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July 1 - July 6, 2025
As shortly as I can summarize it, the thesis is this:- Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of ‘managers’.
Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.
What Burnham is mainly concerned to show is that a democratic society has never existed and so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud.
Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority.
More recently, writers like Peter Drucker and F. A. Voigt have argued that Fascism and Communism are substantially the same thing. And indeed, it has always been obvious that a planned and centralized society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship. Orthodox Conservatives were unable to see this, because it comforted them to assume that Socialism ‘wouldn’t work’, and that the disappearance of capitalism would mean chaos and anarchy. Orthodox Socialists could not see it, because they wished to think that they themselves would soon be in power, and therefore assumed that when
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In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger. But at the same time, Burnham insists, there has been no tendency to return to capitalism. What is happening is simply the growth of ‘managerialism’, which, according to Burnham, is in progress everywhere, though the manner in which it comes about may vary from country to country.
The real question is not whether the people who wipe their boots on you during the next fifty years are to be called managers, bureaucrats, or politicians; the question is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy or to true democracy.
It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory. But there was more to it than that. There was also the disaffection of large numbers of intellectuals, which made it difficult for them not to side with any country hostile to Britain. And deepest of all, there was admiration – though only in a very few cases conscious admiration – for the power, energy and cruelty of the Nazi régime.
Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
Every political theory has a certain regional tinge about it, and every nation, every culture, has its own characteristic prejudices and patches of ignorance. There are certain problems that must almost inevitably be seen in a different perspective according to the geographical situation from which one is looking at them.
In The Machiavellians, Burnham insists that politics is simply the struggle for power. Every great social movement, every war, every revolution, every political programme, however edifying and Utopian, really has behind it the ambitions of some sectional group which is out to grab power for itself. Power can never be restrained by any ethical or religious code, but only by other power.
Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip. Burnham at least has the honesty to say that Socialism isn’t coming; the others merely say that Socialism is coming, and then give the word ‘Socialism’ a new meaning which makes nonsense of the old one.
What is important is not so much the fact of change, which is always present in history, as the rate of change. In some periods the rate of social change is far more rapid than in others.
Production in capitalist economy is commodity production. Thousands of diverse goods are turned out by the processes of production, diverse in their nature and suited to the fulfillment of thousands of different human needs.
During the Middle Ages, money was loaned on a considerable scale for two primary purposes: for making war; and for what Veblen called “conspicuous waste” in such projects as building great castles, memorials, and churches.
In the earliest (mercantile) and again in the late stages of capitalist development, monopoly devices and state intervention try to gain some control over production. But they operate only in restricted fields, not in the total productive process, and even in narrow fields they never succeed in emancipating production altogether from the market. This is not surprising, for deliberate regulation of production as a whole (a “plan,” as it is called nowadays) would be incompatible with the nature of capitalism. It would destroy the commodity basis of the economy, the profit motivation, and the
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The prime interest of liberalism was the promotion of the capitalist economic process. According to the liberal theory of the state, the business of the state was to guarantee civil peace (“domestic tranquillity”), handle foreign wars and relations, and with that to stand aside and let the economic process take care of itself, intervening in the economic process only in a negative way to correct injustices or obstacles and to keep the market “free.”
An “ideology” is similar in the social sphere to what is sometimes called “rationalization” in the sphere of individual psychology. An ideology is not a scientific theory, but is nonscientific and often antiscientific. It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events—though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories.
The theory of the managerial revolution predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by “managerial society” (the nature of which will be later explained), that, in fact, the transition from capitalist society to managerial society is already well under way.
The volume of public and private debt has reached a point where it cannot be managed much longer. The debt, like the unemployed, sucks away the diminishing blood stream of capitalism. And it cannot be shaken off.
History, sociology, and anthropology are not yet much as sciences; but they are enough to show every serious person that the concepts of the bourgeois ideologies are not written in the stars, are not universal laws of nature, but are at best just temporary expressions of the interests and ideals of a particular class of men at a particular historical time.
France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war—as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship, from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals; but they must at least believe in those ideals.
They all agree, in general, as to what they mean by “socialist society” (even though they may call it something else—“communism” or “anarchist society”), and they all agree that it is going to come. Their differences are on how it is going to come and on what ought to be done to help it along, not on the prediction that it will come. The determining characteristics of what they mean by socialist society are that it is classless, fully democratic, and international.
Put very simply, the Marxist movement understands the process as follows: the working class will take over state power (by insurrectionary means according to the Leninist wing of Marxism; by parliamentary means according to the reformist wing); the state will then abolish private property, either all at once or over a short period of time; and, after a certain period of adjustment (called by the Leninist wing the “dictatorship of the proletariat”), socialism will be ushered in. Under socialism itself, in keeping with its fully democratic, classless structure, state power in the sense of the
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But the proposition that capitalism is not going to last much longer is not at all the same as the proposition that socialism is going to replace it. There is no necessary connection between the two.
A survey of Marxist literature quickly reveals that it is far, far weightier in the analysis of capitalism by which it reaches the conclusion that capitalism will not last (though Marx himself gravely underestimated the time-span allotted to capitalism) than in the analysis by which it motivates the all-important positive belief that socialism will replace capitalism. Yet the fullest agreement with the first, and I agree with very much of it, does not in any way compel us to accept the second. In fact, careful study will show that Marxists offer scarcely any evidence for the second belief.
The deduction may be all right, but no deduction from any metaphysical theory can ever tell us what is going to happen in the actual world of space and time; this we can predict, with some measure of probability, only from experience and the inferences which we make from experience.
Russia, as we shall repeatedly see, has already proved that such phenomena are not confined to former ages. The assumption that the abolition of capitalist private property guarantees socialism must be entirely rejected. It has simply no justification on the facts. It is a hope, that is all; and, like so many hopes, one scheduled for disappointment.
The only way out of the theoretical jam is to recognize that the assumption must be dropped, that socialism and capitalism are not the sole alternatives, that Russia’s motion has been toward neither capitalism nor socialism, but toward managerial society, the type of society now in the process of replacing capitalist society on a world scale.
Practical success for such parties does not at all guarantee the victory of socialism as the Russian experience shows: in general, there is no necessary correspondence between the professed aims of a political party and what happens when it takes power. But practical failure of these parties is additional, and strong, evidence against the prediction that socialism will come, since it removes one of the chief social forces which have been pointed to as motivation for the prediction. And the fact is that during the past two decades Marxist parties have collapsed on a world scale. Their fate can
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The Marxian philosophy of dialectical materialism takes its place with the other outmoded speculative metaphysics of the nineteenth century. The Marxian theory of universal history makes way for more painstaking, if less soul-satisfying, procedures in anthropological research. The laws of Marxian economics prove unable to deal concretely with contemporary economic phenomena.
What is decisive is whether an ideology is still able to sway the hearts and minds of masses of men, and we know that this result does not have to have any particular relation to scientific adequacy. Nevertheless, in the case of Marxism more than in that of most other ideologies (though to some extent with all), the exposure of scientific inadequacy is itself a factor tending to decrease the mass appeal.
The power of an ideology has several dimensions: it is shown both by the number of men that it sways and also by the extent to which it sways them—that is, whether they are moved only to verbal protestations of loyalty, or to a will to sacrifice and die under its slogans. This power is tested particularly when an ideology, in reasonably equal combat, comes up against a rival.
Put more simply: the easiest way to discover what the ruling group is in any society is usually to see what group gets the biggest incomes. Everyone knows this, but it is still necessary to make the analysis because of the fact that control of access is not the same thing as preferential treatment in income distribution. The group that has one also, normally, has the other: that is the general historical law.
Once again, the existence of the bourgeois class does not depend upon the existence of any particular individuals; the individual members change. The existence of the class means only that there is in society a group exercising, in terms of these recognized bourgeois property institutions, a special degree of control over the access to the instruments of production, and receiving as a group preferential treatment in the distribution of the products of these instruments.
In the first and most fundamental place, the successful “struggle for power” of the bourgeoisie against the feudal lords can be interpreted as simply a picturesque way of expressing the result of what did, in fact, actually happen: namely, in the Middle Ages society was organized in a way that made the feudal lords the ruling class, possessed of chief power and privilege; later on society was organized differently, in a way that made the bourgeoisie the ruling class.
The fact that the bourgeoisie did build up their social dominance, did reduce ever-widening sectors of the economy to their control, within the still-persisting framework of feudal society was, it would seem, a necessary condition for their appearing as the ruling class of the succeeding type of society. This point, in reverse, can reveal to us a decisive but neglected reason why socialism is not going to come. We have granted that, if socialism were going to come, the proletariat would have to be the social class chiefly concerned in its arrival. But the position of the proletariat in
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Experience has proved that trade-unions are not an anticapitalist institution, not subversive of capitalist control over the instruments of production to any important or long-term extent, but are precisely capitalist institutions organized on the basis of, and presupposing, capitalist economic relations, a fact which is well known to most leading trade-unionists.
A bourgeois state, a state “controlled” by the bourgeoisie, means fundamentally a state which, by and large, most of the time and on the most important occasions, upholds those rights, those ways of acting and thinking, which are such as to permit the continued social dominance of the bourgeoisie.
The capitalists gave support to the kings because they, too, wanted stronger nations with national armies and navies to protect trade routes, and uniform laws, currencies, and taxes, so that trade could be carried on without constant interruption from a hundred feudal barons who considered themselves independent lords; because they made huge sums of money from dealings with the princes; and because they exacted protection and privileges in return for the aid they gave.
The theory holds, to begin with, that we are now in a period of social transition in the sense which has been explained, a period characterized, that is, by an unusually rapid rate of change of the most important economic, social, political, and cultural institutions of society. This transition is from the type of society which we have called capitalist or bourgeois to a type of society which we shall call managerial.
The managers will exercise their control over the instruments of production and gain preference in the distribution of the products, not directly, through property rights vested in them as individuals, but indirectly, through their control of the state which in turn will own and control the instruments of production. The state—that is, the institutions which comprise the state—will, if we wish to put it that way, be the “property” of the managers.
As Machiavelli pointed out in his History of Florence, the poor, enduring oppressive conditions, were always ready to answer the call for a fight for freedom; but the net result of each revolt was merely to establish a new tyranny.
Ownership means control; if there is no control, then there is no ownership. The central aspects of the control which is ownership, are, as we have seen, control over access to the object in question and preferential treatment in the distribution of its products. If ownership and control are in reality separated, then ownership has changed hands to the “control,” and the separated ownership is a meaningless fiction.
That is to say: the group or groups which have control over access to the instruments of production will, as a matter of experienced fact, also receive preference in the distribution of the products of those instruments. Or in other words: the most powerful (in terms of economic relations) will also be the wealthiest.
Social groups and classes are, we might say, “selfish”: they use their control to benefit primarily (not necessarily exclusively) themselves.
The extension of capitalist control was also indicated by the progressive overcoming of all such restrictions on the capitalist mode of economy.
One consequence of the withdrawal is necessarily the assumption of more and more power over the actual processes of production, more and more of the time, by others than the chief legal owners of the instruments of production, in many instances by those whom we call the managers.
The instruments of production are the seat of social domination; who controls them, in fact not in name, controls society, for they are the means whereby society lives. The fact today is that the control of the big capitalists, the control based upon capitalist private property rights, over the instruments of production and their operation is, though still real, growingly tenuous, indirect, intermittent. More and more of the time, over more and more phases of the productive process, no capitalist intervention appears.
