The Technicians of Power
Who runs things?
In our Industrial world or Second Wave world, people ask “Who runs things?”. Before the industrial revolution, everyone knew who ran things, it was a king, warlord, or chief. The common folk all knew who stood and ruled over them. The shabby peasants toiling in the pastures saw the royal palace on the hill above them. There was no question of power. They understood who was in charge and who was on the bottom.
Yet once the Second Wave of industrialism moved in, and upset the social order, a modern faceless form of power developed. Those in power became the nameless ones.
Previously I’ve written how Industrialism or Second Wave society as we have seen, shattered society into a multitude of interconnected components— factories, offices, schools, prisons, hospitals, churches, and such. Church and state became separated as did the state from the individual. Knowledge became separated into new specific disciplines. It splintered labor into factory tasks. It radically changed families into more manageable units. In the end, it devastated First Wave's agricultural life and culture.
There became a need for a new type of position, a specialist with the role of integration. This is where we get our administrators, executives, managers, CEO, and even commissars. They are the coordinators of every business and government, for they are the indispensable bureaucrats at every level of society. They were the integrators of the system.
The integrators defined workforce duties, responsibilities, and allocated precious resources. They also handed out rewards and punishments. They set plans, set standards, and issued or denied certifications. They connected manufacturing, distribution, transport, and public services. They set the rules and regulations for how business and government functioned. In short, they assembled the components of industrial society so the machine or system could run. Without these integrators, the Second Wave system could not function.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx mistakenly thought that the tools and technology and who owned them were an important aspect of this industrial arrangement. His fixation on the means of production and who controlled them misled his view of who would control society. Marx reasoned labor was interdependent, workers might disrupt production and seize the tools or means of production from their bosses. Once they had the tools, they could rule society.
Yet Marx got it wrong. He failed to understand the interdependency of the system. He did not understand the power of a new integrator group— those who coordinated or integrated the system. The owners had wealth but limited power. Since it was not ownership of the means of production that gave power. It was control of the means of integration. In both capitalist and Marxist nations, power rest with the integrators.
The early factory or mill owners were usually able to coordinate the labor of a relatively small firm. They could serve as both owner and integrator. It was not a surprise Marx got confused and put undue importance on the ownership of the plant or mill. Yet as factory production grew more involved, specialization developed as did the role of managers, executives, and experts who became the layer between the workers and owners.
Eventually, in a large business, not even the owner or principal shareholders understood the whole company. The specialists influenced or controlled the owner or shareholder's judgments due to being brought in to coordinate the vast system. Ownership was still relevant, but executive elites wielded considerable power and control through the integration process.
As the manager grew in power, the stockholder grew less important in the business function. As companies grew in size, family owners sold out to larger and larger groups of dispersed shareholders, few of whom knew anything about the actual operations of the business. Shareholders increasingly relied on hired managers to set their long-range goals and strategies. Boards of directors, theoretically representing the owners, were increasingly remote and ill-informed about the operations they were supposed to direct. And as more and more private investment was made not by individuals but indirectly through institutions like pension funds, mutual funds, and the trust departments of banks, the actual owners of industry were still further removed from control.
Business policies are now set by the executives and money managers using other people’s money. Just consider the power in America of the financial sector. The power of integrators is now expressed by the control a Wall Street chief executive exerts not by ownership but by financial control of markets.
All this had certain parallels in the Marxist nations. As Marxists' systems grew so, did the Soviet bureaucracy. Lenin later condemned the Soviet bureaucracy he helped build. While in exile even Trotsky, railed against the manager class. Tito the Yugoslav communist complained about “technocracy, bureaucracy, …and managerialism. In Mao’s China, he too warned against the rise of managerial elites and saw this as a dangerous concomitant of traditional industrialism.
Under Marxism as well as capitalism, it was the integrators who took effective power. When communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, it was also the integrators who rose as oligarchs. In the West, financial integrators made the system run. They are still running it for them and their kind.
Americans rarely ask the question, who runs things? Most people are too distracted by the intensity brought on by our information age. Yet just as the ragged peasant long ago, looking up from the fields, saw the palace looming over them, today we have the technicians of power, in their banks, financial institutions, corporate office, or their K street addresses. We needed no political scientist degree or talking head pundit to solve the mystery of power. We all know who was in charge. It is the technicians of power.