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Under the banner of the rationalisation of production, the figure of the manager has been presented as the incarnation of productive efficiency and social progress. Such an image, heir to the type of the « captain of industry » which was still prevalent in the Fordist paradigm, has proven to be totally illusory. The manager is henceforth the mere agent of financial profitability. Management is a mode of subsumption of labour by capital, one which attempts to control that component of autonomy in work that is a requirement in the processes of post-Fordist production. Class struggle, in its current aspects, is thus enacted by way of the modalities of capital’s hegemony, which seeks to elicit labour’s consent in the process of its own exploitation. It does so by way of paradoxical injunctions and a modification of the representations of social agents. However by breaking collective solidarities and replacing cooperation by competition, management has deployed an anthropology of simulation, provoking a general crisis of confidence which signals the failure of this Hobbesian paradigm.