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

Gar Lipow lipowg at sprintmail.com
Sun Jan 26 20:04:45 PST 2003


On Sun, 26 Jan 2003 17:12:42 joanna bujes <joanna.bujes at sun.com> wrote

>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.

I don't believe I said that efficiency is the primary object. The coordinator class is a matter of keeping control, not of efficiency. Imagine an owner eliminating managers from a privately owned corporation. Perhaps he (it probably would be a "he" - patriarchy is still alive and well) would form it into self managing units; they would get the same percent of the profit that went into wages previously plus a portion of the money that formerly went to the managers. The workers could divide among themselves as the wished, rearrange their tasks, hire and fire. Obviously the contract would have to be more detailed than this so that both owner and worker came out better than in the old the system. It could be done.

But there is one hell of a long term problem from the owner point of view. Probably sooner, rather than later, the workers would start to think "what the hell do we need the owner for? What the hell does he do for his share of the profits?" In fact Marx and Engels expected this to happen. It was the existence of the Coordinator class that prevented it. Given the genius of M&E it is a great pity they missed it. Because they might have come up with a solution, if they had spotted the problem. But they misdefined the middle class and expected it to simply be absorbed into the working class.

Me

>>"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.

Joanna

>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.

I think you prove my point here. I said "majority" not "all". Class measures a tendency, not something that applies to every member of the class. And I agree that managers are not neccesary, though of course management is.

Bill Bartlett in Tasmania said

quoting me

>>Kelley you are absolutely right. I did exactly what I said no one should do in class analysis. I took an analysis that is meant to be a limiting case for large groups and applied it to individuas.

Bill himself

>On the contrary, you took the right approach and proved your class analysis wrong. An analysis of class relationships must be able to be applied to individuals. An abstract analysis of the forest that isn't consistent with what we know about individual trees can be presumed wrong.

>If your analysis is only applicable to abstract "large groups", but not to actual real people, then how can we test its veracity? It is just a vague and sweeping generalisation.

Great, now I have to defend an apology. I wonder why I occasionally lose my temper on this list. Good thing that nobody else ever does.

It is testable statistically. How do we know that smoking causes cancer? (No, I'm not anti-smoking fanatic - just giving an good example.) Plenty of smokers die an eighty of something unrelated to smoking. We know because if you smoke you have a better chance of getting cancer, and of getting other smoking related illnesses. (Plus the mechanism is pretty well documented. But the correlation helped spot it. And the fact that that probability goes up for a non-smoker who starts, and goes down for a smoker who stops.) Lots of things are probablisic, and can only be tested statistically.



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