is not a word that comes to mind.

...as for

"Similarly, you will never persuade a majority of coordinators within a capitalist society to support any form of socialism that does not give coordinators special privileges That is why most people of coordinator background on this list become downright hysterical when a non market, non centrally planned form of socialism is advocated."

I don't know if you're right. I've had different kinds of managers. I don't really see that management is necessary; at least in my work, if we all got together and figured what the resources were and what had to be done, I'm pretty sure it would all come out right in the end. As for those managers who think they are better than workers because they are managers ....I just see that as a form of pathology...and it is pretty nauseating to live with. Fortunately, not all my managers have been like that.

Joanna



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