"State capitalism" and "monopoly capitalism" (the bad kind according to socialists) are about as different as Coke and Pepsi.
Ultimately the "owners" in practice are people you never heard of that work for (government) pension funds and index funds. The billionaires, founders, and celebrities are mostly a sideshow. That's not a denial of wealth inequality, just as officially socialist countries have.
But nearly all big companies have no owner in a top hat running the show, just faceless committees, responsible for buying everything - that company and all its competitors. Bureaucrats, apparatchiks, public or private, it's much the same.
If the C-suite and directors of huge companies are generally parasites, it's because robber barons and corporate raiders are the exception today. People whose job is to invest trillions of dollars by simply buying everything for sale have the least control imaginable over company managers. The current situation reflects classic criticisms of socialism, but it won anyway.
Nearly every source of information on public company stocks in the US has a figure for "institutional ownership". If a company is of any size, and is a real business, this is usually a high % - this is a reality check if what I'm writing sounds outlandish because nobody talks about anything but Twitter around here.
(The full link is https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4...., recommend reading the whole thing):
"As radical theorists like Michael Albert were already pointing out in the 1970s, this is the key flaw of traditional socialism: actual members of the working classes have no immediate hatred for capitalists because they never meet them; in most circumstances, the immediate face of oppression comes in the form of managers, supervisors, bureaucrats, and educated professionals of one sort or another—that is, precisely the people to whom a state socialist regime would give more power, rather than less (Albert and Hahnel 1979; Albert 2003). The decisive victory of capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, ironically, has had precisely the same effect. It has led to both a continual inflation of what are often purely make-work managerial and administrative positions—“bullshit jobs”—and an endless bureaucratization of daily life, driven, in large part, by the Internet."
People think they know what a job is, without having done it.
You cannot imagine even, say, stocking shelves at a retail store, without doing it.
If, for the sake of argument, most jobs are bullshit, the only way that can be maintained is if people are ignorant of what other people do.
But if you're so ignorant, you should consider that you can't imagine jobs you don't do, let alone do them.
One job I had I suppose was bullshit, was sweeping a fairly spotless warehouse, because, I was told, a division boss was coming to inspect, and so they hired a temp to look busy.
But a job is not bullshit, just because you have a flight of fancy that involves massive restructuring of an organization or society. "Writing this CRUD application should be unnecessary because everybody should've used the same database in the beginning". So...make a time machine, or get everyone using one of them to switch. Should be roughly comparable difficulty.
And I'm pretty sure that "the key flaw of traditional socialism" is not that they recognized reality. I think it was Lenin who declared that there would have to be a temporary phase of socialism. It's a sick mind that thinks the "key flaw" of existent socialism was employing educated administrators and not, say, dekulakization.
Edit: Maybe the clusterf*ck was Rumsfeld's idea.
"all public sector employees affiliated with the Ba'ath Party were to be removed from their positions and be banned from any future employment in the public sector... When the CPA turned over enforcement of de-Ba'athification to Iraqi politicians, however, these rules were broadly expanded and used to punish political opponents, including nearly 11,000 teachers who were dismissed from the party and removed from government"
But since you've begun a knee-jerk reaction against this, I think there are some flaws with your criticisms (assuming you have read the book):
> People think they know what a job is, without having done it. > But if you're so ignorant, you should consider that you can't imagine jobs you don't do, let alone do them.
What Graeber has done in the book is to actually do numerous interviews with the people who have actually claimed to have done these jobs, and then categorize them into some noticable patterns to arrive at a conclusion. If you can't experience every job in the universe, the closest you can get is to talk with the people who have done them - and this is what he's precisely did. There are claims that the sample size wasn't enough or it was biased - which I think is totally apt. But it's incredibly dismissive of you to describe this attempt as "ignorant": how are we supposed to do any anthropological / sociological work in a large scale when you claim "no scholar can even try to analyze various types of work without actually doing everything in-person beforehand?"
> But a job is not bullshit, just because you have a flight of fancy that involves massive restructuring of an organization or society. "Writing this CRUD application should be unnecessary because everybody should've used the same database in the beginning". So...make a time machine, or get everyone using one of them to switch. Should be roughly comparable difficulty.
I think the "duck-tapers" Graeber describes in his book are a bit different from what you understand currently. He's mostly talking about the people who are doing tedious cleanup work because of reasons that can obviously and trivially be fixed but the higher-ups in the organization are not doing it for various reasons (mostly politics).
That's no more likely to be true. In order to correctly understand the context of our jobs, we would have to understand other jobs we don't and never will do.
It's called "alienation" - do you even Marx, bro?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Somebody needs to submit this with (1843) appended.
No, no different - this sounds like every bit the same phenomenon I thought I was addressing.
It's a fake distinction because every job can be framed in a way that puts it on either side of the divide.
And lack of understanding of other peoples' jobs is clearly at the core of the issue.
The "higher ups being stupid because of politics" can never be really definitely false, but it never, ever, is an explanation that shows understanding or justifies calling something trivial.