[_meqs]

I do not expect this to be a popular opinion, but I am slightly entertained reading this from more of a Marxist perspective.

> We used to make things. Now we have meetings.

Well, of course. This is what happens when the purpose of a corporation isn't production but profit, and if the workers, the people who by definition exist in the company to make things, were to own their means of production, this would look very differently. But anyway, I digress.

[JoeAltmaier]

Ah, if only there were still 'workers' left in the Marxist sense. But automation has eliminated them (in the West anyway). So all that's left is managers, engineers and other professionals.

[lefrenchy]

Yes and no, there are still workers per se but I don't think they exist with the conception of themselves as that (as much). During the 20th century when the labor movement was strong class consciousness existed and there was an appetite for a conception of the self as a worker in relation to capital and society. I think it still exists but in a pretty inconsequential way. Technology has definitely played a factor in atomizing workers and automating away for labor intensive tasks.

[codeflo]

So under Marxism, people don't need to discuss how to coordinate their work? That does save a lot of time. No wonder the Soviet economy was so efficient.

[Spooky23]

I grew up working on a farm. The person in charge was a foreman, and his job was to coordinate how the work was accomplished on the ground by a crew of 5-7 people.

At most fortune 50 employers today, you’d have a director 1000 miles away, a local manager, a supervisor, an auditor and compliance person reviewing the payroll records, and recommending to the director that the 2 workers utilize less overtime. The local manager would eliminate the OT and hire McKinsey to recommend outsourcing the 2 workers, and retain McKinsey to monitor compliance.

[handrous]

Modern companies are intensive responsibility-laundering engines. It's practically their primary function. That's always been a little true, but it's gotten a lot worse (at least in the US). It's a bunch of box-ticking so you can say "look, I did something!" if anything goes wrong—some of which box-ticking may require creating and hiring for new roles—and it's a downright miracle if the box-ticking activity provides any amount of useful value to anyone, aside from its value for responsibility-deflection.

IIRC, NPR ran a piece some years back covering how something similar happened to US military command (and, relatedly, its relationship to civilian oversight), some time between WWII and Vietnam, getting worse over time after that. Which, if that was accurate, is... worrisome. But that explains how you get a directionless and constantly-failing war in Afghanistan for nearly two decades, with non-stop reports of "yep, we accomplished the mission!" from every local command at the end of every deployment, and everyone in the command hierarchy just pretends everything's fine even though they know it isn't, and they are all allowed to do that with no consequences. Gotta evade, and launder, responsibility. That's job number one. Everything else is just a nice-to-have.

[ghostbrainalpha]

That's a great comment, but I disagree that the trend is ...worrisome.

The purpose of the military is to fight. And in the local sense, it is only increasing in effectiveness at its primary task.

But the primary task of a 20 year "war", is not fighting. It is the building a nation state.

That is something the military is not designed to do. It's absolutely insane we didn't have an entirely different branch of government whose job was to build a lasting system of compromises and coordination between local people. Even if the military did have that skillset and training, which they don't, the resentment from the local populace against the group of people they just fought against would be enough to compromise any mission.

It's like if we asked the same police officer to arrest a drug addict, then be the judge in the case, then be their parole officer, and finally help them find a job after their time served. It's a nice idea in a Utopian kind of way, but there are so many opportunities along that chain for the relationship to sour.

[handrous]

Oh, sure, the "winability" of what they were asked to do is also a problem. Lots of things were wrong with the entire enterprise, only one of which was the military's comfort with their own entire reporting structure openly lying constantly for years on end.

[_trampeltier]

Just like ask to a service to protect the people from IT attacks and at the same the same service like to have backdoors to everybodys phones, cameras, alexas and computers.

[mprovost]

Robert McNamara was secretary of defense for JFK and LBJ during the Vietnam War. Before that he was the president of Ford Motor Company. He's the one who introduced the charts that they used to show on TV with the number of enemy killed, clearly showing that the US was winning since the graphs always went up and to the right.

[Spooky23]

He was fighting the last war. The practice of killing everyone was a successful strategy that won WW2 in the Pacific.

Vietnam wasn’t the type of war that was supposed to happen — the real action was in Europe before we nuked each other.

[toomanyducks]

Ah, I see how I communicated that poorly - it's not that the meetings aren't there, it's that they're oriented towards production.

[krageon]

Please stop and think about what you are saying. The Soviets were never Marxist.