Administration of Things – Capitalism As Non-Government

According to the famous phrase of Engels, the future phase of social development will replace the 'government of people with administration of things'. This long lasting dream of non-intrusive forms of power was (and is) strong even after grave crisis of Marxism and its theory of 'withering of the state'. In my presentation I will argue, that, paradoxically, this idea or dream of power as non-government played important role in economic transformation form state socialism to capitalism in Poland. State socialism was widely perceived as overcomplicated bureaucratic system, that brings enormous amounts of human energy to waste. This opinion was a commonplace, expressed in various forms: in jokes as well as in sociological treatises. In conditions of so called 'economy of shortages', obtaining most trivial production materials and consumption goods was possible only after prolonged efforts, that involved managing expanded web of social relations. In contrast, the reality of capitalism, as it was imagined in socialist Poland, was to be free of such complications. Conscious efforts of 'organizing' things, managing the exchange of favors and bribes, were to be replaced in capitalism by simple and straight-forward mechanisms of market exchange. Capitalism was perceived as a system that strengthens subject's autonomy by freeing her/him from painstaking efforts of managing the trivialities of daily life. The bureaucratic government over most banal spheres of economic and social life was contrasted by impersonal non-government of market relations, in which the invisible hand of the market would replace the conscious efforts of planners. Every project of alternative to capitalism, that would be imagined today or in the future, has to address this motive of non-government, of freedom from complication in daily life or from unwanted social relations.