The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

When the state acts to enforce contracts or debt payments or to stop sit-down strikes (which negate the capitalist control of access to the instruments of production), the state may be described, somewhat metaphorically, as the “executive committee” of the capitalists. There is little doubt that the government (state) of the United States has been and may still be correctly described as a “capitalist state.” But we have also seen that, when the government takes over, either in full ownership or in some degree of control, some section of the economy, by that very fact that section of the economy is removed, entirely or partly, from the reign of capitalist economic relations. That section of the economy is no longer in the full capitalist sense a “profit-making institution,” with the profits going in one way or another to individuals who have one or another form of “property right” in the given institution. The products (goods or services) of the state institution are not subject to the “laws of the market.” They are not even, or do not need to be, “commodities” in the capitalist sense. Nor is the distribution of these products determined by capitalist property relations. This is why most capitalists invariably oppose