I am no great admirer of management as a science or of managers as people. The latter tend to speak a strange language, a jargon neither elegant nor poetic; they buy very dull books at airports, they are often shifty and ruthless, and they seem to me to live in a constant condition of bad faith. They are bureaucrats pretending to be entrepreneurs even when they work for the state, an organization that secures its solvency by the simple expediency of printing more money—in fact, not even by printing it anymore, simply by adding a few naughts on computer screens. We live in a regime of paper money without the paper.
Presumably most managers want to be managers; it is their ambition to become such, though some, I think, are sucked into management from other activities without a full realization of what is happening to them. At any rate, they soon come to have a sense of importance and entitlement by comparison with everyone else in society, even the nominal owners of the enterprise in which they work, for they believe themselves to be doing the world’s real work, as it were. James Burnham, in his book The Managerial Revolution, pointed this out as long ago as 1941:
The Managerial Revolut...
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The managers’ training as administrators of modern production naturally makes them think in terms of co-ordination, integration, efficiency, planning; and to extend such terms from the realm of production under their immediate direction to the economic process as a whole. When the managers think about it, the old-line capitalists, sunning themselves in Miami and Hawaii or dabbling in finance, appear to them as parasites, having no justifiable function in society….
They therefore appropriate shareholders’ funds (or public money) with a good conscience, reasoning that without them there would be no such funds in the first place.
Here I should just like to mention the curious journey of my own copy of Burnham’s book. A little sticker on the inside cover says that it was sold by Vanguard Booksellers of Joubert Street, Johannesburg. That bookshop, as the name suggests, was a purveyor of left-wing literature to the (small) South African intelligentsia, but the book somehow made its way to the Marx Memorial Library in London. Over the library’s neat little stamp of ownership is another in a darker, firmer, more emphatic ink: Disposed of by M.M.L. I think the words Disposed of are significant; most libraries in this situation discard their books. Disposed of seems somehow a little more aggressive, as if the book itself had blasphemed against the doctrines of the church of dialectical materialism and got what it deserved: ownership by a bourgeois reactionary.
