The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

We may think that some of the goods produced (bombers and tanks, for instance) are not worth producing, are positively evil; we may think it is not “progress” to be able to produce more of them; but, nonetheless, the ability of one system of economy to produce relatively more goods than another system is a decisive indication of their relative survival value. Nor should we be so naïve as to imagine that the structural and institutional relations which permit the production of a greater volume of armaments do not also permit the production of a greater volume of other types of goods. If it were really true, as so many say, that the Nazi economy were solely an “armament economy,” no one in the United States would be so worried, as all serious economists are worried, about Nazi economic competition after the war.