Читать книгу The Ungovernable Society - Grégoire Chamayou - Страница 20

There is no theory of the firm that satisfactorily justifies the large modern corporation. Efforts are made to elevate the idea of social responsibility (or, synonymously, the corporate conscience or good citizenship) to the status of a theory of the firm.

Wilbur Hugh Ferry¹

[…] they have not, like the medieval corporations, as yet created a corporate conscience in lieu of the individual responsibility which, by dint of their very organization, they have contrived to get rid of.

Karl Marx²

In the modern period, noted Charles Fourier, a new type of discourse had taken the place of morality and its sermons. The moralists did not realize soon enough that ‘Political Economy [has] invaded the whole field of charlatanerie […], the moralists have fallen into nothingness, and have been pitilessly enrolled into the class of novelists. Their sect died with the eighteenth century; it died politically’.³ As for the economists, they had quickly become too strong to need allies, and had ‘scorned any path of rapprochement and maintained all the more that what was needed was great, no, very great wealth, with a huge trade and huge commerce’.⁴

But, he added, ‘the fall of the moralists harbingered the fall of their rivals. We can apply to those literary sects the words of Danton who, on the scaffold, already tied down with a strap, said to the executioner: Keep the other for Robespierre; he will soon be following me. So moralists can tell their hangman, and the public opinion that is sacrificing them: Keep the other belt for the economists; they will soon be following us’.⁵

What Fourier did not foresee, however, was that this predicted death would be followed by a singular rebirth. In the twentieth century, an unprecedented crisis undermined Adam Smith’s doctrines. People were already working behind the scenes to update the theory, but the initial response was to exhume ancient idols. The economy succumbed in turn, and its fallen rival, morality, made a new entrance in the new guise of an ethical managerialism that presented itself in the 1950s as the grand solution to the problem of the legitimacy of managerial power.

In the vision of the world put forward by the old industrialist paternalism, the manager-owner reigned over his business as his own ‘thing’. He was still viewed in the nineteenth century as a descendant of line of the old ‘master, the dominus, that is to say, the owner of the workers he employs’.⁶ He could always retort to those who questioned his power, ‘Here, I am the one who commands because I am at home, and this belongs to me’. This was the basis for an authority to which the managers of large modern companies can no longer lay claim.

The separation of ownership and control has not only shattered the old managerial justification for authority,⁷ but has also weakened the demands of the shareholders (who are now merely passive owners) that the ‘corporation should be operated in their sole interest’.⁸ The appearance of huge, ‘quasi-public’ companies, whose decisions have an impact on everyone’s lives, have ‘placed the community in a position to demand that the modern corporation serve not only the owners […] but all society’.⁹

So what interests must be taken into account in the management of businesses? In 1932, Edwin Merrick Dodd asked ‘for whom corporate managers are trustees’?¹⁰ An American CEO replied: ‘the social responsibility of management has broadened […] Management no longer represents, as it once did, merely the single interest of ownership; increasingly it functions on the basis of a trusteeship which endeavors to maintain, between four basic interlocking groups, a proper balance of equity’.¹¹ Thus was formulated a new ‘philosophy of management’, ‘the “trustee” philosophy or fiduciary administration’, which presented managers as the trustees of several social groups.¹²

What happened in the wake of the book by Berle and Means, over several decades, was that an ideology of the social responsibilities of the businessman was attached to the problem of the separation of ownership from control. In what is considered to be the founding text of this paradigm, Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, published in 1953, Howard R. Bowen rejected the view that ‘no rules for the individual would be required except those of following one’s self-interest ardently and competing vigorously’.¹³ True, businessmen must make a profit, but they are also obliged to ‘to conduct their enterprises with concern for all the interests affected’ by the business’s activities.¹⁴

Where legitimate private authority was thought to be an attribute of property rights – it’s because the business is mine that I am authorized to manage it – ethical managerialism now justifies it in a non-patrimonial way: the manager now draws his legitimacy from non-proprietary interests. It is precisely to the extent that I do not manage the business for myself that I am justified in doing so. As Hal Draper notes: ‘In this approach, then, the new irresponsibility of the uncontrolled Institutional Leaders is no longer a thing to view with alarm but rather a necessary precondition to freeing them from the petty, distorting influences of short-range, profit-maximizing considerations’.¹⁵ The empowerment of managerial power, the very same empowerment that led to anxieties about a drift into autocracy, now miraculously transfigures itself into moral autonomy. The turnaround is complete, since it could now be claimed, pace Burnham, that this new managerialism was not a new form of dictatorship and that ‘the managerial ethic is inherently benevolent’, precisely since ‘the manager is in no sense an owner’.¹⁶

If the art of leadership is that of ‘balancing interests’, so the position of the ‘almost anonymous managers’ will be a ‘point of convergence’ between multiple claims that they will decide fairly, in accordance with the ancient virtue of the juste milieu (the middle ground).¹⁷ If business thinks of itself as ‘a system of private government’,¹⁸ the manager will change his spots and be transformed into a sort of ‘statesman’¹⁹ – ‘L’État c’est moi, mais moi, je suis une corporation (‘The state is me, but I am a corporation’), as one American commentator wrote at the time, resorting to French.²⁰

Until the early 1970s, the thesis of Berle and Means on the separation of ownership and control was the object, as the sociologist Maurice Zeitlin pointed out, of an ‘astonishing consensus’ in the American social sciences.²¹ This thesis was at the heart of a managerialist vision of capitalism based on a series of established truths. Here they are:

1) The main site of economic power has moved: ‘the decisive power in modern industrial society’, concluded Galbraith, ‘is exercised not by capital but by the organization, not by the capitalist, but by the industrial bureaucrat’.²²

2) The principle of profit maximization was rejected: ‘Never has the imputation of a profit motive been further from the real motives of men than it is for modern bureaucratic managers’, claimed Dahrendorf.²³

3) The capitalist class, divided between shareholding and managerial functions, has lost all consistency, giving way to an ‘amorphous power structure’.²⁴ Berle went so far as to refer to a ‘capitalism without capitalists’.²⁵

4) Private property of the means of production, which was already being seen as liquid, evaporated for good: ‘Ownership’, announced Kaysen in 1957, ‘is disappearing’.²⁶ ‘Private productive property, especially in the United States’, confirmed Bell in 1961, ‘is largely a fiction’.²⁷ In short, it was now certain: ‘Capital – and thereby capitalism – has dissolved’.²⁸

As Daniel Bell concluded, there had once been ‘a society “designed” by John Locke and Adam Smith and it rested on the premises of individualism and market rationality […] We now move to a communal ethic, without that community being, as yet, wholly defined. In a sense, the movement away from governance by political economy to governance by political philosophy – for that is the meaning of the shift – is a return to pre-capitalist modes of social thought’.²⁹

Here, I would make one remark. This idea of governance, the idea that prevailed before the great neoliberal shift, is what I propose to call, both as an echo of and in contrast with the notion of governmentality, ‘manageriality’. Michel Foucault conceived ‘liberal governmentality’ as an answer to the cardinal problem of the arts of governing: how can the economy be brought within the remit of the state? How is power to be exercised ‘in the form of the economy’?³⁰ As an extension of this project, neoliberalism sought to analyse ‘non-economic behavior’ (etc.) through ‘a grid of economic intelligibility’, leading to ‘the criticism and appraisal of the action of public authorities in market terms’.³¹ But its predecessor, the managerialism of the 1950s and 1960s, did the complete opposite, in both those aspects (practical and theoretical). Its problem was not that of introducing the economy into the state, but on the contrary of introducing an analogon of political government into the private management of economic affairs. It was not conceived as an art of exercising political power in the form of the economy, but on the contrary as an art of exercising economic power in the form of a certain politics, of a private politics. Manageriality does not have the economy as its ‘major form of knowledge’; rather, its fundamental epistemic predilection gazes beyond ethics into politics and, as we shall soon see, strategy.

In 1954, in The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution, Berle depicts the magical image of a prince-manager administering business as an ‘oracle of the public interest’. We can read this text as an anachronistic iteration, right in the middle of the American twentieth century, of the old genre of the mirror for princes.³² Berle refers to Augustine and his City of God, where ‘a moral and philosophical organization […] ultimately directed power’.³³ He also mentions the Plantagenet court, where a man, often a priest, called the ‘chancellor’, played the role of ‘keeper of the conscience of the king’.³⁴ The manager, the new prince, will likewise exercise his benevolent power with business ethics as a safety rail. The only limit placed on the power of the manager is his conscience, hemmed in by the informal sanctions of public opinion.³⁵ A few lines further on, without seeing any particular contradiction in this, Berle can argue that managers constitute ‘tiny self-perpetuating oligarchies’ and that the ‘tacit philosophy of the men who control them’ guarantees a ‘real control’ against the excesses of such power.³⁶

But many, including those who followed the managerialist mindset, were sceptical: ‘how could managers be trusted to advance social welfare when they could not be trusted with their own shareholders?’³⁷

Rather than relying on the self-proclaimed virtue of the managers, some people proposed regulating the exercise of business power by a kind of internal constitution – a charter stating the rights and duties of management. This meant applying to managerial power ‘the concepts of limited government which are the essence of Western constitutionalism’.³⁸

In 1962, Richard Sedric Fox Eells, a General Electric executive, noted that wondering whether business possesses a ‘constitutional structure’ is tantamount to asking the ‘question of business governance’³⁹ – note that Eells is one of the first to use this term, outmoded at the time, in this new sense. A company is admittedly ‘a producer and a distributor, a supplier and a buyer of economic goods’, but it is also something different, a ‘decision-making centre’, ‘an instrument of power and authority’.⁴⁰ As such, one can ask it other questions than those raised by economists, questions of governance. ‘Who really controls a company? What power does it exercise? To whom should the power-wielders be accountable, and how? Is the company a “self-perpetuating oligarchy,” as some have charged, or is it a type of republic?’⁴¹

The difficulty, Eells pointed out, is that the private government of business ‘is decidedly not a democracy, and yet, it is no longer possible for a really big business to be an autocracy’.⁴² The path of corporate constitutionalism is narrow: what political space does it still have, on the basis of this dual diagnosis, between an autocracy that it considers untenable on the one hand and, on the other, a democracy it rejects? Actually, not much.

But we need to be careful, warned a 1958 report from the Rockefeller Foundation, for if we accept this, ‘the same sort of question that can be asked of other governments can also be asked of these private governments’, and if ‘the democratic ideals by which the state is properly judged may also be applied to the ways in which the lives of men are governed in the private sector’,⁴³ then we will soon face a major problem: ‘Very simply, the corporation is an authoritarian form of industrial government in a purportedly democratic society’.⁴⁴ Or, if you apply the standards of political legitimacy to it, there will necessarily be a contradiction ‘between the democratic tradition of government by consent and the inevitably hierarchical and authoritarian procedures of business’.⁴⁵

There was even, some thought, a great danger in this. If you shout from the rooftops that ‘management has the worker’s best interests at heart’, warned Peter Drucker in 1950, then ‘management can be legitimate if only it tries’. But how far can it go? It is very unwise to make this kind of promise, as is ‘proven by the one experience that is strictly comparable to modern industrial paternalism: modern colonial paternalism’.⁴⁶ By mistakenly adopting a rhetoric of ‘government for the people’, the colonialist discourse has placed itself at odds with its ‘obligation to manage the colony in the economic, political or strategic interest of the home country’.⁴⁷ This kind of language was catastrophic because rather than achieving ‘the one thing that mattered: acceptance by the natives as a legitimate government […] it made the colonial peoples conscious of the split between the ideals of colonial government and its responsibility toward the economic interests of the home country’.⁴⁸ And this, says Drucker, is a constant in history: ‘All Enlightened Despotisms have ended in revolution’.⁴⁹ And if people persist, ‘Enlightened Managerial Despotism’ will be no exception to the rule.

This was also what the neoliberals of the time feared. Milton Friedman pulled the emergency cord very early on. In March 1958, at a seminar held under the gilded mouldings with their griffon decorations in San Francisco’s Drake Hotel, the Chicago economist adopted a solemn tone: ‘If anything is certain to destroy our free society, to undermine its very foundations, it would be a wide-spread acceptance by management of social responsibilities in some sense other than to make as much money as possible. This is a fundamentally subversive doctrine’.⁵⁰ By dint of repeating everywhere that managers are ‘civil servants rather than the employees of their stockholders then in a democracy they will, sooner or later, be chosen by the public techniques of election and appointment’.⁵¹

In the name of what, after all, are business leaders appointed by shareholders via the board of directors? There is, he replies, no justification for this state of affairs, except that the former are agents in the service of the latter, and if this postulate falls, everything collapses with it. If you accept that the business leader is a kind of private agent of the public, you will inevitably conclude that ‘it is inadmissible that such public officials […] be named as they are now. If they really serve the public, they must be elected via a political process’.⁵² By admitting that they exercise governmental functions, managers are unwittingly exposed to criticism, and soon to much worse. For, under the deceptive charms of ethics, Friedman senses the tracks of a Soviet tank: ‘the doctrine of “social responsibility” involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses’.⁵³

Considered as a form of government, what does big business look like? It looks bad. It looks like a regime where a caste of unelected leaders exercises undivided power. As one British anarchist concluded in the early 1960s:

The political system we find in industry is, on the contrary, one in which the government (the management) is permanently in office, is self-recruiting, and is not accountable to anyone, except formally to the shareholders […]. At the same time, the vast majority of those who are required to obey this permanent government have not citizenship status at all, no right to vote for the leaders who form the government. The only rights that the masses have in this system are the right to form pressure groups (trade unions) seeking to influence the government and the right to withhold their co-operation (the right to strike). Such a political system […] no more deserves to be called democracy […], than does the oligarchical political system of 18th century Britain.⁵⁴

Big business employees are not only deprived of political rights, but also of certain freedoms otherwise recognized as imprescriptible: ‘For nearly two centuries’, wrote a professor from Harvard Business School, ‘Americans have enjoyed freedom of press, speech, and assembly, due process of law, privacy, freedom of conscience, […]. But Americans have not enjoyed these civil liberties in most companies, […]. Once a U.S. citizen steps through the plant or office door at 9 a.m., he or she is nearly rightless until 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. The employee continues to have political freedoms, of course, but these are not the significant ones now’.⁵⁵

The fundamental problem, the major ideological aporia, is that liberal democratic theory provides no consistent justification for this asymmetry of treatment. ‘Capitalism’, said the economist of self-management Jaroslav Vanek, ‘is based on property rights, and democracy on personal rights. […] One of the main reasons why the western world is so schizophrenic is that we have political democracy and economic autocracy’.⁵⁶

In the 1960s and 1970s, in response to the workers’ revolts, philosophers and economists of a critical turn of mind developed theories of economic democracy. The form of authority still prevalent in business – the one that Marx described as being that of a ‘private legislator’ with ‘autocracy over his workpeople’⁵⁷ – appears to them as a remnant of archaic power relations, a bastion of tyranny that escaped the democratic revolutions.⁵⁸

In Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer takes the example of Pullman, an American village founded in the late nineteenth century by a wealthy industrialist, George Pullman, who, because he was owner of the city walls and the soil on which it was built, claimed to have the right to ‘govern’ the inhabitants in the ‘same way a man governs his house, his store, or his workshop’.⁵⁹ In his city, Pullman was a private autocrat. No elections, no civil liberties, no proper justice, let alone any right of assembly or right to demonstrate. Believing that the ownership of a city was incompatible with the theory and spirit of its institutions, the Illinois Supreme Court put an end to this state of affairs. Walzer’s question: this kind of power, applied to the inhabitants of a city, is considered incompatible with the principles of liberal democracy, but was the power that Pullman exercised over the workers in his company really different? No, he answers. ‘If this sort of thing is wrong for towns, then it is wrong for companies and factories’.⁶⁰ In both cases, the same standard of self-determination must prevail: ‘with regard to political power democratic distributions can’t stop at the factory gates. The deep principles are the same for both sorts of institution. This identity is the moral basis of the labor movement […] of every demand for progress toward industrial democracy’.⁶¹

The ideas propounded by Berle and Means had thrown the traditional discourse of legitimization of the capitalist order into crisis. The problem was theoretical, but it was also thoroughly political. As Edward Mason put it: ‘As everyone now recognizes, classical economics provided not only a system of analysis, or analytical “model,” intended to be useful to the explanation of economic behavior but also a defense – and a carefully reasoned defense – of the proposition that the economic behavior promoted […] by the institutions of a free-enterprise system is, in the main, in the public interest. It cannot be too strongly emphasized’, he continued, ‘that the growth of nineteenth-century capitalism depended largely on the general acceptance of a reasoned justification of the system on moral as well as on political and economic grounds. The managerial literature appears devastatingly to undermine the intellectual presuppositions of this system. And what does it offer in its place?’⁶² Nothing, or almost. Worse than that, the ethical managerialism that has striven to fill the void is dangerous, giving a foothold to the demands for democracy in business, thus weakening the institution in its very principle.

Among the intransigent, calls were heard to repudiate such unnatural language and to extol capitalist values: ‘Instead of fighting for its survival by means of a series of strategic retreats masquerading as industrial statesmanship’, advised Theodore Levitt in 1958 in the Harvard Business Review, ‘business must fight as if it were at war. And, like a good war, it should be fought gallantly, daringly, and, above all, not morally’.⁶³