cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3190259

To me they’re like mere servants of the State, like Lenin talked about in “2. What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine?” in his writing “The State and Revolution”

Under Capitalism, they are its privileged knights that try to deflect and control, if not defend directly its image as “the only option”, who have their incentive in doing so, with their class status stake being in their duty to shepherd the means of production and its resulting benefits

However, they don’t own the means of production, as they merely manage it for the landholding, industrialist, and financier capitalists

On the other hand, under Socialism, while its privileges will be probably be done away, the PM class on its own would innovated upon, for their new duty of overseeing, managing, and reporting the collectivized cooperatives and state-owned enterprises…

Until the final stage of Communism arrives, I think they’re pretty handy

I say this, because I hear such disgusted sentiment in Hexbear against them

Note: I know a bit about the bazingo techbro culture that the PMC is associated with, please don’t criticize them solely on those vibes…

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    And really, this is just the tip of the iceberg of a phenomenon that I don’t think has a name yet.

    This diffusion of responsibility downwards while still holding virtually all of the chips which is implemented alongside a sort of crabs-in-a-bucket model of managing people who aspire for more (or maybe just aspire for a decent education, home ownership, healthcare, and a reasonable retirement).

    I know I’m being vague in what I’m describing but, as an example, this same sort of program has been carried out in lots of countries in the privatisation of retirement funds. It used to be that the company you worked for would pay for your retirement, then the government started taking up that role, and since then there’s a strong trend towards employee and/or employer retirement contributions going into mutual funds.

    These mutual funds mean that the average prole’s economic wellbeing is inextricably linked to the performance of the stock market and yet with all of that responsibility comes virtually no power - BlackRock is probably the best example of how that power is still wielded at the top in the service of capital, even if it’s the workers’ funds ostensibly.

    You want a good retirement, chump?

    Well, you just have to sell your soul to the devil that is late capitalism and become increasingly involved in the exploitation of your fellow workers because the better the stock market does at extracting surplus value and screwing over the workers, the better your retirement will be but know that in doing so you’re enabling BlackRock buying up investment properties which only drives up the cost of living for all workers and which puts home ownership ever further out of reach for your fellow proles and for future generations. (Of course this is only a small slice of the market manipulation that a company like BlackRock engages in too.)

    Idk. It’s like a sort of pseudo-enfranchisement or something.

    If you take a historical long view of this, what’s playing out right now is what the evolutionary socialists and fabianists had always desired - the gradual evolution of the economy so that everyone has more representation in power structures and economic processes. Except those types have always overlooked the fact that the house always wins; the interests of the bourgeoisie and capital didn’t just concede ground and allow for people to actually have more power, instead it simply rearranged the order of things so that more of the burden of responsibility could be shifted onto the proles with little-to-no changes to the overarching power structure.

    This is also what happens a lot in prison systems with the most obvious example being of “kapos”; comprador Nazi concentration camp inmates who turned on their fellow inmates to become functionaries of the concentration camps themselves, overseeing stuff like forced labour for tiny concessions and no ability to influence the power structure itself (i.e. the kapo had authority over fellow inmates so they had some measure of power to speak of but their ability to influence any change in the system of concentration camps or Nazi Germany itself was entirely non-existent.)

    …maybe it could be called coopting workers into being the henchmen for capital, or something?