A Nation of Shopkeepers by Dan Evans

Author:Dan Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913462925
Publisher: Repeater Books
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Management

From constituting a tiny percentage of the workforce in the early part of the twentieth century, managers now constitute a significant chunk of it. Managers, of course, pose a problem to those who posit the dualist class structure — in which the working class are “anyone who works” and the “bourgeoisie” are an increasingly tiny group of elites who actually own the businesses we all work for. If class is reduced to “ownership” of the means of production, what are the managers who, technically, don’t own the company? They are employees. Ergo, they can be included in the 99%.

This might perhaps sound like a bit of a straw man — i.e., who on earth would realistically think like this? — if not for the fact that managers are now prominent and normalized within left groupings, with the Labour Party and trade unionism being extremely popular among managers. Within mainstream British trade unionism, there is no problem with managers and workers being in the same union, and as previously noted, managers are now increasingly likely to be in trade unions. When working as a shop steward for Unison, I was regularly handed cases and disputes where managers and workers were both union members, and indeed, in any big public sector organization, such as local authority workers, it is common for very senior staff and junior staff to all be unionised, or even for trade union representatives to be drawn from the management structure. While landlords are vilified on the left, managers are not.

Poulantzas solves this very simply by pointing to Marx’s work, which states that the function of capital is not always fulfilled by the owners of capital themselves:

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