Our Absurd Moment and the Postmodern Critique
When one looks at the QAnon Shaman at the Bumpkin Putsch or Harry Potter book burnings on TikTok, it is only natural to ask “how did we get here?” How did the Age of Reason come crashing down upon us like this? Surprisingly, a common explanation is “the postmodern critique” or, as Jordan Peterson absurdly mislabels it, “cultural Marxism.” (Peterson believes that Karl Marx was the person who invented the idea that some things are good and other things are bad and then mysteriously blames him for ideologies that claim nothing is good or bad.)
The idea is that the really wacky aspects of the culture wars come from a kind of vulgar cultural relativism that resulted from university students in the Midwest misreading French philosophers at university in the 1990s and calling their misreading “postmodernism.”
All sorts of sinister silliness in our present is thrown at the feet of Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Jean Beaudrillard and their ilk. We are quick to blame pronoun politics, trigger warnings, standpoint epistemology, the moronic redefinition of “cultural appropriation” and the like on the excesses of the Golden Age of Theory.
Far be it from me to suggest that the Golden Age of Theory was lacking in excesses, silliness or nonsensical clumps of words masquerading as ideas but, most of the ideas it is blamed for had nothing to do with it.
Austerity: Crucible of the New Commissar Class
So many of the cultural practices that undermine our ability to think, to debate, to organize and to stand in solidarity with our comrades arose during the 1980s and 90s but not in the sociology, literature and women’s studies departments we so often blame. They arose in much better-maintained, newer and more expensive buildings on university campuses. Because contemporaneous with the vulgar postmodernist wave was a far more sinister and influential development: the explosion of management theory and the rise of what Thomas Piketty calls “the super-manager.”
Contrary to the public rhetoric of neoliberal reformers like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, austerity programs do not attack bureaucracy and bureaucrats. They typically increase the number of people in management roles in both the private and public sectors. Someone has to develop the strategies for designing and implementing cuts to the industrial and government workforces; someone has to create the new private corporations that are spun off from the state as public resources are sold off; someone has to develop new labour discipline routines to force more productivity out of the remaining workers to make up for all the discarded labour.
And so, the Janus face of fewer frontline workers being paid less is more supervisory and managerial workers being paid more. Furthermore, it is dangerous to promote frontline workers into these new roles. While they might be intimately familiar with the operations of their workplace, they might be from the wrong class and, worse still, act in the interest of that class by stymying austerity effort. Much better to hire folks whose knowledge and skills are unrelated to the operations of the workplace but instead are organized around management itself.
And so, while the social sciences and humanities wandered down one rabbit hole or another in the 1990s, a new kind of professional, the cross-sectoral manager came to populate this burgeoning new class and with that new kind of authority came the expansion of a pre-existing credential, the MBA, the Master of Business Administration.
Administration ceased to be a professional attainment within vocation that one achieved by rising through corporate ranks and became a vocation all its own, with hefty tuition fees to keep the riffraff out.
The was contemporaneous with all kinds of new corporations. Blairite/Third Way austerity programs often involved downloading government services to non-profit or charitable enterprises. All these government contracts with entities outside the government required management; and charities that wanted to keep contracts flowing have discovered that they need to stop promoting from within and instead to begin poaching MBAs from the private sector, often folks with family money or a wealthy spouse who could slum it with their prestigious degree.
More importantly, conventional Thatcherite austerity involved taking parts of the state that made money, selling them off cheap. This created all kinds of openings for high level managers and CEOs who needed private sector experience, to stay competitive. Former government departments needed to be reformed to be “lean” and “agile.” This involved the usual: busting unions, cutting wages and new systems of surveillance and punishment to squeeze more work out of the remaining workforce.
Most exciting for this emerging was the rise of a new kind of business that just managed other things. Hedge funds arose from new laws that made financial speculation easier. Health management organizations (HMOs) and their ilk were necessary to ensure that privatized parts of the state were not too taxed by having to actually provide services to anyone and so whole corporations came into being whose sole purpose was to act as gatekeepers to deny people basic services.
As this new management culture took off in the private sector and in the ruins of where the state had once been, it developed a vast abundance of its own nonsensical theories, like the worst excesses of postmodernism, but with fewer syllables behind it and, even less disciplined thinking. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and similar works of non-scholarship formed the zeitgeist of the emerging super-manager class.
Ironically, all this was taking place as the Soviet Union and its satellite states, the only places where the manager class had seized power from the owner class, were collapsing. And so despite having an emerging class consciousness strikingly similar to the commissars of Eastern Europe, the world’s new manager class presented itself not as competitors of the capitalist/owner class but as its handmaidens.
During this period, sectors of the economy like healthcare and postsecondary education experienced huge growth in their administrative sectors, with the number of managers per frontline worker increasing three- or fivefold. To advance in such a system, the post-USSR commissar class, remade in the Harvard School of Business, was charged with the continuous revolutionizing of production. The owner class delegated this work to CEOs and the massive bureaucracies they built outside the state, at the state’s margins and inside the state as governments sought to ape the supposedly more efficient private sector.
The meat of this work entailed increasing productivity while reducing wages. And that involved not only the formal and legal destruction of unions but a frontal assault on the cultural fabric of working folks that made them stick together, whether formally unionized or not.
The 1990s was the decade of, among other things, the listserv, proto-social media, an e-mail list that distributed your response to a post to the inbox of everyone on the list. This led to the first of a series of internet-leavened eruptions of social conflict as people normally inhibited by the physical presence, tone and body language of one’s interlocutors were able to express their opinions of coworkers and their ideas in a medium (e-mail lists) lacking in those inhibiting features. Combined with the radical social dislocation produced in workplaces by neoliberal reforms and the adjustments associated with the switch from alcohol and tobacco to coffee and anti-depressants as the main workplace drugs, this led to an explosion of the expression of workplace interpersonal grievances.
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The New Age and the New HR
Rather than the empirically-driven efficiency models we associate with Robert McNamara’s presidency of the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s, this thinking was surprisingly woo-based, as it reflected the Yippie-Yuppie transition embodied in the Jerry Rubin-Abbie Hoffman debates of the 1980s. The transformation of the New Age EST movement for self-actualization into the Landmark Forum for personal and financial success typified the alchemy 1970s New Age thinking underwent to become Management Theory.
The structure of gurus, retreats and encounter groups underwent a similarly superficial transformation. The retreats became “corporate retreats,” which did not always involve even leaving the office. Instead, they imbibed of the spirit of the elementary and middle school assembly. Regular duties would be canceled for a day and the bosses and managers would introduce an individual or small team to educate the company’s workers in some way that would somehow make them better co-workers. These exercises often repurposed “trust building exercises” from 1970s New Age culture with employees being forced into conscriptive group activities that entailed behaving in undignified ways: confessional testimonials, bad collaborative drawing, incoherent improvisational skits, sack races, etc.
Many of these activities entailed classic cult recruitment strategies designed to break down one’s dignity, one’s ego in front of the group and then have the group conscripted into reforming/repairing that ego as one based on the values of the facilitators of the activity, centred around the group. The idea of the outsider guru did not just form new high level charlatan jobs like “management consultant;” “retreat facilitators,” “anti-bullying consultants,” etc. multiplied in the ever-expanding world of Big HR. For every new manager based in a single firm and workplace, there was also a new contractor, ready to charge big bucks to put on day-long events designed to induce a new camaraderie, a new loyalty as old loyalties and solidarities were chipped away by ever-tightening regimes of austerity and surveillance.
All this unfolded as the wage disparity within corporations grew; more ranks, more material differences came to separate conventional employees from management as the super-manager class emerged, to vie with the owner class for control of capitalism and its institutions.
Anti-Bullying and the New Morals Clause
A curious development arose from all this: when corporations came to the bargaining table with unions, it was often they, not the union that asked new contracts to include anti-discrimination and anti-bullying measures with large, elastic, capacious definitions of discrimination, harassment and bullying. And when there was no union with whom to negotiate, workers found similar measures creeping into their non-union contracts.
Central to these new measures was what we might call victim subjectivity. These policies were typically framed based not on intersubjective or objective standards but by subjective standards. By this, I mean that whether a person was facing discrimination, harassment or bullying was based on the following test: did the person feel as though they had been targeted based on their sexual orientation, gender expression, race, etc.? These grounds for discrimination typically excluded the two main factors in workplace harassment: class and workplace rank/status.
Such policies tended to eschew easily available evidence in favour of an individual’s feelings: had one’s coworkers witnesses some portion of the harassment? That was unimportant evidence. Could one find a pattern of financial discrimination in the awarding of overtime, holiday dates or unsuccessful promotion attempts? Again, not nearly so important as feelings.
In this way, real, material structures of power and real, material standards of evidence were effaced, enabling those most able to narrate their emotions to serve their strategic objectives to dominate this field. And as an increasing number of complaints were encouraged by these policies, complaints also came to be directed downward or horizontally in the workplace. After all, with such a deliberately flimsy evidentiary structure, it was as easy for complaints to fail with evidence as to succeed without it. Consequently, complaints tended to be directed at individuals who could not materially punish the complainant. And they tended to operate in an evidence-free frame, causing them to measure not how wronged a person was but how much power and popularity, how much social capital they could mobilize.
Furthermore, with increasing frequency, these complaints could encompass actions and opinions expressed outside the workplace provided they produced feelings located in the workplace. Unwittingly, union negotiators often tended to embrace these management-driven policies because they appeared congruent with the values associated with political projects and parties with which unions were associated outside the workplace, like anti-racism initiatives.
Such complaint structures also served another purpose for the new managerial class in the age of austerity: more and more of unions’ energies were taken up with complaints by workers about other workers, not about managers and owners. Union grievance structures, originally designed to force management accountability, have become increasingly colonized by complaints by workers about one another, further undermining solidarity and distracting union officials from fights for real economic justice inside and outside the workplace.
The HR-ification of Activism
And we all know where things have gone from here. Social justice activism is taking the cue from Big HR and the super-manager class. One does not need to be a co-worker for an individual who feels wronged or offended by something one has done or said. The moral logic of HR is now the moral logic of the world. An increasing portion of self-styled social justice activists focus all or a portion of their time on finding a person whose speech they find hurtful and seek redress through the person’s workplace.
And given the capacious, incoherent and subjective nature of harassment policies, non-co-worker complainants appear to have real power and real standing whether conferred de facto or de jure. At our present moment, it is as though everyone has had a morals clause inserted into their contract, i.e. everyone’s job is now contingent on non-controversial public speech.
Now, political victory is not a change in public policy or cultural practice nearly as often, these days, as it is the infliction of unemployment, precarity and, ideally, homelessness on any individual who thinks aloud in ways that emotionally trouble people who possess significant social capital, as though being emotionally untroubled is some kind of right we have earned, as though being emotionally troubled or challenged is not the most common path towards personal growth.
What I find most shocking arising from all this is that the huge popularity idea that those who express wrong (i.e. emotionally troubling) thoughts should not have jobs, homes or even friends and loved ones. And that the left’s idea of victory is not the conversion of those it deems opponents to values of tolerance, pluralism, economic equality and ecological sustainability but instead their firing, eviction, shunning and premature deaths.
In my own recent experiences with two abusive employers, I have witnessed this firsthand. Those most interested in striking a pose as radicals, revolutionaries, as social justice warriors, have thrown in with my bosses, amplifying their slanders of me on social media, intensifying their harassment at times I am in high-stakes negotiations. They are labouring for free because being implicated in my humiliation, immiseration and poverty will redound to their glory, making them heroes of today’s Bizarro Left.
Once upon a time, we had a name for such folks. They were called “snitches” and “scabs,” and were subject to the scorn of their fellow workers. Now scabbing and snitching are the very essence of the travesty that passes for too much of contemporary social justice activism: volunteer work for the bosses.
