The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders:

The Coming Revolution – The End of Corpocracy and the Emergence of the New Worker!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 15, 2015

REFERENCE:

To a trusted colleague I passed the idea of publishing in an e-book some of my journal articles over the past few decades that relate to the decline of management and its credo of corpocracy and the emergence of a new worker.


HE WRITES:

Are you sure you understand the worker? Wouldn't you be speaking their language if you did?

Do you know the name Lech Walensa? Sure you do. How did he manage to gain the confidence of the workers he championed? I think he convinced them that they really could succeed, and that by sticking together (solidarity), they had power.

You believe, but does your principal audience believe? Collectively? Gustav le Bon, where are you? Or Pied Piper, where are you? Hey, could Trump be recruited to lead the Proletariat to the Promised Land? After all, his only principle is to be the center of attention. Or, could Gloria Steinem inspire women to take the lead on behalf of men and women? Sure she could. She loves crusading. Any way you cut it, a champion needs to step forward.

End of Corpocracy? Great idea. It seems the managerial class is so in love with the power that anything less than a revolution can change things. So I like your idea of a revolution, but as a method, not an end result.

Here in Alberta, we elected a Labor government back in May. You wouldn't believe the shrill outcry of our corporate controlled news media. An all-out ideological war is under way here. If you can imagine the State of Texas electing a labor government, that's basically what's happened here.

We are Texas North, but the electorate voted impulsively against corporatism, being extremely angry at the Conservatives.

It's interesting to see what they're saying in the newspapers about our fledgling new government. It has flushed the conflict out in the open, these pretend capitalists who give themselves so much credit for their wealth reveal their true colors.

Even though the new government has only been in power for a couple of months, every conceivable evil in the world is blamed on the NDP. That includes the low price of oil of course.

The day after the new government brought in their first budget, about three months after the election, two major corporations, Shell Canada and Husky Energy simultaneously announced major layoffs and project cancellations, cynically linking the despised government budget directly to losses of jobs in the public mind.

Now, concerning the title of your journal collection, I wonder if the term corpocracy will resonate with people. It seems ironic to me that knowing you are politically conservative, you want to promote a profoundly socialistic concept.

William McDonald Wallace wrote a book in the 1970's, "How To Save Free Enterprise", which dealt with the problems created by bureaucratic work structures. He identified the problem as what he called the BSO; bureaucratic social order.

His insight was that by organizing work in bureaucratic fashion, the unrecognized by-product was the destruction of supportive social systems. His solution? You've seen it. My point is that this issue has been kicked around for a long long time, probably a lot longer than we know. Maybe a hundred years from now people will be saying much the same thing as you are saying today.

The question is what does it take to trigger constructive permanent change, to move people to action? Idealists agree, there's a problem; that there has to be a better way. 

You trust the workers, Dr. Fisher.  They are sheep.

Your trusted friend


DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Wow! You are wound up! Good. That is healthy.

Yes, workers are sheep. That is how they have been programmed.

Management and those in power and control of the economy trust that they will remain so.

That said there was the American and French Revolution of common people some three hundred years ago. And if pundits and prognosticators are correct, more change has occurred in the past thirty years than the previous three hundred.

That, alone, would seem portend for dramatic change if not drastic disruption, or a recipe for revolution.

Regarding Lech Walensa, when I was in Poland I asked people what they thought of him. He was president at the time.

People said he was a good propagandist but a poor president. They had a much higher regard for their own Polish pope, Paul II.

Walensa when he visited the United States, said, "I have noticed when visiting the West, a certain illness, and I call this the illness of stabilization."

Interesting, Poland as well as the West suffers the same illness to this day.

WORKERS HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO TURN!

About workers, I write not to lead them or to have them follow me, but for them to pay attention, be aware and to take charge, themselves. It can be no other way.

I am not surprised that my title, THE COMING REVOLUTION -- THE END OF CORPOCRACY AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW WORKER confounds you slightly.

Yes, as a moral philosopher, I suppose I am conservative, but from that point it gets a bit murky. Am I a conservative with socialistic leanings? I don’t think so. Labels have never rested too well on me. I am a provocateur.

What is true about me is that I have never forgotten my roots, never forgotten how Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the mess left by my Iowa Republican President Herbert Hoover, and gave men such as my da some level of dignity with work during THE GREAT DEPRESSION.

Roosevelt took office in 1933 cutting pay of government workers, cutting government spending by 15 percent, insuring people's deposits in banks against losses in the banking system.

He instituted the AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT (1933) that paid farmers to limit crops, forced employers to collective bargain with trade unions, and effectively ended Prohibition by authorizing the production of 3.2 beer before the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was written.

FDR also created public works known as WORKS PROJECT ADMINISTRATION or WPA, which gave work to people like my da, and to others with the CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS or CCC.

Roosevelt's New Deal of the three R's -- relief for the poor and the unemployed; recovery of the economy to pre-Depression status, and reform of the financial system -- did not take the United States out of the Great Depression. WWII did. But it was a bold move to restore the psychic confidence of the nation.

I write so much about confidence because confidence is not a thing. Confidence is a mindset. Anything is possible with such a mindset, and nothing is possible without it.

I've read books on FDR and he freely admits he made up things as he went along. He betrayed his patrician class and embraced the common man, not always wisely but completely.

This is where the irony of my politics and economics comes in.

Neither the Democratic nor Republican Party understands FDR's legacy.

President Ronald Reagan was something of a Democrat in the White House as a Republican President. Yet, he didn't quite understand Roosevelt's "three R's," nor has either party ever since.

There is no difference in either party today when it comes to lobbyists, special interests, and the one-tenth of one percenters who quietly from a distance control the economy.

The whore of the one-tenth of one percenters is elected officials of both parties, while the pimp is the management class that does its heavy lifting and gets all the attention.

Apparently, it is the same in Canada and most of the Western World.

Our great universities and the scientific establishment falls in line with this construction because they depend on the financial support of the one-tenth of one percenters.

Now, we have one of their kind brazenly running for President of the United States in Donald J. Trump, claiming he has bought most of those on the stage with him, and those not, in the other political party, especially Hillary Clinton.

If this is not a recipe for revolution, I don't know what is. But with me "revolution" is more modest, more evolutionary than socially disruptive.

Over my long career, I have watched able men and women, acquire education, step into the working world, and pledge that once they have acquired a modicum of influence that they would behave differently than their bosses. It has not happened. They behave precisely the same or they disappear from the payroll.

Perhaps, I am one of the few exceptions who didn't change, didn't join the club. For whatever reason, I have always remembered my roots and my loyalties to my da and workers like him.

Once people who rise into management acquire status, special privileges, perks, bonuses, club membership among the elite, it is easy for them to forget from whence they came. They are thus inclined to deny their roots, the struggle of their families, and the origin of their idealism.

For the past twenty five years, or since I have devoted myself full-time to writing, commencing with WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A VIEW FROM THE TRENCHES (1991), I have been relentless in attempting to get the worker's attention, but alas, without success.

These published essays that I am considering to republish in an e-book are a record of that constant endeavor to bring attention to this matter.

Keep thinking and challenging the conventional wisdom.