The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

Perhaps Lenin did not realize the full irony of his position. He, as a Marxist, believed—correctly—that the roots of social power lie in the control over the instruments of production. And he, as the head of the new state, helped to smash workers’, popular, control over those instruments and to substitute for it control by the managers. And, of course, the managers of individual plants became subordinate to the big managers, to the boards and bureaus directing entire sectors of industry and governing industry as a whole. Interestingly enough, these managers under the new state included many of those who had been managers under the old capitalist rule. Lenin and Trotsky poured scorn on “infantile leftists” who were against making use of the “services” of the “bourgeois specialists” (as they called them). The workers needed them—to run the plants. Lenin regretted that there were so few left and that in Russia there had never been an adequate staff of trained specialists. Most favorable terms were given to foreign “bourgeois specialists” who were willing to come to work under the new regime. The class of managers that steadily rose was not altogether a new creation; it was the development and extension of the class which, as we have seen, already exists, and is already extending its power and influence, under capitalism, especially during the latter days of capitalism.