When reading through Marx I can’t help but think that capitalism has gotten even worse today than it used to be back then, meaning that the actual mechanisms that drive capital now need much more exploitation and in more forms than they used to.
Also I wonder if some changes of capitalism have also caused the working class to be so completely numb. Workers of the 19th and 20th century knew that the capitalists have opposite needs to them and only through fighting them could they stand to improve their situation. However today people just seem uninterested to really fight for themselves despite the proletariat being a much larger percentage of society compared to the past. I know I’m leaving out some important struggles going on when I’m saying this, but it still makes me wonder what made workers in the past centuries so much more class conscious.
I don’t believe that much, if anything, that Marx critiqued about capitalism has changed on a structural level, but the flow of capital is so complex today, and the collected capital has become so much larger, that it begs the question if this has created some superstructures of capitalism today.
Middle management didn’t exist in Marx’s time. Management as a profession didn’t start until the 1920s.
Large middle management structures end up with interests opposed to both the workers and the owners. The owners want to maximize value (exploited from the workers) and minimize costs. But management wants to maximize the perception of value (not quite the real thing) and increase the number of middle managers (adding a cost). I think this is important for understanding a lot of the bizarre behaviors we expect from large corporations today.
And I think it may also be important for developing new theories of praxis - if worker actions can exasperate the tensions between owners and management, the two can’t form a unified front against them. (I don’t know what such an action concretely is though.)
This brings Bullshit Jobs to mind.
I don’t think there’s any way for workers to sabotage the middle management and capitalist relations though, because as the book also mentions, middle management is not only there to help capitalists with their metrics and optimization of labour. It’s also there to legitimize and make the owners look good, to act as a protective buffer against the workers by playing a kind of “good cop / on your side” role, and to create enough labour aristocracy so the organizing workers don’t reach a critical mass.
Modern office jobs, unlike the factories, give you a much closer person above you, with a much smaller class difference, sometimes even doing work themselves, that is responsible to not only keep you in line and performant, but to also “help” you improve every evaluation period. Workers are much more likely to lick the boot when they feel like a manager will notice them and appreciate them, and when they have a certain list of improvement areas to constantly improve on hoping to get that annual raise.
I think that as long as they can still be profitable enough to keep middle managers happy and complacent, they are never going to break that relationship.