[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the controls we all live under and the path to setting us free from how we are manipulated. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
[Because of the clarity and the HR relevance of this piece by Susan Rosenthal, I have made excerpts of it into a full Reader].
—We are told who we must be and what we can and cannot read, think, say, and do with our bodies and our lives. This suffocating control is justified as necessary for a complex society to function. This is a lie.
1. While all societies require people to be organized, the need for external management is a unique feature of class-divided societies. Managed societies are arranged in a hierarchy, where decisions flow from those with more power to those with less. To sustain this unfair social arrangement, members of the subjugated class cannot be allowed to rebel, move elsewhere, or choose a different social arrangement –with protest being criminalized.
2. Workers vastly outnumber bosses, so why do they tolerate an oppressive social arrangement? In society, the manager class imposes the will of the capitalist class on the working class. Without this manager class layer*, capitalists and workers would battle openly for social control, and victory would go to the working class with their superior numbers and their hands on the wheels of production. The manager class thus stands between the other two classes (capitalists and workers) and are pulled in both directions.
*: The manager class includes: —workplace supervisors who tell workers what to do and when and how to do it; —social gate-keepers who restrict access to medical treatment, medicines, and financial and social support; —police who control where we go and what we do; —psychologists and psychiatrists who insist that we are the problem, not society; —generals who send workers to war; —judges who side with bosses; —union officials who stop workers from fighting for more; —social and political reformers who claim they can make the system work for us; —academics and other ‘experts’ who insist there is no alternative.
3. The manager class members are opportunists; they monitor which way the political wind is blowing and act accordingly. Their role is to manage injustice, not to end it. Mass injustice is caused by a social system that deprives the many to enrich the few; …and suffering is portrayed as a personal problem of individuals. Blaming the victim shields the system, i.e., implies that sufferers cause their own misery and are responsible for ending it. (The possibility that sufferers could organize themselves to end their misery is never considered; but anything that helps workers organize and fight is actually a step towards ending that suffering. As it is, workers continue to suffer though).
4. The professional manager class is trained to impose decisions on the underclass ‘for their own good’. Positioning themselves as social parents, they treat workers as children who cannot be trusted to make their own decisions. … and this will continue to happen until workers organize independently of the manager class so they can truly press forward.
Right-leaning managers
5. Right-leaning managers insist that the solution to all social problems is –more personal responsibility, —hard work, —patriotism, —adherence to religion, and —strengthening of the two-parent, heterosexual family. They push to reduce social supports, deny reproductive control, and reject any challenge to traditional gender roles. They lobby for more police, harsher punishments, more prisons, and fewer immigrants. They oppose affirmative action, are fiercely anti-union, and demand a government that reflects their values.
6. Right-leaning managers are generously funded by right-wing foundations that aim to strengthen the business class and weaken the labor movement. In times of social crisis, right-leaning managers join paramilitary, fascist, and counter-revolutionary movements in the belief that the political system is so corrupt that they must defend their rights and values by force.**
**: The basic difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is how best to suppress the working class. Trump is a right-leaning manager who wants to crush all opposition by force, while Biden poses as a left-leaning manager who relies on the union bureaucracy to contain workers’ demands. The truth is, a union bureaucracy exists for only one reason: to prevent workers from organizing themselves as a class to defeat the bosses and their system.
Left-leaning managers
7. Left-leaning managers insist that the solution to all social problems is compromise. Convinced that society can be made to work for both classes, they appeal to capitalists to be more socially minded and workers to be more patient.
8. While left-leaning managers will condemn the unfairness, the human rights violations and the brutality of Capitalism, their solutions are limited to convincing authorities to change course or electing different authorities. [The managerial concept of socialism is a top-down, centrally controlled society run by enlightened professionals. Managerial socialists do not trust workers to lead their own fight, choose their own leaders, and build the world they want. Instead, they position themselves as authorities].
Government elections offer no real choice, only a choice of manager
9. No matter which manager we vote for, all are committed to a for-profit system that is destroying our lives and the planet. All believe that civilization would collapse if ordinary people organized to make their own decisions and directed society to meet their and the planet’s needs.
Bottom line
–Workers must learn to ‘organize despair’. (Alberto Toscano)
10. Late-stage capitalism is an extremely managed society. The more capital accumulates, the more inequality grows, the more people rebel, and the more social controls are imposed.
11. Yuval Noah Harari expressed this pessimistic view as follows: “We are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we have made for ourselves”.
12. The opposite of managerialism is not everyone-do-their-own-thing. Genuine freedom must be organized. The path is not laid out for workers, so they must construct it, step by step. They must become highly organized, clear about their goal and build cooperative, creative organizations that equip them to build the world we need.
13. Building enough public pressure and getting the right people in power is NOT the solution; it is a delusion. As soon as we stop fighting, everything we have won is stripped away. We do not need rescuers to end the widespread suffering. Workers belong to a powerful international class that can fight-for and win for the liberation of all of us. (S. Rosenthal)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com