RE: The Managerial Revolution, it turns out that its sort of bunk in a huge way. His assertion of uniformity in an identifiable managerial class across the USA is more closer to the truth now, but still off from where he seems to place it, but it was certainly way off at the time he wrote it. When he wrote that, the USA still had huge sectoral and structural diversity and didnt have the homogeneity he thinks he did, not even by a hundred miles did it have it. Management practices varied by alot between the giants like GM, many of which which did put themselves under intensive bureaucratic hierarchies, but mid sized (but they can still be pretty big) and smaller firms (and we had a lot more of both back then) variegated widely. And back then there was a lot more regional variation in these types of things as well
Thanks Mike. I came across an interesting article on Jacobin making some of those points when researching the piece - The Right's Phony Class War, by David Sessions.
I think elite theory is most interesting when it is pursued in combination with class theory, as you see for example in Gramsci. Part of its value for the right is opening up a different set of cleavages around education etc, but it also points to a persistent problem for the left in terms of what it means to secure working class representation, which was a very salient issue in my work on the CIA's relationship with the AFL.
HI, thanks for the interesting reply! In my view, both the so called "right" AND the so called "left" are who almost entirely destroyed most of the representation the general population had. They split their task and each took over one of our two parties and over a few decades transformed them into haunted house mirror simulacrums of what they were.
We used to have very imperfect and limited but nonetheless still genuinely democratic governance structures based around our two formerly decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties, each --while still being full of a lot of BS-- was for the most part honestly named, the Democratic Party was a small "d" democratic party and the Republican Party was a small "r" republican party. And they operated in a semi-politically decentralized, semi-economically decentralized, semi-culturally decentralized, and semi-scientifically decentralized system.
But due to their (not saying they didnt have help, tho) dirty deeds, foe several decades now we've had two centralized and publicly in-accessible exclusionary membership parties. And our now so called Republican and Democratic parties are no longer republican and democratic parties, they are conservative party and a technocracy party, neither of which gives a flying **** about republicanism or democracy. And part parcel with that, they operate in a deeply politically, economically, and scientifically centralized system. So we've essentially lost most all of both our representation and our democratic governance structures.
Well written!
RE: The Managerial Revolution, it turns out that its sort of bunk in a huge way. His assertion of uniformity in an identifiable managerial class across the USA is more closer to the truth now, but still off from where he seems to place it, but it was certainly way off at the time he wrote it. When he wrote that, the USA still had huge sectoral and structural diversity and didnt have the homogeneity he thinks he did, not even by a hundred miles did it have it. Management practices varied by alot between the giants like GM, many of which which did put themselves under intensive bureaucratic hierarchies, but mid sized (but they can still be pretty big) and smaller firms (and we had a lot more of both back then) variegated widely. And back then there was a lot more regional variation in these types of things as well
Thanks Mike. I came across an interesting article on Jacobin making some of those points when researching the piece - The Right's Phony Class War, by David Sessions.
I think elite theory is most interesting when it is pursued in combination with class theory, as you see for example in Gramsci. Part of its value for the right is opening up a different set of cleavages around education etc, but it also points to a persistent problem for the left in terms of what it means to secure working class representation, which was a very salient issue in my work on the CIA's relationship with the AFL.
HI, thanks for the interesting reply! In my view, both the so called "right" AND the so called "left" are who almost entirely destroyed most of the representation the general population had. They split their task and each took over one of our two parties and over a few decades transformed them into haunted house mirror simulacrums of what they were.
We used to have very imperfect and limited but nonetheless still genuinely democratic governance structures based around our two formerly decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties, each --while still being full of a lot of BS-- was for the most part honestly named, the Democratic Party was a small "d" democratic party and the Republican Party was a small "r" republican party. And they operated in a semi-politically decentralized, semi-economically decentralized, semi-culturally decentralized, and semi-scientifically decentralized system.
But due to their (not saying they didnt have help, tho) dirty deeds, foe several decades now we've had two centralized and publicly in-accessible exclusionary membership parties. And our now so called Republican and Democratic parties are no longer republican and democratic parties, they are conservative party and a technocracy party, neither of which gives a flying **** about republicanism or democracy. And part parcel with that, they operate in a deeply politically, economically, and scientifically centralized system. So we've essentially lost most all of both our representation and our democratic governance structures.