I can think of three reasons:

1. It's part of the "bullshit jobs" pressure valve to keep unemployment low enough that you don't get riots like what happened in 2020. Capitalism requires people without capital to work to survive regardless of whether the work satisfies real wants and needs. The premise of capitalism comes under question when the surplus created by productive labor is just freely distributed to the unemployed without caveats, without social shame attached.

2. It's a disciplinary measure for the drones at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. Having redundant middle managers means diffusion of accountability: workers suffering because of the shit decisions can blame their immediate supervisor or that supervisor's boss for decisions made by a manager three layers above the bottom-tier workers, and executives can pass blame downwards onto immediate subordinates who can then pass the buck to their subordinates and so on. Assigning blame becomes a matter of pointing fingers which means top executives who fuck up or make controversial decisions on behalf of shareholders don't immediately catch heat from a significant portion of the company's workers. A vice president can act on a president's decision to fire or discipline someone and grant the president some degree of plausible deniability, soaking up the hatred while the president can pretend to be the good guy. Every layer adds another buffer to protect top management and shareholders from angry rank-and-file workers.

3. Middle- and upper-middle-managers soak up some of the surplus value extracted from the rank-and-file. The top management of course get the biggest checks but it's easier to notice the pay disparity if it's just top management getting the lion's share of pay that they clearly did not earn through their own labor. The higher pay afforded to managers (the "M" part of PMC which leans petty-bourgie) means they have the same material stake (qualitatively, if not quantitatively) in extracting more value from the rank-and-file that execs and shareholders do, and this dynamic plays out in a nested Russian-doll fashion in specific departments all the way down to the first layer of managers/supervisors who still do a significant amount of real work.

Check out this talk by late great David Graeber on exactly what you're describing: Bullshit Jobs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kikzjTfos0s

The illusion that most of the country needs to work for everyone to eat is something that helps perpetuate the existence of Late Capitalism.

If you know how to read a little bit, I highly recommend reading The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber. I think it's written in a really accessible way, and it's basically him trying to figure out why big beuracracy exists. Fantastic book.

op please read utopia of rules and then bullshit jobs by david graeber. there's really good insight into this in those books, especially in the first one

they keep the worker oppressed and create a layer of padding between the workers and the absolute caligulan parasites at the top.

as both a managerial system and a class structure; it makes perfect sense.

remember; corporations do not exist to be efficient at making money. they exist to perpetuate and exacerbate classist exploitation and diffuse responsibility into nothingness. a layer of middle managers is just logical for this. MORE layers of middle managers is MORE logical. vague corporate structures cannot be lynched.

they don't have to do anything. they just need to exist identify (more with the oppressors than the oppressed)and attenuate.

IMO Its the carrot for the worker, give a person who is completely alienated from the power of their labor a small slice of the power pie within a vertical power structure and razzle dazzle with salary & other perks. And thus you have the carrot of a "career path" to counter the stick of at-will employment.

The way I look at it is this:

Any business is a microverse of capitalism as a whole. Pyramid scheme - small top, huge bottom, but an ever upward dwindling middle.

The middle is the PMC. It's what all the children of bottom layers strive to become. But competition is fierce because the owner's 25 year old airhead child needs a place to plant their ass, and they're certainly not going to the mailroom.

The kick in the balls is, if they allow you up the pyramid, life gets abundantly easier workwise so everyone tries to look busy, or the elite will dream up busy work that may possibly require more hours and time from the PMCs versus the workers who reside below them, with the promise that one day the middle managers might ascend. Some, a select few, will figure out how to make some company dependencies completely rely on their know-how. But for the rest, it's just busy work for the sake of busy work. To eek more productivity out of your underlings, or to chase new business. Always something you're not doing enough of.

That day of ascension and promise of promotion never comes. Because the top is not for you. The middle is barely for you. And if they don't like you, they'll can your ass and replace you with another true believer. And the cycle continues.

I also have a theory that if there was no buffer between workers and the elite, the elite would all show themselves for what they are and there would be worksite revolutions everywhere. They kind of need the buffer of class traitors who can take the heat but still talk like a poor.

There was a post not long ago about how The Office was the most watched TV show in 2020, and how depressing it was.

The Gervais Principle is a brilliant analysis of the predictable lifecycle of a modern company, including the clueless middle management you mentioned, and uses The Office for examples.

It's equally funny and sad that so many people relate to the show without even knowing why.

I don't really think middle management is a feature of capitalism. I saw the same thing working both for private businesses and the government. And the capital class would certainly rather not have layers of expensive middle managers who don't do anything.

Rather, middle management is rewarded based on their ability to manage large orgs, so everyone in the chain benefits from inserting layers below themselves. But everyone knows this is the game, including the investors, so new layers can only be added when someone demonstrates sufficient ability to bullshit up a reason for their layer existing.

Honestly, I think it makes sense to view middle management as a third class, more aligned with capital than with workers, but hostile to both.

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Also love when companies bring in consultants who are another form of middle management in a sense who decide who gets the axe and who gets more work load. Great system

Efficiently run companies don't have gobs of middle managers, they build processes from the ground up, in poorly run companies they sit around around and use dumb buzzwords and business jargon to justify their existence.

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Bureaucracies have traditionally existed to off-load time-consuming work from a single individual onto a multitude. So when your company grows from 5 employees to 50, you need to expand HR to manage them all. And then you need someone to manage HR, in turn.

Since one person can't efficiently manage more than five or ten others, this creates layers of management as the company grows.

But then you have to factor in that people are lazy. If I bust ass, I can manage 20 people. But busting ass sucks. It's miserable. Far better to hire a deputy and give the deputy 10 people to manage. Or... better still, two deputies. And then I've got time to myself. I've got a department with a budget and my company is doing well. Why not?

So management metasticizes. And the folks at the top rely on the folks in the middle to communicate what the folks at the bottom are doing. A CEO can't fire his VP, because the VP is the guy he interfaces with every day. And a VP can't fire his director. And the director can't fire his manager. And the manager can't fire his supervisor. Not without assuming those associated roles.

The only people you can comfortably fire are the lowest level staffers. At worst, those roles go back onto the supervisor. The supervisor gets to keep his job and the manager gets to say "We cut the employment budget!" up the chain to the director who tells it to the VP who tells it to the CEO. And everyone's happy.

But now you have a system where the business cycle grows the management tree while trimming the employee base.

It's a recipe for this kind of management creep.

For the people at the top, it's like diversifying your portfolio, but instead of stocks, its accountability and responsibility. THey have to go through an army of middle managers before getting to you. With enough middle management, the only "work" a 1%er has to do is sit in a zoom meeting while getting blown and yes/no a bunch of proposals.