An overview

This book combines a broad variety of distinct approaches in a rather unusual and dense fashion. A number of chapters make an extensive use of data sets regarding income distribution and technical change; others attend to theoretical frameworks, first of all Marx's theory of history; a third field is the examination of sequences of economic and political events since World War I. Wide use is also made of the work of historians in the analysis of secular social transformations and ideologies.

As suggested in the Introduction, the relationship between our thesis and Marx's analytical framework is an uncommon mix of fundamentalism and revisionism. On the one hand, the analysis is grounded in the principles of Marx's theory of productive forces and production relations, classes, and class struggle; on the other hand, the approach to class patterns is extended to the consideration of managers as forming a new class.

This first revision is prolonged by the thesis that capitalism is not the last mode of production in the chain of modes based on class antagonisms. In the same way that capitalism is the mode of production whose upper class is the class of capitalists, managerialism is a new mode of production whose upper class is the class of managers. While in capitalism the main channel of extraction of surplus-labor is surplus-value, the extraction of surplus-labor within managerialism follows from the hierarchy of wage inequality. Within contemporary societies, the transition between capitalism and managerialism is still underway; well advanced though not completed. The resulting hybrid social formation is known as managerial capitalism.

The first part of this book harks back to fundamental principles. A close examination reveals the dual nature of Marx's theory of historical dynamics. The most familiar facet is the "theory of class societies," attending to the stubborn reproduction of class dominations as successive links in the chain of modes of production: Along such lines, the contradictions of the last such phase, in capitalism, were expected to lead to the destruction of antagonistic patterns of any forms, and the establishment of what Marx and Engels called socialism or communism (in the terminology used in the middle of the nineteenth century). A second, less familiar, facet of Marx's and Engels' analysis is, however, the acknowledgement of the march forward of mankind in the conquest of rising degrees of what we call "sociality," that is, the increasing sophistication of social interactions. Production is realized within large firms, including broad national and international networks of affiliates; the division of labor among firms is dramatically increased; central authorities, specifically states, are at the head of vast networks regarding transportation, education, welfare, etc. In Marx's and Engels' view of history, the process of socialization was conducive to dignified forms of social organization in socialism, provided that the appropriate political inflection were imparted. The theory of sociality without the theory of class societies would amount to sheer ideology, and the demonstration that the historical progress of sociality is embedded within the sequence of classes and dominations along the chaotic course of capitalism was Marx's and Engels' key concern.

Managers play a central role in managerialism in the above two respects, class dominations and sociality: simultaneously as a social class and for being the main agents of socialization. Managers will be the upper class of managerialism as a new mode of production; new degrees will be reached in the historical process of socialization thanks to the organizational capacity of managers, thus overstepping the potential inherent in capitalist relations of production.

The study of the interaction between the historical dynamics of socialization and class societies — the object of this book — defines a broad field of analysis, but in our investigation not all aspects of social relations are considered, only aspects lying at the intersect of the two theories, that is, fundamentally, economic and state relationships. For example, the "production of material life," as Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology, is conferred a central role, as are the functions of states in the management of class relationships or the conduct of the economy. Many other components of life in society — including important sources of dominations and alienation such as gender dominations — are not directly subject to class dynamics, only secondarily. They do not belong to the field here outlined.

A first expected outcome of this analytical revolution is the recovery of the capability to interpret the course of managerial capitalism. Abstracting from intermediate groups, the class pattern is the three-polar structure of capitalists, managers, and popular classes (production workers and other categories of subaltern employees). The first steps of managerial capitalism were accomplished at the end of the nineteenth century. The ensuing twelve decades were punctuated by large crises, delineating three periods of a few decades, which we denote as social orders. A social order is a configuration of social powers defined by the hegemony of a class, the corresponding class dominations, and the potential alliances between classes. One can notably contrast the alliance between popular classes and managers after the Great Depression within the post-depression/postwar compromise or "social-democratic compromise" and the alliance at the top between managers and capitalist classes in neoliberalism after the crisis of the 1970s. These politics of managerial capitalism, as expressed within social orders, must be understood in relation to the historical trends of technology and distribution, and the secular rise of the class of managers, thus harking back to Marx's analyses of the dynamics of productive forces and relations of production, and historical tendencies. This renewed Marxian interpretation of managerial capitalism is the object of the second...