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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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askchapo
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Yeah, there's definitely a late capitalist "managerialization" of labour at play here.
A century ago there were far fewer management roles and there'd be a better argument for a PMC distinction when there were the working masses in a factory or a mine and then a small handful of managers at most, although even then this is not a materialist take and I'd prefer to conceptualise it as a stratum within capitalist classes (much like the iffy "precariat" label) than as an actual class in itself.
These days the role of a manager is expanded to diffuse responsibility and accountability downwards - if your shift supervisor "manager" is the one who is the hatchet man who is essentially pushed into a position where they are coerced into enforcing unwritten policy on wage theft then the company gets all the benefits from wage theft while holding none of the responsibility for it because they can just blame the "manager" for violating written policy and fire them for it.
(Anyone who was worked entry-level jobs, especially in customer service and food service roles, knows that there's the explicit written policy which is almost always in line with legislation but there's implict policy which routinely violates labour laws, occupational health & safety laws etc. but this is just one example. Upper management creates conditions where it's impossible to meet all the demands without cutting corners and yet they've figured out a way to wash their hands of any responsibility because it's all implication and workplace culture but none of it is authorised by upper management or inked in policy proper.)
Then, as you've mentioned, today's pseudo-manager can be exploited for unpaid overtime and all in exchange for a full-time job and a minor pay bump in their hourly rate, which invariably ends up either a wash or an effective pay cut when considering all the hours they work.
I like this bit. Doesn't help that most promotions in a company are only for manager roles. Now some managers are just dicks who absolutely enjoy the little power they hold but others I know are barely holding on by a thread and hate what they do yet are trapped because they made commitments through long term loans.
The only route made to try and escape poverty and wage labour seems to only be granted the gun to shoot your fellow worker on behalf of the capitalist for a few extra slices of bread.
I think its a topic worth writing about with proper thinking and research moreso to analyse the dynamics of the modern working class rather than pin a target on a group.
And really, this is just the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon that I don't think has a name yet.
This diffusion of responsibility downwards while still holding virtually all of the chips which is implemented alongside a sort of crabs-in-a-bucket model of managing people who aspire for more (or maybe just aspire for a decent education, home ownership, healthcare, and a reasonable retirement).
I know I'm being vague in what I'm describing but, as an example, this same sort of program has been carried out in lots of countries in the privatisation of retirement funds. It used to be that the company you worked for would pay for your retirement, then the government started taking up that role, and since then there's a strong trend towards employee and/or employer retirement contributions going into mutual funds.
These mutual funds mean that the average prole's economic wellbeing is inextricably linked to the performance of the stock market and yet with all of that responsibility comes virtually no power - BlackRock is probably the best example of how that power is still wielded at the top in the service of capital, even if it's the workers' funds ostensibly.
You want a good retirement, chump?
Well, you just have to sell your soul to the devil that is late capitalism and become increasingly involved in the exploitation of your fellow workers because the better the stock market does at extracting surplus value and screwing over the workers, the better your retirement will be but know that in doing so you're enabling BlackRock buying up investment properties which only drives up the cost of living for all workers and which puts home ownership ever further out of reach for your fellow proles and for future generations. (Of course this is only a small slice of the market manipulation that a company like BlackRock engages in too.)
Idk. It's like a sort of pseudo-enfranchisement or something.
If you take a historical long view of this, what's playing out right now is what the evolutionary socialists and fabianists had always desired - the gradual evolution of the economy so that everyone has more representation in power structures and economic processes. Except those types have always overlooked the fact that the house always wins; the interests of the bourgeoisie and capital didn't just concede ground and allow for people to actually have more power, instead it simply rearranged the order of things so that more of the burden of responsibility could be shifted onto the proles with little-to-no changes to the overarching power structure.
This is also what happens a lot in prison systems with the most obvious example being of "kapos"; comprador Nazi concentration camp inmates who turned on their fellow inmates to become functionaries of the concentration camps themselves, overseeing stuff like forced labour for tiny concessions and no ability to influence the power structure itself (i.e. the kapo had authority over fellow inmates so they had some measure of power to speak of but their ability to influence any change in the system of concentration camps or Nazi Germany itself was entirely non-existent.)
...maybe it could be called coopting workers into being the henchmen for capital, or something?