At first glance, Friedrich
Nietzsche’s pro-capitalist stance on private property and the process of accumulating
profit (or wealth) may seem to extend a vote of confidence to the business
manager as a type. After all, managers manage the private property of
stockholders (which can include themselves) with a fiduciary duty to do so to increase
shareholder value by maximizing profit. The notion of profit-seeking by
maximizing revenue and minimizing cost is arguably too simplistic. Squeezing a
workforce too much, for example, can backfire in the long term. Nietzsche was
concerned about such a thing happening even though he claims that the vast
majority of laborers must be kept to subsistence wages for culture to be
possible. He castigates petty, short-sighted managers who do not look out for
the spiritual and economic welfare of workers, and yet holds that those workers
must be slavish in the sense of being exploited by employers so culture can
emerge and be sustained by the rich. To be for such exploitation and yet
against petty cost-cutting managers renders Nietzsche’s socioeconomic
philosophy interesting as well as useful in terms of keeping a
capitalist economy from being reduced to the mentality of its bottom-feeder
producers. I first discuss the matter of exploitation and then turn to how
Nietzsche addresses his wider socio-economic philosophy more specifically to human-resource
management. Within the wider subject-heading of exploitation, very different
approaches, or mentalities, to human resource management can be discerned. In dichotomous
terms, there can be said to be a pathos of distance between enlightened
self-interest and selfish, short-sighted greed.
The full essay is at "Nietzsche on Managerial Capitalism."
