#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #GERMANY #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Germany, FAU Direkte Aktion - MOVE FASTER! by Hermann Bueren. (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Review of the book 'Move faster. On the criticism of modern management methods. A

Handbook' by Hermann Bueren. ---- Operations & Society By: Peter Nowak ---- "The
so-called new middle class has long since integrated criticism of the work ethic
into its flexible and precarious life plan. State-of-the-art work criticism
should also attack the New Work ideology," demands Stephan Maßdorf in a
discussion contribution in the weekly newspaper jungle.world. There he also works
well to show how the criticism of alienation from the alternative movement of the
1970s has long since found its way into the new managerial culture and has become
a weapon against wage earners. ---- Hermann Bueren dealt with these new
managerial methods in a knowledgeable manner on almost 320 pages in his book
"Move faster", published by Kellner-Verlag. Bueren was a works council member in
a printing company for several years before he studied industrial sociology and
worked in the field of trade union education. In his book he critiques the
different managerial methods from the perspective of wage earners. At the center
of his investigation is the hype surrounding agility, today the hallmark of an
open-minded, modern company. "As early as the mid-1980s, the word flexible had
the same function as agile today," writes Bueren, emphasizing that the aim is to
adapt wage earners to constantly changing market conditions through constant
learning and adaptability. Again and again Bueren undertakes brief digressions
into the history of managerial methods. He goes into Taylorist models in the USA,
but also various joint venture models in Nazi Germany and shows that it was
always about getting as much added value as possible from the labor power of wage
earners. It became clear to industrial psychologists decades ago that things work
better when less external pressure dominates, and people should have the feeling
that they want to work better and faster themselves.

NO PLACE FOR SOLIDARITY AND CLASS WAR
Bueren exposes the rhetoric and propaganda of these managerial methods, which
have also managed to appropriate concepts and values that are also popular in
left-wing circles. This includes the concept of self-organization. "The teams
should be able to move and exchange ideas freely and self-organized in a network
with other teams in the company." But Bueren emphasizes that old dreams of the
labor movement are not being implemented. Rather, the wage earners should
implement the goals of the corporations in a self-determined manner. Of course,
class struggle ideas and committed representation of the interests of wage
earners have no place in this agile working world. If there are problems in
operation, these are individualized. Appraisal interviews should ensure that the
individual workers function in the interests of the company. If this does not
succeed, they are considered underperformers from whom the company has to part.
The team is given as a reason that it can no longer be expected that someone who
does not show enough commitment can continue to work there. Bueren uses many
examples to show that the conflicts of a capitalist organization of work are
shifted to the individual employee. When in doubt, he doesn't have management in
front of him, but a team to whom he has to justify himself if he was unable to
provide the required service.

SELF-ORGANIZATION INSTEAD OF AGILE MANAGER CULTURE
But Bueren does not stop at criticism of ideology. In the last part of the book,
he shows that managerial dreams often fail because of proletarian stubbornness.
Many of the agile working methods are rejected by wage earners despite or because
of the rhetoric of self-organization and respect. In the last chapter under the
programmatic title "Working differently", Bueren names initiatives of proletarian
self-organization that have come out of the factories in recent decades and did
not aim for self-organization of the employees under the guidelines of capitalist
profit maximization. He is reminiscent of the Plakat Group, a circle of
opposition works councils at the Daimler-Benz plant in Untertürkheim, which asked
their colleagues in the 1970s: "What else can we actually produce with such a
system than axles, crankcases and cylinder heads for Cars?" This question has
become even more topical today and could be the basis for cooperation between
workers and the climate movement.  A model could be the cooperation between the
extra-parliamentary left, workers at the armaments company Lucas Aerospace and
critical scientists who developed models in Great Britain in the early 1970s for
the conversion of an armaments factory into a production facility for vital
products. Therefore the book is more than a critique of capitalist managerial
methods. It encourages reflection on what self-organization in the workplace that
is not under the control of management might look like.

Featured image: https://www.kellnerverlag.de/bewegt-euch-schneller.html

https://direkteaktion.org/bewegt-euch-schneller/
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