domingo, 22 de julho de 2018

Da Absoluta Necessidade de Novas Grelhas de Leitura


A capacidade de elaborar as suas próprias grelhas de leitura e de fazê-lo quando necessário acaba por ser o que realmente define uma elite. A mudança estrutural em curso (já muito rápida e a ganhar ainda mais velocidade...) tornou obsoletas as grelhas de leitura recebidas da segunda metade do século passado. De facto, tudo o indica, estamos perante uma completa mudança do modelo global que começou a ser construído depois de 1945 e cujas instituições e lógicas já não comportam as realidades actuais.

O modelo tinha sido estruturado para conter a expansão da URSS e do seu “mundo comunista”. Com a queda da URSS e do seu símbolo maior, o muro de Berlim, implodiu também a base em que o modelo assentava... 

Logo a seguir, a China faz a sua entrada no mercado mundial. O modelo também não previa a integração de uma economia com a dimensão brutal da chinesa. E muito menos previa a integração de uma economia de tal dimensão orientada por uma “sugadora” estratégia mercantilista. 

O “11 de Setembro”, veio juntar a tudo isso o desencadear de uma “chaos operation”, uma guerra assimétrica e híbrida, que abala toda a arquitectura do modelo.

As elites ocidentais, capitaneadas por Clinton, Bush Jr. e Obama, alcançaram a proeza de, durante três décadas, conseguirem ignorar as realidades enquanto se ocupavam com oportunas questões societais (mas ignorando as sociais...) e outras preciosidades muito “politicamente correctas”.

Enfim, um barroquismo completo que teve o seu ponto mais perfeito na campanha presidencial da senhora Clinton que se dedicou a discutir muito seriamente quem poderia ir a que casa de banho, no momento em que o pão e o tecto falhavam ao proletariado americano e a classe média se afundava. 

E é esta gente que se diz “surpreendida” pela escolha eleitoral de Donald Trump! E que só a consegue “explicar” por uma soviética e desbragada intervenção putinesca!

Esta miséria de discurso político necessita, obviamente, de ser explicada. Agarrada a (e por...) grelhas de leitura arcaicas e obsoletas não conseguem “ler” a realidade, que assim recusam, e só uma ”teoria da conspiração” (imputada, obviamente, a Putine) lhes permite “explicar” um facto tão singelo como a eleição de Trump (aqui antecipada e prevista no início de Junho 2016).

A absoluta, imperiosa e urgente necessidade de elaborar novas grelhas de leitura capazes de integrar os factos e “iluminar” a sua leitura torna-se assim evidente. A guerra económica desencadeada por Trump torna essa necessidade ainda mais imperiosa e urgente. A “interpretação” dessa guerra que está a ser feita por decisores políticos e económicos, pelos media e pelos “opinion makers”, é uma coisa paupérrima e que falha em toda em linha.


Veja-se, por exemplo, a intervenção da presidente do FMI, a Lagarde, que não conseguiu mais nem melhor do que dizer, agora na abertura da reunião do G20, que tal guerra económica ameaça o crescimento da economia mundial... Quando o que está em causa é uma questão de potência!

É esta disfunção intelectual que o nosso velho amigo Christian Harbulot aqui analisa, com a sua mestria habitual.

L’IMPÉRIEUSE NÉCESSITÉ OCCIDENTALE D’ÉLABORER DE NOUVELLES GRILLES DE LECTURE

Christian Harbulot | InfoGuerre | 17 Juillet 2018

Le dernier sommet d’Helsinki entre Donald Trump et Vladimir Poutine a révélé les limites des vieilles grilles de lecture. Les médias sont les premiers touchés par ce phénomène. Mais en définitif c’est le cœur de la matrice impériale que l’Occident a généré depuis siècles qui est atteinte de plein fouet par la mutation actuelle des rapports de puissance.


Les pertes de repère des observateurs de l’actualité

A force de s’être englué dans le politiquement correct depuis la fin des années 70, les éditorialistes français relatent les faits mais sont incapables de les interpréter au-delà des commentaires classiques à l’image de L’Express ou du quotidien Libération qui estiment que Trump s’est fait manipuler par Poutine, sans oublier Courrier International qui résume le sentiment hostile de la presse américaine contre le Président des Etats-Unis. Ce sentiment de vide analytique se ressent aussi dans les commentaires désabusés de Philippe Grasset, l’animateur du site dedefensa. Ce dernier avait pourtant la réputation d’être un observateur attentif et « non aligné » de la vie politique d’outre-Atlantique. Il ne sait plus quoi penser de l’implosion du système américain, si ce n’est en soulignant les risques de guerre civile ou de chaos.

Le tour de passe-passe du monde occidental

La réal politik que le monde occidental a édifié au cours de son histoire reposait sur un postulat qui relevait du non dit, c’est-à-dire pour parler sans langue de bois : la domination du monde. Les prétendants à un tel objectif se sont succédé au cours des siècles. Les deux derniers en date, l’empire britannique puis les Etats-Unis d’Amérique, ont même réussi à bâtir un discours qui éludait cette évidence stratégique. C’est dans cet esprit de duplicité que Londres mit en scène avec brio le discours sur la libéralisation des échanges. L’empire dominant masquait sa volonté de conquête économique, en prônant l’ouverture des frontières et l’abaissement des barrières douanières. Il ne craignait pas la concurrence des autres pays. Ses produits étaient plus compétitifs que ceux des pays dont il convoitait les marchés intérieurs. Ainsi s’édifia un double discours particulièrement efficace qui porta l’empire victorien au sommet de sa gloire. L’invincible Albion élabora siècle après siècle cette dynamique non affichée de puissance. Le pouvoir britannique accorda une priorité à sa marine militaire pour s’assurer le contrôle des flux d’échange commerciaux. Ne pouvant rivaliser sur terre comme sur mer, le Royaume Uni joua sur la capacité de nuisance de ses milieux financiers ainsi que sur l’influence de sa monnaie. A la charnière des deux siècles, la Grande Bretagne compléta ses moyens de suprématie par la conquête géopolitique de l’énergie pétrolière.



La créativité américaine

Lorsque les Etats-Unis d’Amérique prirent le dessus sur la Grande Bretagne au milieu du XX siècle, ils s’attribuèrent les mêmes atouts de puissance, mais en ajoutant une dimension industrielle et militaire terrestre qui prit forme au cours de la seconde guerre mondiale. Encore faut-il rappeler que les fondateurs de la République américaine avaient intégré l’importance de la dynamique non affichée de la puissance ainsi que l’importance des double discours. Ces futurs dénonciateurs des empires coloniaux européens créèrent un Etat d’Est en Ouest en colonisant violemment les territoires sur lesquels vivaient les natifs indiens. Ce processus de colonisation intérieure a été très judicieusement effacé de la mémoire collective du monde occidental. Forts d’un tel exploit de dissimulation cognitive, les gouvernements américains ont porté haut et fort les principes du droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes. C’était audacieux pour un Etat qui venait de se substituer aux autres, en faisant disparaître les nations indiennes en 1870. La dynamique silencieuse de la puissance nord-américaine a su détourner avec beaucoup d’habileté l’attention des opinions publiques naissantes par sa capacité rhétorique à critiquer moralement les actions des puissances rivales. C’était très audacieux pour une puissance qui s’était construite à partir d’un processus de colonisation intérieure de dénoncer les pratiques de colonisation extérieure de la France et de la Grande Bretagne.

Les limites de la dynamique occidentale de puissance non affichée

La disparition des empires coloniaux européens a conduit les Etats-Unis à élaborer d’autres moyens cognitifs de puissance non affichée. Pendant des décennies, la lutte contre les totalitarismes fut la colonne vertébrale de leur justification de recherche de puissance. Une telle légitimité cognitive permit aux promoteurs de la suprématie américaine de faire passer au premier plan leur rôle autoproclamé de régulateur du monde. Ainsi passaient sous les radars de l’Histoire officielle, le cynisme de leur recherche d’intérêts dans leur participation à la première guerre mondiale, leur opportunisme marchand dans la participation d’entreprises américaines à la Nouvelle Economie Politique de l’URSS, la très forte ambigüité du soutien financier de la Réserve fédérale à l’Allemagne nazie au début des années 30, les multiples opérations clandestines pour mettre la main sur le pétrole du Moyen Orient, la tentative de prise de contrôle du processus européen dans les années 50, les guerres secrètes au Cambodge et au Laos, menées au nom de l’anticommunisme.

L’absence de stratégie cognitive en cas de perte de domination

Après l’effondrement de l’Union soviétique, Washington perdit le levier de la lutte contre les totalitarismes. Elle mit en avant un nouveau levier d’influence cognitive en s’affichant comme la seule nation capable de défendre la promotion de la démocratie à travers le monde. Cette stratégie s’effrita peu à peu à travers les échecs politico-militaires de la guerre en Afghanistan, et de l’après-guerre civile en Irak. Les succès très relatifs du «soutien» aux révolutions colorées menées sur les marches de l’ex-empire soviétique, en Tunisie, en Lybie et en Syrie ont mis un terme à la pertinence de cette vocation extranationale.

Depuis plusieurs années, les penseurs (toutes écoles confondues) de la puissance américaine tournent en rond. Ils ne savent pas comment reprendre la main sur un monde qui leur échappe partiellement. C’est une raisons pour lesquelles ils répètent parfois de manière caricaturale les mêmes recettes. Il suffit de lire en ce moment les déclarations des ténors de la vie politique américaine pour se rendre compte de la platitude de leurs propos. Un Président qui remet en cause l’action d’une partie de l’administration fédérale du renseignement, une presse qui dénigre ce même Président, une classe politique qui ressort les sempiternels slogans de la guerre froide. Bref, la créativité de l’envie de dominer a disparu. Tout est désormais affiché au grand jour.

L’audace géopolitique des Russes, la duplicité géoéconomique des Chinois, la résistance nationaliste des Iraniens, les rêves de reconstruction impériale de la Turquie, la lucidité du nouveau Premier Ministre indien dans son approche des relations internationales, sont autant d’indicateurs de cette déconstruction du processus cognitif de domination occidentale.

Il n’est jamais simple de s’affaiblir pour un empire qui fut dominant et qui ne l’est plus tout à fait. La relation perverse que l’humanité entretient avec le pouvoir et l’argent ne permet pas de dépasser le rapport dominant/dominé. Les rescapés des logiques impériales occidentales ont donc fortement intérêt à sortir des sentiers battus et à réfléchir d’urgence sur la manière d’éviter une fois de plus le sort d’Athènes et de la Rome antique.

Christian Harbulot


sábado, 21 de julho de 2018

Guerra Económica: Gagliano Explica


Uma obra saída no momento certo e muito oportuna. Este livro do nosso amigo Giuseppe Gagliano sobre a escola francesa de guerra económica e o trabalho teórico de Christian Harbulot (velho cúmplice do Intelnomcs) aparece na melhor altura. “Pour comprendre la guerre économique sans merci dans laquelle nous sommes plongés, parfois désarmés, cet ouvrage envisage de présenter la réflexion de l'école française de la guerre économique à partir de quelques concepts clés (guerre économique, guerre cognitive, intelligence économique, mouvements altermondialistes) qui permettent au lecteur de comprendre l'originalité et la profondeur méthodologique, dans le contexte des relations internationales, de l'analyse de l'École de Guerre Économique de Christian Harbulot.”


Giuseppe Gagliano “met en scène les différents types de guerre, les acteurs, la panoplie de leurs armes, le champ de bataille et ses objectifs. Si l’objectif n’est plus le contrôle d’un territoire, cette guerre peut prendre, par exemple, la forme de l’utilisation des ressources minières comme arme de domination économique. 

Les acteurs ne sont plus seulement les états, mais aussi les groupes industriels, les mouvements altermondialistes et, plus généralement, les ONG pacifistes et antimilitaristes. 

Cette analyse est illustrée par de nombreux cas pratiques de subversion tels que Brent spar, Elf Shell contre Ran, l’affaire Arcelor Mittal ou encore l’affaire des OGM qui mettra aux prises Greenpeace et Unilever ou Nestlé…

Une lecture du monde plus pertinente que jamais est décrite dans ces pages. Ce livre offre une grille de lecture indispensable pour comprendre les changements de paradigme de la nouvelle guerre qui se déroule sous nos yeux.”


quarta-feira, 18 de julho de 2018

Quando Trump Significa “Aggiornamento”

O que Trump está a fazer, à sua muito especial maneira, é o “aggiornamento” da política externa americana. Just that...

Trump lançou a empreitada de todo um trabalho de construção da adaptação às novas circunstâncias estratégicas criadas pela implosão da URSS e consequente fim da guerra fria (4 presidências atrás!), pela integração de todo o antigo mundo comunista no mercado global e na OMC (que deu o quadro para a ascensão em potência da China) e pela “chaos operation” desencadeada pelo “11 de Setembro”.

É, portanto, um outro mundo que temos aí e cuja emergência só agora (e com décadas de atraso) está a ganhar visibilidade. Há que estudar e alcançar saber o que isso significa para cada um, tanto para Estados como empresas ou mesmo como indivíduos. Por exemplo, para uma pequena potência cujo território arquipelágico ocupa boa parte do Atlântico Norte. 



O Arquipélago Português

É enorme e ensurdecedor o coro das vozes do ‘establishment’ que se levanta contra Trump e em defesa da velha “ordem liberal” (seja lá isso o que for porque nunca clara e consistentemente definida). Apenas alguns (escassos, muito escassos) analistas independentes e todos do universo da Geopolítica têm procurado dissecar o que Trump significa. George Friedman (inevitável...), que hoje mesmo, em três penadas, despacha o mito de um Trump “agarrado” por Putine, e poucos mais. Como Peter Zeihan, por exemplo, que publica hoje um texto analítico de leitura imprescindível.

Aqui, no Intelnomics (que em Junho de 2016 teve o “desplante” de afirmar preto no branco que Trump ia ganhar e explicando porquê) tudo o que temos escrito tem procurado (apesar de não apreciarmos o donaldiano penteado) entender o como e o porquê do aparecimento de Trump, qual o significado profundo e quais as consequências estratégicas. E é nessa via que continuaremos, procurando entender e (sempre que possível) antecipar as dinâmicas deste “aggiornamento” iniciado por Trump.



terça-feira, 17 de julho de 2018

Trump, a Europa e a Fractura no Atlântico


O ex-maoísta André Glucksmann, em “Ouest contre Ouest”, foi talvez quem primeiro na Europa (2003) chamou a atenção para a fractura estratégica que o “11 de Setembro” podia abrir no mundo transatlântico. Pela mesma altura, o ex-comunista Alexandre Adler, em “L'odyssée américaine”, via a abertura de um novo ciclo estratégico (o quarto, para ser mais preciso) da evolução dos Estados Unidos.
  

Se ainda é cedo para confirmar a visão de Adler, o alerta de Glucksmann confirmou-se imediatamente e a fractura por ele então referida não parou ainda de se afirmar e desenvolver. Essa evolução fica muito bem retratada num editorial (05 de Outubro de 2016) de um dos mais sonantes e importantes nomes da geopolítica europeia, o francês Pascal Gauchon: “C’est le moment de se séparer”.


Pouco mais de um mês depois deste editorial de Gauchon, os eleitores americanos escolhiam o seu novo presidente, surpreendendo todos os que gostam de ser surpreendidos. Donald Trump entra na Casa Branca, num ambiente de “desbragadas” críticas emocionais e de pesadas disfunções no próprio aparelho do estado americano, num clima de histeria nunca antes visto.

É neste contexto que a imperadora da Europa Angela Merkel aparece a pretender dar lições de democracia ao novo presidente e a impor-lhe condições, regras políticas e a sua visão do mundo. Este “desvio soviético” de Merkel foi catastrófico, foi o exemplo perfeito de cegueira política e foi um dos seus maiores (e ela tem muitos...) disparates políticos (que, de resto, está a pagar bem caro).

Depois das declarações, entrevistas e outras posições públicas do presidente americano, no seu recente périplo europeu, fica oficializada a fractura antecipada por Glucksmann, há claramente e à vista de todos um ocidente contra outro ocidente, há um mundo novo a emergir e há uma Europa sem destino definido (nem previsíveis possibilidades de o definir).

Se, de Glucksmann a Gauchon, não faltaram na Europa vozes proféticas a anunciar a vinda de um Trump, a verdade é que isso não serviu de nada a uma classe de decisores políticos incapazes, incompetentes e impotentes. A figura de Jean-Claude Juncker trôpego, incapaz de andar por si e tendo de ser amparado/arrastado por dois ou três “amigos” é o retrato fiel desta Europa. E é muito difícil culpar Trump por tal...

P.S. Para Portugal, cujo território nacional se espalha arquipelagicamente pelo Atlântico, esta fractura pode assumir aspectos muito complexos e configurar situações de graves ameaças. E parece que ainda ninguém (entre quem de direito) se lembrou de estudar tal matéria...



segunda-feira, 16 de julho de 2018

Ministro italiano dos Negócios Europeus foi fundador da inteligência económica italiana


O actual ministro dos Negócios Europeus, o Prof. Paolo Savona, é autor do memorando sobre o papel da Inteligência Económica (elaborado por solicitação do então presidente da República, Cossiga, em 1989 mas apenas divulgado em 1999) que constitui o acto de fundação da inteligência económica italiana, com o título “Presupposti, estensione, limiti e componenti dell’organizzazione dell’Intelligence economica”, como aqui explica o nosso amigo Giuseppe Gagliano.

“(...) Ebbene, quanto attuato dalla Germania nei confronti del nostro paese, non solo rientra in modo adeguato nel contesto della infosfera ma più in generale costituisce una vera e propria guerra della informazione con finalità volte a screditare politicamente il nostro paese e a danneggiarlo a livello economico. Superfluo sottolineare che anche il nostro paese dovrebbe essere nelle condizioni di rispondere in modo adeguato a tale offensiva informativa pur nel rispetto delle alleanze politiche nel contesto della Unione Europea.

Sotto il profilo storico, allo scopo di anticipare e contrastare manovre offensive di tale natura, nel novembre del 1989 Cossiga ,in modo lungimirante, fece istituire dal governo Andreotti una commissione di studio sul ruolo della intelligence economica alla quale prese parte Paolo Savona che ebbe modo di scoprire con sorpresa che i francesi erano molto più avanti degli italiani nel contesto della intelligence economica. La collaborazione di Savona con il colonello Stefano Orlando poterà alla stesura di una memoria edita nel 1999 dal titolo “Presupposti, estensione, limiti e componenti dell’organizzazione dell’Intelligence economica” che costituisce l’atto di fondazione della intelligence economica italiana.



Partendo anche da queste riflessioni, a partire dalla legge del 3 agosto 2007 i servizi di sicurezza italiani hanno ampliato il campo di azione della intelligence includendovi anche quello della intelligence economica e della cyberintelligence.

Infatti una guerra economica si può concretizzare anche nello spazio cibernetico che deve essere opportunamente tutelato da attività illegali volte ad acquisire know-how scientifico,tecnologico e aziendale o volte a praticare azioni di aggiotaggio. Proprio per questa ragione la cyberintelligence definibile come l’insieme di quelle pratiche volte a monitorare informazioni sulle minacce digitali, nonché dati sulle intenzioni e attività di soggetti rivali è fondamentale per prevenire crimini informatici(accesso illegale,intercettazioni illegali) e di spionaggio informatico che , attuandosi nell’anonimato,lo rende estremamente pericoloso. Ora tutelare lo spazio cibernetico diventa fondamentale per salvaguardare l’interesse nazionale e la competitività sui mercati internazionali.”


Trump: “A Europa é inimiga dos Estados Unidos”

Mesmo se, na sequência, Trump esclarece e relativiza bastante o termo “inimigo”, a “bomba” está lançada: o mundo mudou e, se ainda não totalmente, já mudou muito...

É claro que a NATO vai continuar a arrastar a sua existência mas há uma concepção do mundo que faleceu. A nascida da vitória americana de 1945 sobre a Alemanha e o Japão. Talvez porque o seu tempo já terminara e o mundo dessa concepção já desaparecera, finado com o século XX. Obama não teve, em dois mandatos, tempo para se ocupar disso (nem realmente de nada...) e Bush Júnior esteve sempre ocupado com a sua “guerra ao terrorismo” na sequência da tragédia do “11 de Setembro”. Nestas duas décadas, o mundo “pulou e avançou” e deixou de ser aquele que era na segunda metade do século XX. Trump chegado à Casa Branca ter-se-à apercebido disso e, com a sua especial subtileza de elefante em loja de finíssima porcelana, decidiu pôr tudo “em pratos limpos”... E, claro, a finíssima porcelana está a ficar em cacos. 




Do que se pode observar, há ilações a tirar: Trump, na melhor tradição westfaliana, dá prioridade absoluta ao interesse nacional americano (se o define bem ou não é outra questão...), considera que a maior parte (ou serão todos...?) dos actuais organismos intergovernamentais e multilaterais não são o melhor quadro para a prossecução dessa prioridade (e prefere, portanto, as relações bilaterais) e não dá qualquer importância ao que as opiniões públicas estrangeiras possam “pensar” disso (o que depois do fracasso do “charme” de Obama se pode perceber sem grande dificuldade). 

Se, depois de discursos quase de subserviência, como o tristemente famoso “discurso do Cairo”, Obama apenas conseguiu que ninguém o tomasse a sério (nem um pobre diabo como Assad!), é porque a estratégia de se “fazer amar” não tem cabimento e, portanto, não pode funcionar. De resto, como Maquiavel muito bem explicou, ao Princípe é mais conveniente ser temido do que amado. Se não pode juntar as duas coisas, então, ao menos que seja temido. E toda a actuação de Trump (uma actuação que a sua personagem serve muito bem) aponta para que, tendo tirado as lições do fracasso de Obama em fazer-se amar, o actual Príncipe da Casa Branca tenha optado por fazer-se temer. É, porém, ainda cedo para dizer se o conseguirá. 



Para os europeus mais obtusos e mais dominados pela inércia que não tivessem (mesmo depois desta cimeira da NATO) percebido as linhas com que vão coser-se ou ser cosidos, neste novo mundo emergente, Trump deixou-lhes ontem todas as explicações necessárias numa singular e, até há bem pouco tempo, inconcebível entrevista:

quinta-feira, 12 de julho de 2018

Para Perceber Putin

Em vésperas da cimeira Trump-Putine, é importante perceber Putine, o seu tabuleiro de jogo e os seus objectivos. Para isso, vale a pena (re)ler o que aqui se publicava, em Setembro passado:

Para Perceber Putin Ler Vladislav Surkov

Os “especialistas” ocidentais, salvo raras excepções, não têm sabido compreender o presidente Putine. Têm-no “lido” através de uma grelha de leitura demasiado “ocidental”, uma grelha de leitura cujo etnocentrismo inviabiliza qualquer leitura profícua. John Robb e George Friedman e, em português, o Inteligência Económica são alguns dos escassos casos de tentativa de leitura objectiva e desapaixonada do ‘software’ putinista. Agora, neste Verão 2017, Chris Arkenberg passou a fazer-lhes companhia.

Inteligência Económica escrevia, há mais de 3 anos, a 09 Maio 2014, a propósito da  estratégia de confronto de Putine na Ucrânia, “a guerra de Putine é “não-linear” e é “económica”… Guerra Económica no seu fundamento e Guerra Não-Linear nos métodos e nas formas que assume o seu desenvolvimento. Para perceber a estratégia de Putine na Ucrânia, sua essência, seus modos e seus tempos, há que ler o conselheiro presidencial Vladislav Surkov  e, especialmente, o seu livrode “ficção científica”… Aí se descreve um certo tipo de guerra “não-linear”, suas formas e lógicas e também o que move os seus protagonistas. A “ficção científica” de Surkov (que além de escrever é também um dos homens mais poderosos da política russa da última década e um velho e muito chegado colaborador de Putine) ilumina fabulosamente o lado obscuro da acção russa na Ucrânia. 

"Talvez por também ser especialista de guerras não-lineares (vidé Brave New War), o nosso amigo John Robb ao olhar para a Ucrânia viu duas coisas: “Putin is using open source warfare” e “In the 21st Century, warfare isn’t politics by other means. Warfare is business by other means”.

E o I.E. concluía, então: "Berlim não sabe no que se meteu e Putine vai explorar o erro europeu na Ucrânia para desestabilizar e alterar toda uma ordem nascida depois da implosão soviética e que é (era) desvantajosa para a Rússia" ....

https://intelnomics.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2017-09-13T04:37:00%2B01:00&max-results=50


Merkel na Cimeira da NATO...


segunda-feira, 9 de julho de 2018

O "super-smart iphone" de um dos maiores especialistas mundiais de segurança, ciber e contra-terrorismo...

Foi você que pediu um smartphone, iphone ou outro que tal gadget de última geração? Então, inspire-se no super aparelho de um dos maiores especialistas mundiais de segurança, ciber e contra-terrorismo, consultor da polícia americana, de presidentes, primeiros-ministros e governos, professor de universidades europeias, chinesas e americanas. Durante uma óptima conversa, este nosso amigo permitiu que o seu super "aparelhómetro" fosse fotografado.

Pensem um pouco e inspirem-se de quem sabe...


Porque devem as Escolas de Negócios ser passadas a bulldozer

Há no mundo 13.000 escolas de negócios. São 13.000 escolas a mais. Martin Parker sabe do que fala pois foi aí professor durante 20 anos. No 'Guardian', Parker explicou porque devem estas escolas ser passadas a bulldozer. Pouco depois, saiu o seu 'manual' sobre o assunto: “Shut Down the Business School: What’s Wrong with Management Education”, verdadeira versão moderna e aplicada ao tema do clássico "Delenda Carthago"


Why we should bulldoze the business school

There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years.

By Martin Parker | The Guardian | 27 Apr 2018  

Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how to make profits.

Business schools have huge influence, yet they are also widely regarded to be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of short-termism and greed. (There is a whole genre of jokes about what MBA – Master of Business Administration – really stands for: “Mediocre But Arrogant”, “Management by Accident”, “More Bad Advice”, “Master Bullshit Artist” and so on.)

Critics of business schools come in many shapes and sizes: employers complain that graduates lack practical skills, conservative voices scorn the arriviste MBA, Europeans moan about Americanisation, radicals wail about the concentration of power in the hands of the running dogs of capital. Since 2008, many commentators have also suggested that business schools were complicit in producing the crash.


Having taught in business schools for 20 years, I have come to believe that the best solution to these problems is to shut down business schools altogether. This is not a typical view among my colleagues. Even so, it is remarkable just how much criticism of business schools over the past decade has come from inside the schools themselves. Many business school professors, particularly in north America, have argued that their institutions have gone horribly astray. B-schools have been corrupted, they say, by deans following the money, teachers giving the punters what they want, researchers pumping out paint-by-numbers papers for journals that no one reads and students expecting a qualification in return for their cash (or, more likely, their parents’ cash). At the end of it all, most business-school graduates won’t become high-level managers anyway, just precarious cubicle drones in anonymous office blocks.

These are not complaints from professors of sociology, state policymakers or even outraged anti-capitalist activists. These are views in books written by insiders, by employees of business schools who themselves feel some sense of disquiet or even disgust at what they are getting up to. Of course, these dissenting views are still those of a minority. Most work within business schools is blithely unconcerned with any expression of doubt, participants being too busy oiling the wheels to worry about where the engine is going. Still, this internal criticism is loud and significant.




The problem is that these insiders’ dissent has become so thoroughly institutionalised within the well-carpeted corridors that it now passes unremarked, just an everyday counterpoint to business as usual. Careers are made by wailing loudly in books and papers about the problems with business schools. The business school has been described by two insiders as “a cancerous machine spewing out sick and irrelevant detritus”. Even titles such as Against Management, Fucking Management and The Greedy Bastard’s Guide to Business appear not to cause any particular difficulties for their authors. I know this, because I wrote the first two. Frankly, the idea that I was permitted to get away with this speaks volumes about the extent to which this sort of criticism means anything very much at all. In fact, it is rewarded, because the fact that I publish is more important than what I publish. 

Most solutions to the problem of the B-school shy away from radical restructuring, and instead tend to suggest a return to supposedly more traditional business practices, or a form of moral rearmament decorated with terms such as “responsibility” and “ethics”. All of these suggestions leave the basic problem untouched, that the business school only teaches one form of organising – market managerialism.

That’s why I think that we should call in the bulldozers and demand an entirely new way of thinking about management, business and markets. If we want those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem, or that the purpose of learning about taxation laws is to evade taxation, or that creating new desires is the purpose of marketing. In every case, the business school acts as an apologist, selling ideology as if it were science.

Universities have been around for a millenium, but the vast majority of business schools only came into existence in the last century. Despite loud and continual claims that they were a US invention, the first was probably the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, founded in 1819 as a privately funded attempt to produce a grande école for business. A century later, hundreds of business schools had popped up across Europe and the US, and from the 1950s onwards, they began to grow rapidly in other parts of the world.

In 2011, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business estimated that there were then nearly 13,000 business schools in the world. India alone is estimated to have 3,000 private schools of business. Pause for a moment, and consider that figure. Think about the huge numbers of people employed by those institutions, about the armies of graduates marching out with business degrees, about the gigantic sums of money circulating in the name of business education. (In 2013, the top 20 US MBA programmes already charged at least $100,000 (£72,000). At the time of writing, London Business School is advertising a tuition fee of £84,500 for its MBA.) No wonder that the bandwagon keeps rolling.

For the most part, business schools all assume a similar form. The architecture is generic modern – glass, panel, brick. Outside, there’s some expensive signage offering an inoffensive logo, probably in blue, probably with a square on it. The door opens, automatically. Inside, there’s a female receptionist dressed office-smart. Some abstract art hangs on the walls, and perhaps a banner or two with some hopeful assertions: “We mean business.” “Teaching and Research for Impact.” A big screen will hang somewhere over the lobby, running a Bloomberg news ticker and advertising visiting speakers and talks about preparing your CV. Shiny marketing leaflets sit in dispensing racks, with images of a diverse tableau of open-faced students on the cover. On the leaflets, you can find an alphabet of mastery: MBA, MSc Management, MSc Accounting, MSc Management and Accounting, MSc Marketing, MSc International Business, MSc Operations Management.

There will be plush lecture theatres with thick carpet, perhaps named after companies or personal donors. The lectern bears the logo of the business school. In fact, pretty much everything bears the weight of the logo, like someone who worries their possessions might get stolen and so marks them with their name. Unlike some of the shabby buildings in other parts of the university, the business school tries hard to project efficiency and confidence. The business school knows what it is doing and has its well-scrubbed face aimed firmly at the busy future. It cares about what people think of it.

Even if the reality isn’t always as shiny – if the roof leaks a little and the toilet is blocked – that is what the business-school dean would like to think that their school was like, or what they would want their school to be. A clean machine for turning income from students into profits.

What do business schools actually teach? This is a more complicated question than it first appears. Much writing on education has explored the ways in which a “hidden curriculum” supplies lessons to students without doing so explicitly. From the 1970s onwards, researchers explored how social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and so on were being implicitly taught in the classroom. This might involve segregating students into separate classes – the girls doing domestic science and the boys doing metalwork, say – which, in turn, implies what is natural or appropriate for different groups of people. The hidden curriculum can be taught in other ways too, by the ways in which teaching and assessment are practised, or through what is or isn’t included in the curriculum. The hidden curriculum tells us what matters and who matters, which places are most important and what topics can be ignored.

In many countries, a lot of work has been done on trying to deal with these issues. Materials on black history, women in science or pop songs as poetry are now fairly routine. That doesn’t mean that the hidden curriculum is no longer a problem, but at least in many of the more enlightened educational systems, it is not now routinely assumed that there is one history, one set of actors, one way of telling the story.

But in the business school, both the explicit and hidden curriculums sing the same song. The things taught and the way that they are taught generally mean that the virtues of capitalist market managerialism are told and sold as if there were no other ways of seeing the world.

If we educate our graduates in the inevitability of tooth-and-claw capitalism, it is hardly surprising that we end up with justifications for massive salary payments to people who take huge risks with other people’s money. If we teach that there is nothing else below the bottom line, then ideas about sustainability, diversity, responsibility and so on become mere decoration. The message that management research and teaching often provides is that capitalism is inevitable, and that the financial and legal techniques for running capitalism are a form of science. This combination of ideology and technocracy is what has made the business school into such an effective, and dangerous, institution.

We can see how this works if we look a bit more closely at the business-school curriculum and how it is taught. Take finance, for instance. This is a field concerned with understanding how people with money invest it. It assumes that there are people with money or capital that can be used as security for money, and hence it also assumes substantial inequalities of income and wealth. The greater the inequalities within any given society, the greater the interest in finance, as well as the market in luxury yachts. Finance academics almost always assume that earning rent on capital (however it was acquired) is a legitimate and perhaps even praiseworthy activity, with skilful investors being lionised for their technical skills and success. The purpose of this form of knowledge is to maximise the rent from wealth, often by developing mathematical or legal mechanisms that can multiply it.

Successful financial strategies are those that produce the maximum return in the shortest period, and hence that further exacerbate the social inequalities that made them possible in the first place.

Or consider human resource management. This field applies theories of rational egoism – roughly the idea that people act according to rational calculations about what will maximise their own interest – to the management of human beings in organisations. The name of the field is telling, since it implies that human beings are akin to technological or financial resources insofar as they are an element to be used by management in order to produce a successful organisation. Despite its use of the word, human resource management is not particularly interested in what it is like to be a human being. Its object of interest are categories – women, ethnic minorities, the underperforming employee – and their relationship to the functioning of the organisation. It is also the part of the business school most likely to be dealing with the problem of organised resistance to management strategies, usually in the form of trade unions. And in case it needs saying, human resource management is not on the side of the trade union. That would be partisan. It is a function which, in its most ambitious manifestation, seeks to become “strategic”, to assist senior management in the formulation of their plans to open a factory here, or close a branch office there.

A similar kind of lens could be applied to other modules found in most business schools – accounting, marketing, international business, innovation, logistics – but I’ll conclude with business ethics and corporate social responsibility – pretty much the only areas within the business school that have developed a sustained critique of the consequences of management education and practice. These are domains that pride themselves on being gadflies to the business school, insisting that its dominant forms of education, teaching and research require reform. The complaints that propel writing and teaching in these areas are predictable but important – sustainability, inequality, the production of graduates who are taught that greed is good.

The problem is that business ethics and corporate social responsibility are subjects used as window dressing in the marketing of the business school, and as a fig leaf to cover the conscience of B-school deans – as if talking about ethics and responsibility were the same as doing something about it. They almost never systematically address the simple idea that since current social and economic relations produce the problems that ethics and corporate social responsibility courses treat as subjects to be studied, it is those social and economic relations that need to be changed.

You might well think that each of these areas of research and teaching are innocuous enough in themselves, and collectively they just appear to cover all the different dimensions of business activity – money, people, technology, transport, selling and so on. But it is worth spelling out the shared assumptions of every subject studied at business school.

The first thing that all these areas share is a powerful sense that market managerial forms of social order are desirable. The acceleration of global trade, the use of market mechanisms and managerial techniques, the extension of technologies such as accounting, finance and operations are not routinely questioned. This is a progressive account of the modern world, one that relies on the promise of technology, choice, plenty and wealth. Within the business school, capitalism is assumed to be the end of history, an economic model that has trumped all the others, and is now taught as science, rather than ideology.

The second is the assumption that human behaviour – of employees, customers, managers and so on – is best understood as if we are all rational egoists. This provides a set of background assumptions that allow for the development of models of how human beings might be managed in the interests of the business organisation. Motivating employees, correcting market failures, designing lean management systems or persuading consumers to spend money are all instances of the same sort of problem. The foregrounded interest here is that of the person who wants control, and the people who are the objects of that interest can then be treated as people who can be manipulated.

The final similarity I want to point to concerns the nature of the knowledge being produced and disseminated by the business school itself. Because it borrows the gown and mortarboard of the university, and cloaks its knowledge in the apparatus of science – journals, professors, big words – it is relatively easy to imagine that the knowledge the business school sells and the way that it sells it somehow less vulgar and stupid than it really is.

The easiest summary of all of the above, and one that would inform most people’s understandings of what goes on in the B-school, is that they are places that teach people how to get money out of the pockets of ordinary people and keep it for themselves. In some senses, that’s a description of capitalism, but there is also a sense here that business schools actually teach that “greed is good”. As Joel M Podolny, the former dean of Yale School of Management, once opined: “The way business schools today compete leads students to ask, ‘What can I do to make the most money?’ and the manner in which faculty members teach allows students to regard the moral consequences of their actions as mere afterthoughts.”

This picture is, to some extent, backed up by research, although some of this is of dubious quality. There are various surveys of business-school students that suggest that they have an instrumental approach to education; that is to say, they want what marketing and branding tells them that they want. In terms of the classroom, they expect the teaching of uncomplicated and practical concepts and tools that they deem will be helpful to them in their future careers. Philosophy is for the birds.

As someone who has taught in business schools for decades, this sort of finding doesn’t surprise me, though others suggest rather more incendiary findings. One US survey compared MBA students to people who were imprisoned in low-security prisons and found that the latter were more ethical. Another suggested that the likelihood of committing some form of corporate crime increased if the individual concerned had experience of graduate business education, or military service. (Both careers presumably involve absolving responsibility to an organisation.) Other surveys suggest that students come in believing in employee wellbeing and customer satisfaction and leave thinking that shareholder value is the most important issue, and that business-school students are more likely to cheat than students in other subjects.

Whether the causes and effects (or indeed the findings) are as neat as surveys like this might suggest is something that I doubt, but it would be equally daft to suggest that the business school has no effect on its graduates. Having an MBA might not make a student greedy, impatient or unethical, but both the B-school’s explicit and hidden curriculums do teach lessons. Not that these lessons are acknowledged when something goes wrong, because then the business school usually denies all responsibility. That’s a tricky position, though, because, as a 2009 Economist editorial put it, “You cannot claim that your mission is to ‘educate the leaders who make a difference to the world’ and then wash your hands of your alumni when the difference they make is malign”.

After the 2007 crash, there was a game of pass-the-blame-parcel going on, so it’s not surprising that most business-school deans were also trying to blame consumers for borrowing too much, the bankers for behaving so riskily, rotten apples for being so bad and the system for being, well, the system. Who, after all, would want to claim that they merely taught greed?

The sorts of doors to knowledge we find in universities are based on exclusions. A subject is made up by teaching this and not that, about space (geography) and not time (history), about collectives of people (sociology) and not about individuals (psychology), and so on. Of course, there are leakages and these are often where the most interesting thinking happens, but this partitioning of the world is constitutive of any university discipline. We cannot study everything, all the time, which is why there are names of departments over the doors to buildings and corridors.

However, the B-school is an even more extreme case. It is constituted through separating commercial life from the rest of life, but then undergoes a further specialisation. The business school assumes capitalism, corporations and managers as the default form of organisation, and everything else as history, anomaly, exception, alternative. In terms of curriculum and research, everything else is peripheral.

Most business schools exist as parts of universities, and universities are generally understood as institutions with responsibilities to the societies they serve. Why then do we assume that degree courses in business should only teach one form of organisation – capitalism – as if that were the only way in which human life could be arranged?

The sort of world that is being produced by the market managerialism that the business school sells is not a pleasant one. It’s a sort of utopia for the wealthy and powerful, a group that the students are encouraged to imagine themselves joining, but such privilege is bought at a very high cost, resulting in environmental catastrophe, resource wars and forced migration, inequality within and between countries, the encouragement of hyper-consumption as well as persistently anti-democratic practices at work.

Selling the business school works by ignoring these problems, or by mentioning them as challenges and then ignoring them in the practices of teaching and research. If we want to be able to respond to the challenges that face human life on this planet, then we need to research and teach about as many different forms of organising as we are able to collectively imagine. For us to assume that global capitalism can continue as it is means to assume a path to destruction. So if we are going to move away from business as usual, then we also need to radically reimagine the business school as usual. And this means more than pious murmurings about corporate social responsibility. It means doing away with what we have, and starting again.

“Shut Down the Business School: What’s Wrong with Management Education”  was published by Pluto Press in May 2018




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