>>2923776>However, in a socialist society, the notion of waste would simply be what people percieve as such (eg. energy expense, time, quality etc).Who would these people be, and how would they decide what is waste? Would it be democratic? Or would it be managers fresh out of
business scientific management schools with zero work experience? Once again, would executants take actual decisions, or would it be only the resort of a separate caste of directors?
>Have you ever worked in a factory anon ? Or in a shop ?I have worked at both unqualified manual jobs in the agricultural sector and intellectual work in corporate offices.
In my experience, manual workers in agriculture can't direct production in the current conditions, because they are formed to execute only a very narrow set of tasks in the production process, and have a very vague understanding of the whole production chain, if at all.
This is a defect of education, work training, and work organization. This is not a fatality. Manual workers are considered to be dumb and expendable in general.
Moreover, if you have worked at similar manual jobs, you must know that having to do the same set of repetitive tasks over and over again is ultimately soul-crushing.
I think it's possible to expand the involvement of manual workers in a much broader part of the production process, so they ultimately gain a better understanding of how to manage it efficiently.
———
In the office, it's different because executants tend to be more solicited to do tasks that are usually within the realm of managers. It's also very dependent on the type of project you work on.
There are projects which can be done by a small team or even a solo worker, and in that case, the low-level managers are almost superfluous and just tend to make sure you filled the Excel sheets correctly, re-read the Word documents, etc.
There are more complex projects which involve several teams working on different parts of a product, each team has a manager, then these managers are themselves managed by a supervising manager or several.
Of course, in these cases, coordination is needed and difficult to put into place, but it's not like these supervising managers are doing God's work.
There are often mismatches between the work done by all the different teams, and more often than not, when it's time to put everything together, it's executants who have to directly communicate between themselves to make sure all the parts fit correctly, because they have the relevant technical knowledge that managers don't necessarily have.
In corporate work in general, there is a dizzying hierarchy of managers.
At the top level, they often come out of elite schools, control entire departments and are basically indistinguishable from the bourgeoisie as they own significant amount of company stocks (hell, there is even intra-company competition over yearly budgets).
At the lowest levels, they are basically a basic worker that got promoted into overseeing the most direct aspect production and the simplest aspects of accounting just like a basic manager at McDonalds.
In between these two poles, there are at minimum two or three additional levels of management, depending on the size of the company.
———
The truth is, a lot of the work done by managers isn't actually the work of an overseer making sure production goes as planned without problems, but to be
the representative of the company and deal with the customers.
It begins when they show a Powerpoint to a potential customer, telling them "we can deliver this and that", they negotiate, then once a contract is signed, it usually goes like this:
- The manager asks specifications from the customer.
- The customer delivers shitty vague specifications, because they don't really know what they want, but also because it allows them to potentially negotiate later on for unpaid work (i.e. "we wrote this in the specs, and by this we meant [something outside of the perimeter of what was initially agreed upon]").
- There is a back-and-forth between the different managers at the company, and the customer who also have different layers of management. To summarize quickly, it's all a game of "what did they mean by this?" and more importantly, if what they meant by this is applicable in the terms of the contract.
- Parts of the product are eventually delivered, the customer test them, give their approval or not, then rinse and repeat.
You might notice that I didn't mention the worker anywhere in this process.
It's simple, workers are basically asked to work on whatever they can as fast as they can while the managers and the customers endlessly negotiate.
For the customer, it's in their best interest to spend the most minimal amount of money for the best product possible.
For the corporate manager, it's in their best interest to bill the customer for the highest amount of money possible, and make sure the executants deliver the product in the quickest amount of time possible, so they can allocate these
workers human resources to another project.
———
Maybe now, you do understand why I'm very cynical about management.
The interest of managers isn't to benevolently oversee production to make sure their employees are producing quality products within a good and comfortable work environment.
The interest of managers is to make sure the largest amount of work possible is done in the tightest amount of time necessary, show to the upper-echelon of management the executants have done so successfully under their orders, and eventually climb up the corporate ladder for a higher salary and some shares of the company.
In short: the interests of managers are different from the interests of executants.
Now, I see this talk about "socializing production", but how should it be done in practice? Because it can means a lot of different things, like nationalizing companies, but keeping the management hierarchy completely intact.
In my opinion, the truly radical idea of "the abolition of any separate stratum of directors" is one of the only ways to make sure executants don't get subjugated by an external force that is virtually the same as a boss under capitalism.
I can think of a system not unlike Greek democracy where, for example, workers would elect among themselves some people in charge of management duties, with a possibility of immediate revocation in case they fuck up or make the working conditions worse for everyone, and workers would be trained for to eventually manage production at some point, just like Athenians were educated from birth to be a responsible citizen and take political decisions at some point in their lives.
>Empirical evidence suggests that this leads to massive inneficiencies as workers priorize their own self-interest within the firm they work in rather than their self-interest as a class.Are you talking about the Yugoslav system?