The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

According to Marx himself, the inherent development of capitalist society as it tended toward centralization and monopoly was such that there would take place the “proletarianization” of the overwhelming bulk of the population; that is, almost everyone would become workers. This made socialism easy, because the workers would have almost no one except a handful of finance-capitalists to oppose their course. As is well known, this development did not take place as predicted by Marx. Sectors of the economy even of advanced nations, in particular agriculture, resisted the process of reduction to full capitalist social relations; most persons engaging in agriculture are neither capitalists nor workers (in the technical sense) but small independent producers. Small independent proprietors remain in many lines of endeavor; and the last seventy-five years have seen the growth of the so-called “new middle class,” the salaried executives and engineers and managers and accountants and bureaucrats and the rest, who do not fit without distortion into either the “capitalist” or “worker” category.