ABSTRACT
Large sections of society were ‘de-hierarchized’, while the organizations in business, science, politics and art remained, for the most part, as hierarchically structured systems, free of democracy. All capitalists, according to Karl Marx, strive to increase profit in their own businesses. Both systems theory and Marxist sociology have as their central figures of organizations the determination of purposes, hierarchy and membership. According to Marx and Friedrich Engels, the trend towards “real subsumption” had devastating consequences for the workers. For Marx, the transition from production in manufacturing businesses to industrial production is the decisive step towards the increase of relative surplus value. In science, the question of how widespread the Taylorist-Fordist mode of production was in businesses is still controversial. Whether a trend was observed towards further Taylorization or towards the formation of holistic forms of work, it was always assumed that the strategies of the capital were to increase the economic rationality of the company.
