The Techno-managerial Class
The State
Implications for Practice
Unions and Councils
A People's Alliance?
Alan asks, "What are the specific class interests" of the techno-managerial class?
The techno-managerial class differs from the capitalist class in that their power and life prospects are not based on ownership but on their relative monopolization of expertise and levers of decision-making in the economy. They can't pass on their class position to their kids through inheritance of property. Rather, they can reproduce their class position for their offspring through such strategems as ensuring a good school system in their exclusive residential areas, access to university educations, plus providing connections when their children seek jobs.
Their class interest lies in ensuring the continuation of a hierarchical system based on the relative monopolization of expertise and decision-making. This is why the techno-managerial class tends to have a meritocratic ideology, which says that those with more knowledge and credentials "merit" more income and power.
The techno-managerial class was only embryonic in 19th century capitalism. That early capitalism tended to make use of the technology of craft production. This technology existed in the heads of artisans, handed down through craft tradition. In some industries this survived into the 20th century. To take an example, my grandmother was a milliner. Although she worked at times in garment factories in downtown Los Angeles in the '30s and '40s, she had all the skills required in the hat-making industry. She could design hats, she could figure out how to organize the work, she was familiar with all the tools of the milliner's craft, and she also did the physical work of making the hats. She was a compleat artisan.
Prior to the 20th century, artisanal methods of production had existed for thousands of years and were the pre-capitalist basis of industry that had survived under early capitalism.
With the rise of the big corporation at the end of the 19th century came a systematic effort by corporations to re-organize work and re-define jobs. The new management approach came to be called "Taylorism" after one of its main theorizers, Frederick Taylor. The idea was to analyze the jobs of skilled workers into component tasks so as to isolate tasks that required much less skill. These tasks then could become a separate job, done repetitively by someone hired at lower pay.
Machines such as conveyors and automated tools could be used to design the jobs so that the physical equipment controlled the pace and motions of workers. The purpose of this re-design of work was ostensibly to lower wage costs, and enhance productivity, and this is how management justified it to the shareholders. But even more important was that it shifted the balance of power on the shop floor to the advantage of management and to the disadvantage of workers. Control of the organization and methods of work had been one of the bargaining strengths of 19th century craft workers.
Breaking this control enhanced management's ability to squeeze more production out of workers and lower wage costs, but also entrenched management's position. A class interest of the techno-managerial class is power. As David Nobel has shown in his history of the machine tool industry(1), managers and engineers will tend to prefer those new technologies that offer the prospect of shifting power to their advantage. Efficiency or enhancing productivity is not sufficient by itself to explain actual technical choices that are made in industry.
The re-organization of work also meant a shift in the control of technical change in industry. Management dispossessed workers of the control over production technology and placed it in the hands of engineers with science-based university educations, working as adjuncts of management.
This change did not happen without struggle. The beginnings of this process in the early 20th century coincided with a huge labor rebellion in the USA, and the emergence of unions like the IWW with an explicit theme of worker control of production.
Alan refers to "the boss class" but there is no single boss class since the power over workers in advanced capitalism lies in both the capitalist and techno-managerial classes. Moreover, talk of a "boss class" obscures the fact that there have been a great variety of systems of domination of the immediate producers by "bosses" in history. But the basis of the class power of various boss classes has been different. Feudal land barons, Roman slave-owners, government administrators, corporate middle-managers and capitalists are all "bosses" but the basis of their class power is different. Talk of a "boss class" obscures these differences.
An example of a struggle of the techno-managerial class with the capitalists is the formation of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). Very often these are created as management-entrenchment devices; that is, they give the salaried managers more independence from a capitalist ownership group.
The Mondragon cooperatives serve a similar function in the Basque country. As Sharryn Kasmir shows(2), the Mondragon coops are dominated by their managers and professional cadres. The only real input a worker has over how the coops are run is to show up and vote at annual meetings. But if a person works 40 hours a week cleaning floors or machining parts in a stove factory, how are they going to acquire the skills and knowledge to challenge the plans and financial analyses presented by the professional cadre at the annual meetings? The Mondragon coops have a rule that disallows workers from hiring outside consultants to help them evaluate management plans. This rule is designed to entrench the power of the techno-managerial cadre.
The Mondragon coops are not really a worker empowerment strategy but a nationalist investment strategy by the Basque techno-managerial class. Cooperative ownership prevents a private capitalist owner from disinvesting and moving the plants to another country.
Recognizing the existence of the techno-managerial class is necessary for developing a critique of the top-down hierarchy in advanced capitalist industry, and shows the importance of developing a strategy for eliminating that hierarchy, and thus dissolving the power of the techno-managerial class. The working class will remain a subjugated and exploited class as long as techno-managerial class power persists.
The state-owned economies in the so-called "Communist" countries are also a techno-mangerialist mode of production. That the techno-managerial class can be a ruling class is a key historical lesson of these systems. I think it is not quite accurate to refer to these economic systems as "Stalinist." Stalinism was an authoritarian political system. But even if the centrally planned Soviet economy had a democratic parliamentary system on top of it, it still would have been a system with a techno-managerial ruling class, and a subjugated and exploited working class.
The large economic entities owned by the state in capitalist countries are not controlled directly by the capitalists — water systems, the postal service, government-owned electric companies, air pollution control districts, sewer districts, transit authorities, and so on. These organizations are controlled directly by cadres of the techno-managerial class, and they are a reason why a fraction of that class supports social-democratic strategies. Very often these entities are created to cover market failures, and they provide a market for some capitalist entities, such as huge construction conglomerates and equipment manufacturers.
Alan says the capitalists own these entities "collectively through the state." I believe this is mistaken. Rather, it is joint-stock companies — private corporations — that are owned collectively by capitalists. The control of the capitalists over the state is more complex. Although the capitalists are the dominant influence over the state, it also serves the interests of the techno-managerial class.
Moreover, this idea of the state as a vehicle of collective private ownership cannot distinguish state ownership from privatization of government powers such as "common interest" housing developments (such as gated communities) and "business improvement districts" (BIDs). Common interest housing enables an affluent minority (usually members of the techno-managerial and business classes) to control their own private services (such as security, trash pickup and so on), thus undermining support for genuine public services that also serve working class communities. BIDs are entities in business districts controlled typically by the private property owners, and which provide things like private security and street cleaning. This enables the dominant business class elements in these areas to more directly control these state-like functions. The WSM's theory of the state as "collective private property" of a "boss class" can't differentiate these private governments from the actual state.
A social function of the state is to nurture and protect the existing economic structure. Nonetheless, the WSA does not agree that the state is merely an "executive committee" of the ruling class, contrary to The Communist Manifesto. The state must have a certain degree of autonomy from the capitalists in order to maintain its legitimacy. It must be able to maintain a facade of "representing the whole society." The state cannot carry out its function of preserving a system dominated by the top classes if it cannot successfully govern.
In response to popular pressure, the government sometimes does things that are contrary to the interests of the capitalist class. The huge expansion of the welfare state in Europe and the USA after World War II was a response to the vast upeaval caused by capitalism in the preceding decades — the Russian and Spanish revolutions, the near revolution in Italy after World War I, the worst depression in the history of world capitalism in the '30s, the general strikes and factory occupations and other mass worker struggles in the USA in the '30s and '40s, and the mass slaughter of two inter-imperialist world wars. So long as the system was making huge profits in the '50s and '60s the ruling class was willing to put up with this concession. But with the profits crisis of the early '70s leading capitalist circles began financing right-wing think tanks and politicians who could mount a concerted counter-attack. This movement originated from the corporate sector, outside the state. Its political victory led to the creation of the present world-wide neo-liberal regime, with its emphasis on privatization and market expansion.
There is in fact an ongoing struggle over the state; that is, a struggle over what the state will do. Movements can and do make demands on the state, just as unions make demands on private employers. Government provides some benefits that augment the consumption of workers — the so-called "social wage". This includes such things as affordable housing subsidies, rent control, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and public transit fare subsidies. There is an ongoing class struggle over how large the social wage will be.
Who controls the government can sometimes have a real impact on the lives of working people. This being the case, working people can have real reasons for voting for one politician rather than another, or voting yea or nay on ballot measures. Voting sometimes provides an avenue for influencing what the government does that is not available to us in the case of the private corporations. This is especially relevant in cases where there are social movements with reform demands. This is why I'm not an abstentionist. The IWW's "Big Bill" Haywood supported voting for the Socialist Party, in an era when it worked as a mass labor party in some towns in the U.S., on the grounds that it would be better to have in local government office people somewhat more sympathetic to the labor movement. But he didn't look to a strategy of elections to gain a transition to a post-capitalist future — for that he supported a syndicalist strategy of mass organization-building and eventual direct worker takeover of industry.
Voting is sometimes an acceptable tactic to gain certain concessions or for self-defense. But what changes the society is the activation and direct involvement of masses of people. We disagree with the socialists and Marxists in that we do not support a strategy of empowering the working class by trying to build up a labor-based political party to capture the state. This is because, as we see it, the state is inherently an institution for the maintainance of a class system. There is no possible road to human liberation through the state. On this point the WSA and the Workers Solidarity Movement are in agreement.
However, we need to be clear as to why a strategy of capturing the state cannot emancipate the working class. The Marxist strategy is based on the idea of a political faction becoming managers of the mass movement (expressed, for example, in the idea of unions being "transmission belts" for the party) and using their control of the movement to catapult the leadership of a political party into control of the state. The assumption is that they will then implement their program through the state's chain of command. But this presupposes a power relationship between the party (and especially its leadership) and the mass of working people that is analogous to that of the techno-managerial class to workers in production. Techno-managerial class domination is thus built into the Marxist strategy.
Alan asks, What implications does the theory of the techno-managerial class have "for our daily practice in our unions, communities, and political organizations?"
The basis of the power of the techno-managerial class is a relative monopolization of expertise and levers of decision-making. This means that, if we don't want a techno-managerial ruling class to consolidate itself in a period of revolutionary change, it is necessary to work against the monopolization of expertise and levers of decision-making into the hands of a few in the movements that emerge as the forces for change.
For example, a way that a bureaucracy has often become entrenched in unions is through certain activists gaining over time a relative monopolization of negotiating skills, of knowledge about contracts, of connections to lawyers and politicians, and so on. Through long practice of being the people who monopolize these roles the rank and file comes to be dependent on them.
We should work to avoid having movements where there is a relative monopolization of expertise and decision-making power in a minority. To do this we need to develop tactics, programs and structures that continually work to democratize knowledge, to place limits on how long people can occupy certain positions, and to enable more of the rank and file members of organizations to play an active role. "Leadership skills" include such things as public speaking, writing articles that articulate a point of view, negotiating on behalf of a group, coming up with new ideas, carrying out the work of an organization. We should want leadership skills, in this sense, to be widely present within the working class. To play an active role in controlling their own movements, people need to have a means of gaining knowledge and experience through which they develop skills. Study groups, public speaker training and other kinds of training sessions, term-limits for officers — these are a few of the tactics that can be used.
We also must conceive of a different relationship between revolutionary activists and the mass of our fellow workers than that espoused by Leninists. The aim should be to nurture the development of the capacity of the working class itself to self-manage its own movements, to self-manage the struggle, not to gain a management control over the movement. The emphasis on developing self-managing mass organizations is directly a consequence of this point of view.
Alan says: "We don't think the trade unions will become revolutionary organizations; they were never set up to be that. However from within trade union struggle will arise the embryo of the worker's councils of the future. A new form of organization suited to new conditions will arise from the old forms of organization which developed to seek a better deal within capitalism rather than to overthrow it."
This is a perspective that is often called councilism. Councilism and syndicalism have a different terminology, which can lead to debates being merely about words. To make sure the debate is about substance, not words, we need to be clear about our terminology.
Syndicalists use the word union broadly to encompass any mass organization which workers form in struggle against bosses at the point of production. By a mass organization I mean an organization open to any worker who is willing to fight the bosses. Any organization rooted in the workplace that is the workers "in union" with each other counts as a unionist body, even if it doesn't call itself a "union." Unionism is a diverse and contradictory phenomenon, encompassing a spectrum from top-down organizations that function as virtual "company unions" to self-managed organizations with a radical character.
I understand the phrase "workers council" a bit differently than Alan. I would define a workers council as a mass democratic institution of worker power, such as self-management of industry. In other words, organizations only function as workers councils once workers have achieved actual power to run workplaces. The collectives that the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists formed to run industries in the revolution in 1936 were an example of workers councils.
If in a high point of class struggle, workers form organizations of a more directly self-managed character than the bureaucratic trade unions — the kind of organization that Alan would call a "workers council" — this would be simply an organization of the sort that WSA would call a self-managed union, if it is an organization of struggle in a context where the power of the bosses to manage industry has not yet been removed.
It's useful to have an historical example that we can use to make the issue clearer. So, consider the shop council movement in Turin, Italy after World War I. The shop councils were built independently of the unions, through assemblies at work and election of rank and file delegates. The councils were formed partly because the main metal workers union, FIOM, had become bureaucratic and out of touch with the rank and file, but also because there were multiple unions that divided the workforce on lines of craft and ideology, and the councils were a cross-union solidarity movement. The shop council movement was the work of socialists and anarcho-syndicalists.
Antonio Gramsci argued that the shop councils were fundamentally different than the trade unions. The trade union has a bureaucratic character as a result of its role in negotiating the sale of labor power:
"[As it develops,] the union concentrates and generalizes its scope so that the power and discipline of the movement are focused in a central office. This office detaches itself from the masses it regiments, removing itself from the fickle eddy of moods and currents that are typical of the great tumultuous masses. The union thus acquires the ability to sign agreements and take on responsibilities, obliging the entrepreneur to accept a certain legality in his relations with the workers. This legality is conditional on the trust the entrepreneur has in the solvency of the union and its ability to ensure that the working masses respect their contractual obligations."(3)
Gramsci contrasts the external, bureaucratic control of the trade union with the shop councils which have a revolutionary character precisely because of the absence of this bureaucratic control:
"The factory council is the negation of industrial legality. It tends at every moment to destroy it....By its revolutionary spontaneity, the factory council tends to unleash the class war at any moment; by its bureaucratic form, the trade union tends to prevent the class war ever being unleashed."
The bureaucratic trade union discourages the development of self-confidence and the capacity for making their own decisions in the rank and file. The trade union cadre will tend to disfavor mass mobilization and militant struggle because of the risks to the union as an institution and because it doesn't emphasize the activity that gives the bureaucrats their position — negotiating contracts, lobbying politicians, and so on.
But collective action and development of skills and capacity for self-management in the rank and file are needed for fundamental social change.
However, when we look at the actual activity of the Turin shop councils, we find that much of their work is the organization of the struggle with the employers over the "terms and conditions" of labor within capitalism. For example, the council delegates were called upon to "exercize surveillance" over the enforcement of the existing labor contracts and "resolve disputes that may arise between the workforce and management."(4) Gramsci once referred to the Turin shop council movement as a form of "industrial unionism" which is a use of the word "union" in the broad sense.
Moreover, the shop council movement gained control of the FIOM local in Turin, democratizing it. An anarcho-syndicalist, Pietro Ferrero, was elected secretary of the union because of his commitment to rank and file self-management of the union.
In other words, the shop council movement was a shopfloor unionist force precisely because it expressed the desire of the workforce for a more effective organization in the struggles within the current capitalist system as well as expressing their aspirations for complete control.
The main body of Italian syndicalists were in the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) at that time. The USI were enthusiastic supporters of the Turin shop council movement which they described as a form of "revolutionary industrial unionism." Most of the shop councils organized in Italy in that period outside Turin were organized by the USI.
Moreover, if it is the non-bureaucratic, mass autonomous character of the Turin shop councils that gave them a revolutionary potential, as Gramsci had argued, then USI activists could have argued that Gramsci must concede that the "unions" advocated by the anarcho-syndicalists have a revolutionary potential also since they had the same character and structure as the Turin shop councils.
Says Alan,
"We don't think trade unions will become revolutionary organisations; they were never set up to be that. However from within trade union struggle will arise the embryo of the worker's councils of the future. A new form of organisation suited to the new conditions will arise from the old form of organisation which developed to seek a better deal within capitalism rather than to overthrow it. The early beginnings of this are seen wherever workers create their own rank & file organisation without mediation of "all-knowing" leaders..."
When Alan says "unions will [not] become revolutionary organizations," he leaves out the fact that his "workers councils," if they emerge as organizations of struggle within capitalism, are unions, as syndicalists understand the term "union," and this implies the WSM does believe there can be revolutionary unions.
Perhaps the difference between the syndicalist and councilist viewpoint is a judgment about how far in advance of a revolutionary transformation these self-managed mass organizations are likely to emerge. WSM seems to think they are not possible now whereas the WSA believes they are possible now. Given that the CNT in Spain had the character that would define them as "workers councils" in the WSM's terminology, it would seem workers councils can exist for decades prior to an actual revolution. We would argue that the development of self-managed mass organizations — organizations that workers can feel are "theirs" — is necessary for the development of class consciousness towards radical social change. Such organizations are necessary to develop the practices and habits of direct worker solidarity, of running organizations through direct democracy. Such practices develop confidence in the rank and file that they can run things.
Says Alan:
"This does not mean that we are committed to staying in our existing union for all time, merely that we don't think that splitting the tiny minority of revolutionaries and militants away is a good idea. In any situation of trying to build a new organization we want to be in with a real chance of bringing significant numbers. Otherwise it could mean the self-isolation of the militant minority."
In essence, then, the WSM agrees that the bureaucratic unions need to be replaced by a more genuinely self-managing mass worker organization, at some point in time. We can agree perhaps that it is impossible for us to predict when this is likely to happen. Perhaps WSA and the WSM can agree that this depends upon when the bulk of the rank and file in the unions are prepared to go this route. WSA agrees with the WSM in rejecting the idea of breaking off a tiny minority of anarchists or anti-authoritarian revolutionaries into a highly ideological "revolutionary union." This is the basis of the WSA's long-standing disagreement with Anarcho-Syndicalist Review. We agree that this would tend to isolate the militant minority from the mass struggles of the class.
The rank and file networks that the WSM supports are not just caucuses aiming to "get "better" or "more honest" bureaucrats into positions of power," says Alan. WSA agrees with this perspective and has advocated the formation of such networks and autonomous shop groups.
But what are such groups to do? Should they try to reform local unions so that they are more genuinely self-managing? Should they be a means of organizing actions independent of the union such as wildcat strikes? Since the national unions of the AFL-CIO and the large, amalgamated locals tend to be bureaucratic professional cadre organizations that workers do not effectively control, I doubt they could be a means to reviving the labor movement in U.S. Workers no longer feel that these are "their" organizations.
Yet, workers will seek organizations to defend their interests. According to recent polls, a majority of young workers in the U.S. now support unionism. Historically the labor movement in the U.S. has made leaps forward only during periods of widespread labor rebellion, such as the period from 1898 to World War I, or the '30s and '40s. During such periods new organizations arise partly because of the limitations of the bureaucratic organizations left over from earlier periods of labor struggle. During each of those labor rebellions the number of workers in unions in the U.S. quadrupled.
Such periods of labor rebellion provide an opportunity to develop new industrial organizations with a grassroots, self-managing character. An example is the Independent Union of All Workers(5), which emerged out of a sitdown strike at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota in 1933. This union spread as a rank-and-file solidarity movement in smaller cities of the midwest. In each town a branch was formed that was a "one big union" of workers of various industries. The large numbers in the larger industrial plants were used to support more vulnerable workers, such as retail clerks in downtown stores. The union was formed by revolutionaries — such as Wobbly butcher Frank Ellis — but did not have an overtly revolutionary ideology.
I believe that the present period in the U.S. offers a potential for new self-managed industrial organizations to emerge.
A problem here that I addressed in my first installment is that the development of support for more far-reaching aims depends upon workers seeing around them the heightened level of solidarity and thus class power to make more far-reaching changes in society. This presupposes that the development of movements and organizations through which this broader solidarity and more direct rank-and-file control can take shape. There needs to be self-managed mass organization as a means to the working class changing itself, developing into a class with the capacity and aspirations for more far-reaching changes. This is why I think of self-managed mass organization as transitional to a more far-reaching challenge to capitalism, because it provides a means for popular self-confidence and habits of direct involvement and direct democracy to develop.
In addition to lack of self-management of unions by the rank and file, another
problem is that the U.S. labor movement tends to act as just a collection of unrelated
contract-bargaining entities. The working class in the U.S. is a vast and
heterogenous set of population groups. It's unity and consciousness of itself
as a potential agency for change requires what we might call unifying moments,
events where larger social issues and larger mutual support are in play.
For example, the general strike of 1934 in San Francisco was such a moment because
working people did visibly take action in unison. The failure of the AFL-CIO union
leadership to mobilize mass actions diminishes class consciousness.
A People's Alliance?
There is a tendency for the left historically to reduce class politics to the politics of the labor movement — to some extent we have done that in this discussion. But I think it is a mistake. Syndicalism historically was a strategy for revolution based on the development of self-managed mass worker organizations at the point of production, prefiguring and laying the basis for the transition to a post-capitalist future based on workers self-management. But I think that class politics also embraces struggles outside the workplace in working class communities, that is, communities where the life prospects of the population are shaped by their status as subordinated wage-workers. This can include things like rent strikes, squatting in buildings, struggles for affordable housing and child care, organizing among public transit riders, struggles against race discrimination or for pay equity for women. Class struggle is broader than the workplace. But the syndicalist strategy of developing self-managed mass organizations that empowers the rank-and-file participants can be applied in such struggles.
Marxists propose that the sectoral struggles of groups of workers and of the various oppressed groups are to find their unity in the class party that aims at state power. Since we disagree with this, we need to provide an alternative — a grassroots way for the working class to unify itself in practice. Perhaps an alternative is to envision an alliance of movements or mass organizations. A coming together of various strands of struggle can enable each sector or community to understand the concerns of other groups while forging a unity of common purpose. A possible model for this type of formation might be the Resistencia Popular in Brazil — a grassroots alliance of neighborhood committees, independent unions like the scavengers associations, and opposition groups in unions of the CUT (union federation alligned with the Workers Party).
(1) David Noble, The Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation
(2) Sharryn Kasmir, The Myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town
(3) David Forgacs, ed., The Antonio Gramsci Reader, p. 93; for more on the Turin shop council movement, see Tom Wetzel The Italian Factory Occupations of 1920.
(4) Lynn Williams, Proletarian Order, p. 123 ff.
(5) Peter Rachleff, "Organizing Wall-to-Wall: The Independent Union of All Workers, 1933-37", in Staughton Lynd, ed., "We Are All Leaders"