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Or, "How I learned not to start discussions of practical matters with a roomfull of Philosophy majors."
Just to put the titular question up front: do you view management-type positions as necessary to one degree or another?
Now, the background: I'm taking a class on "Nietzsche, Buddha, and Marx." It ties into certain common ground they may have on ontological matters (read: the nature of existence). Very abstract. Anyway, it's been pretty much the same thing all semester; knowledge of the subject can be faked reasonably well by saying obvious things like "we're all interconnected in our social and economic relationships" while trying to think like Keanu Reeves's character from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures."
Not that the class as a subject hasn't been thought-provoking, it's just that its focus has been on the kind of thing one needs to be a philosophy major (or pothead) to spend a couple of consecutive hours talking about without going insane. Plus I'm a philosophy minor, and I find that periodically bringing up concrete questions keeps the rest of them from lapsing into long exchanges of words like "epistemological" and "paradigm."
So: in today's class, I raised a question concerning our readings on Marx and his view of Capitalists, just for variety. I opined that, while CEOs and such can be exploitative and cruel, management positions are quite simply essential for the completion of any task involving more than a few people. Marx seemed to be making them out to be hobgoblins who did nothing but cackle and take finished goods from the workers in order to mark said goods up and take the profit.
The prof just said we had to bear in mind that Marx was extremely bitter against capitalism at the point in his life we were studying--but the rest of the class chipped in that, really, if everyone's committed to doing the job and doing it well, you don't need some guy handing out orders. People can organize themselves and stuff. As the son of two people with experience in bureaucracy, I know this is patently false, at least within current socioeconomic contexts or whatever phrase philosophers use to cover their butts. But I really can't imagine any kind of society wherein thousands of people could organize themselves to build, say, the Space Shuttle, and not have several parts put in backwards or something.
The final fifteen minutes of class were very animated, but I'll leave out the gory details until I've gotten some responses. I don't want to get even more carried away with my rant than I already have.
Just to put the titular question up front: do you view management-type positions as necessary to one degree or another?
Now, the background: I'm taking a class on "Nietzsche, Buddha, and Marx." It ties into certain common ground they may have on ontological matters (read: the nature of existence). Very abstract. Anyway, it's been pretty much the same thing all semester; knowledge of the subject can be faked reasonably well by saying obvious things like "we're all interconnected in our social and economic relationships" while trying to think like Keanu Reeves's character from "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures."
Not that the class as a subject hasn't been thought-provoking, it's just that its focus has been on the kind of thing one needs to be a philosophy major (or pothead) to spend a couple of consecutive hours talking about without going insane. Plus I'm a philosophy minor, and I find that periodically bringing up concrete questions keeps the rest of them from lapsing into long exchanges of words like "epistemological" and "paradigm."
So: in today's class, I raised a question concerning our readings on Marx and his view of Capitalists, just for variety. I opined that, while CEOs and such can be exploitative and cruel, management positions are quite simply essential for the completion of any task involving more than a few people. Marx seemed to be making them out to be hobgoblins who did nothing but cackle and take finished goods from the workers in order to mark said goods up and take the profit.
The prof just said we had to bear in mind that Marx was extremely bitter against capitalism at the point in his life we were studying--but the rest of the class chipped in that, really, if everyone's committed to doing the job and doing it well, you don't need some guy handing out orders. People can organize themselves and stuff. As the son of two people with experience in bureaucracy, I know this is patently false, at least within current socioeconomic contexts or whatever phrase philosophers use to cover their butts. But I really can't imagine any kind of society wherein thousands of people could organize themselves to build, say, the Space Shuttle, and not have several parts put in backwards or something.
The final fifteen minutes of class were very animated, but I'll leave out the gory details until I've gotten some responses. I don't want to get even more carried away with my rant than I already have.
. Smart communists don't say everything will work out fine without managers... they suggest different sorts of them.
Sorry, I got distracted by shiny things.
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