The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

The big capitalists, legally the chief owners of the instruments of production, have in actual life been getting further and further away from those instruments, which are the final source and base of social dominance. This began some time ago, when most of the big capitalists withdrew from industrial production to finance. At first this shift to finance (which was well under way by the turn of this century) did not mean any lessening of control over the instruments of production: rather the contrary, for through finance-capitalist methods a wider area than ever of the economy was brought, and was brought more stringently, under the control of the big capitalists. Nevertheless, the control necessarily became more indirect, exercised at second or third or fourth hand through financial devices.