Karl Marx's Turnkey Solution - Industry Trend or Event

Industry Standard, The, Oct 16, 2000 by Thomas Frank

As this idea that vertical corporations equal governments equal totalitarian systems became an accepted part of gurudom, authors everywhere began to make spectacular claims for the red.-smashing power of their various pet theories.

To the authors of the change-worshipping 1998 tract Blur, for example, it was perfectly obvious that the fall of communism discredited not only "the entire concept of a centrally planned economy," but also Western companies that rejected the authors' own management prescriptions. After all, they observed, "Managerially, much of the West runs its corporations like the Soviets ran their economy," complete with guidance by a "centralized decision-making body like the Politburo."

In fact - and even though they were writing almost 10 years after the event - the book's authors divulged that it was the very phenomenon of really fast, really excellent change that they had identified as "blur," which was the real winning factor in the Cold War, the thing that finally made Ivan throw in the towel.

It's not just jargon, then; there is an idea deep within this strange language of the gurus: "Vertically integrated" corporations, like "governments," are essentially the tools of totalitarianism.

What is surprising here is that the very language that gurus use to condemn the Kremlinized corporation is itself often derived from explicitly Marxist roots.

Contemporary management writers continue to marvel, for example, at the Viet Cong, who handed a humiliating defeat both to "government" and to the old-style American corporate establishment. Oracle once even ran a TV commercial comparing its own commitment to "revolution" to that of a gang of guerrillas clearly identifiable as Khmer Rouge. And the ever-popular "guerrilla marketing" movement, of course, imagines its roots to lie not in the Harvard Business School but in the jungles of El Salvador.

Most remarkable, however, is the business community's weird but undeniable attraction to the idea of historical determinism, a concept we associate most vividly with the followers of Karl Marx.

Inevitability, it seems, is the very essence of the new economy. The revolution is coming, and there is nothing you can do to resist it. We are told that markets will "inevitably" triumph over all the world thanks to a number of immutable new "laws." Computers are growing faster and cheaper, bandwidth is doing all sorts of miraculous tricks and so on. Then there's demographics, and the idealistic young generation, and "globalization," which can't be stopped by anyone, unless maybe they've got another globe stashed somewhere.

Such claims in the past typically were made not by middle managers planning for the second quarter but by party officials justifying, say, the gulags. It seems to bother no one, though, that determinism of any kind flatly contradicts the usual everyone-will-be-free rhetoric of the new age.

Consider the first sentence in Kevin Kelly's slim 1998 volume, New Rules for the New Economy: "No one can escape the transforming fire of machines." The point of the book is that we must act at once to remake the world in the image of the Internet, which, Kelly warns, "is moving irreversibly to include everything of the world." Get with the program, he says, unless you fancy being run over by the freight train of history.