Denouncing the Dictatorship of Managers

Productive workers make things; non-productive workers provide services for production and consumption. However counter-productive management has become all too common; disconnected from creative labour they proffer different forms of duplicity as specialities. This is the calibre of people put in charge of our economy and increasingly everything else.

Once the manager and the telephone was the conduit for important information, their meetings and contacts were assets. Their oversight of processes and procedures had some virtue, but all of this has been made redundant by digital communications. Once they coordinated production, orchestrated work, planned logistically and controlled the distribution of final products. Now the telephones, meetings, file cabinets, Rolodex addresses, the crafted letters and the triplicate carbon copies are a thing of the past; just as technocratic management itself has long since passed away.

The technocrats of production, hailed in the 1930s for their contributions, are extinct; replaced with modern managers who micromanage employees, create obstructions, make bad problems worse, rumour monger, slander, conspire and deceive. They now write reports on things they have have not studied and hire ‘experts’ because they are too lazy, and inept, to apply themselves to understanding anything difficult. They endorse advice without a care if it is any good so long as it accredited and they escape blame when it does not work. These are our decision-makers!

People who elect to such a career begin with dignity and morality, but if they retain these they will not rise. They network to gain entry, but rise by abandoning scruples as they commit unconscionable acts and shrug off the consequences as someone else’s responsibility. They have the same Eichmann outlook that timetabled the trains, and made out the death lists, “if not me then somebody else.” This is what we call a career today? The only thing worse than being under manager’s control, is being one.

These generalizations are unfair to individual managers and unfair to many on a partial basis at least — but as a general condition of present managerialism these generalizations hold. This is the character of a class whose ambitions are disconnected from reality and vainly pursued. To say that management bullies the workforce upon which it relies, is to see that it has reverted to an older and tougher form of overseers that want to be seen as hard and effective, but are in fact weak and effete packs that pull down a victim because it is already under attack.

Line managers, section managers, so called personal departments, will falsify records, attack and harass, without any other purpose or reason than being part of the same gang. This is the main reasons managers should be treated as a group, because when pressed that is how they respond. In a work incident none of them will stick-up for the ‘little guy’ by silence they will collectively condone any act, as they sat in meetings and kept silent when slanders are made. To assuage guilt they will find reasons to blame the victim, believe chosen parts of convenient lies, discard the disproportionate force brought to bear; as a group they are immoral and this is the body that is in charge of our society.

If management were otherwise then this society would be very different to what we know, and what we are passing on to the next generation. It is a shameful legacy from a parent, and a terrible prospect for a young person — to have a future bleaker than these terrible times, yet unless something is done this will be true. This no good thing that we have, no statistic can prove otherwise, life is not nowhere good enough given the level of technology and knowledge that now exist. Until this layer of society is removed from political, economic and social power nothing better will come our way.

It is not the individual manager who is the problem for they are a collection of many vices and a few virtues; the problem is managers as a group, a destructive social malignancy, that is all vice and no virtue.

Greg Schofield Perth Australia