Leviathan Part 1: Auckland

A different analysis of the social, political, economic and cultural forces shaping the western world is emerging post the 2008 "Global Financial Crisis" - a crisis which many have interpreted as the sign of a major cross-road in the progress of the neo-liberal project that economic efficiency requires a free market. This different analysis was developing in the USA before neo-liberalism really took off under Reagan, was dormant for a time, but is now coming back into focus to help explain Trump, Brexit and other similar behaviours and outcomes. Important writers include Galbraith, Weber, James Burnham, Samuel T. Francis and Jerry Woodruff. Hardly household names. Especially not here in New Zealand.

To kick this post off, a summary of the analysis is this: a new ruling social group has been developing over the past fifty years in the West. This is an increasingly powerful class of skilled professionals who are at the heart of and who guide the operations of an expansion of government power and bureaucracy, and the widespread emergence of mass organisations. It is argued that this is a change from times when a greater proportion of government and public functions were de-centralised, smaller and local, and where more economic activity was concentrated in the hands of private entrepreneurs, their families, and local communities.

It is argued that this increasingly influential and affluent social grouping has emerged as a managerial elite which is steadily displacing social and political institutions that had existed to reinforce and protect the interests of the large group of society who now feel increasingly alienated and by-passed. This managerial elite is remaking society by substituting its new world outlook.

But I get ahead of myself with such a summary. In this post I would like to briefly explore what this analysis has to say about Auckland today - especially since amalgamation - and the creation of a mass organisation (Auckland Council) whose form, function and behaviour, is so well analysed and anticipated.

Mass Organisation and Loss of Owner (Ratepayer) Control 

It is useful to note that the writers listed above are not easily dismissed as "left" or "right" in their views. So don't be put off by the fact that the early pages of texts examining the social changes I discuss here usually begin with a bit of Karl Marx and Adam Smith. For example, Samuel Francis writes:

Both Smith and Marx, contemplating the rudimentary forms of corporations of their time, perceived a natural conflict of interest between the owners or stockholders of a corporation and its managers. The owners are interested primarily in a profitable return on their investment, measured in the increased yield in their dividend. The managers, on the other hand, are interested in the wellbeing and particularly in the growth of the corporation itself, and they typically desire not to pay out higher yields to the owners but to reinvest corporate profits in an increased capacity for greater output and enlargement of facilities and operations. (Pg 22, Leviathan and its Enemies, Samuel T Francis)  

For "owner and stockholder" read "ratepayer", for "corporation" read "council", for "return on investment" read "minimise rates for essential public services".

In this next section, quoted from a few pages later, as Francis develops his argument, I have only swapped "Council" for "corporation", and "ratepayer" for "owner". You will get the picture:

...the dispersion of the mass of ratepayers, who lack the opportunity, the interest, or the ability to coordinate their voting power, tends to prevent most effective challenges to those who possess the skills to operate and direct the Council. But the decisive cause of the loss of control by the ratepayers to the managers is the sheer size, complexity, and technicality of the mass organisation and its activities. Whatever the legal rights of ratepayers.... they cannot... acquire the specialised technical skills that management of the mass organisation involves...(Pg 25, Leviathan and its Enemies, Samuel T Francis)

And here we could just as easily substitute "elected councillors" for "ratepayers", because councillors are the ratepayers' representatives in "control" of Auckland Council. The main thrust of this analysis is the problem presented to ratepayers and their representatives in any attempt to challenge or to control Auckland Council. Frances continues (and no swapping is needed):

Like the corporation, the mass state undertakes a wide range of diverse and highly technical activities in the economy, society, science and communications, in addition to its purely administrative and political functions. The latter also become increasingly specialised, technical and complex to the point where today academic degrees and entire schools of public administration exist and flourish.... in the state sector of mass society and in the mass corporation, actual power is distributed according to managerial skills and not by a formal equality of rights and votes or by legal ownership.  (Pg 45 and 47, Leviathan and its Enemies, Samuel T Francis) 

Another plank in the analysis is the relationship that exists between the mass state organisation and large private corporations. The myth of public and private separation is well and truly dismissed:

Mass organisations in the economy cannot operate - they cannot plan for mass production, financing, research, and marketing - without the cooperation of the state, and this cooperation serves the interests of the managerial elite in the state, since its role in the economy extends its power and functions. Thus the managerial elites of the mass corporations and the mass state do not resist, and, indeed, collaborate to promote, the fusion of the mass economy and the mass state.  (Pg 63, Leviathan and its Enemies, Samuel T Francis)

Nowhere do we see the truth of this more clearly than what is happening here in Auckland between the growth economy and Auckland Council with population growth and mass housing development, and where the "owners" of Auckland - existing ratepayers - have no control of their own environment, let alone Council managers in charge of enabling and facilitating this social transformation. (I suggest it is also evident between central government and the Fonterra Corporation; and between the emergency state in Christchurch and Fletcher Corporation - but those are other stories.)

I'll end this post with a brief account of another conceptual idea that is explored in this analysis of the massing of western society, and which is relevant to Auckland because of its size and growth. Mass state organisations (and mass corporations) act to break down social differentiations that impede or restrict mass production and mass consumption. A clear example of this in Auckland has been the replacement of a set of diverse District Plans, with a single Unitary Plan which envisages just 3 or 4 types of urban housing settlement. The main advocates for this simplification were from the property development economy. For them the diversity in planning across Auckland and the different housing and street typologies that have resulted in Devonport, Ponsonby, Waitakere, Albany, Freemans Bay, Flat Bush and Parnell for example, was intolerable. A more homogeneous system of urban planning was required. Distinct and local Community Board arms of the state were also intolerable, when viewed from the perspective of the professional management class, whose sophisticated and highly educated submissions easily trumped the local interest arguments mounted by those clinging to community and a particular and kiwi way of life.

The question then. Are you part of the problem, or part of the solution?