In reading Havel’s Power of the Powerless, a work of dissident thought from the late Soviet Union, I was struck by how seamlessly his description of late communist bureaucracy maps onto the issues of large capitalist corporations and the governmental and political apparatus surrounding them. The endless meetings serve as the illusion of progress and decision. The dissident’s complaint and the modern corporate worker’s complaint side by side are nearly identical.
The same pathology emerges in both systems, so it is clear that economic label is not the operative variable. What we call corporate capitalism is, structurally, managerial bureaucracy which is synonymous with what Havel described: authority diffused across a middle layer so thoroughly that no single person holds enough of any decision to be accountable for any of the outcomes. Formal authority is essentially severed from technical authority. Failure becomes an occult process because it is genuinely unattributable. The accountability has nowhere to land. One only has to look at the 2008 financial crisis to observe the lack of any accountability for the cause of the destruction.