The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

Capitalist economy is a system of private ownership, of ownership of a certain type vested in private individuals, of private enterprise. The capitalist state is therefore, and necessarily, a limited state. The traditional and necessary capitalist role of government is, as everyone knows, now being quickly abandoned in all nations, has been altogether abandoned in at least one (Russia), and close to abandoned in several others. Government is moving always more widely into the economy. No matter who runs the government or for what, every new incursion of government into the economy means that one more section of the economy is wholly or partially removed from the reign of capitalist economic relations.

The historically anticapitalist nature of the extension of governmental ownership and control is the only basis from which we can plausibly explain the attitude of the capitalists themselves. Leninists are forced to the most complex and devious psychological fairy tales to get around the difficulties. When the capitalists, almost en masse, object, say, to some New Deal extension of the government into the economy, the Leninists are compelled to say that the capitalists, with their complaints, are only trying to “deceive” the people or are deceiving themselves about “their own best interests.” Such explanations are logically possible but most unlikely, especially when there is a simpler one that fits the facts directly: the capitalists object because the measures are against their interests.

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

Nevertheless, it may still turn out that the new form of economy will be called “socialist.” In those nations—Russia and Germany—which have advanced furthest toward the new economy, “socialism” or “national socialism” is the term ordinarily used. The motivation for this terminology is not, naturally, the wish for scientific clarity but just the opposite. The word “socialism” is used for ideological purposes in order to manipulate the favorable mass emotions attached to the historic socialist ideal of a free, classless, and international society and to hide the fact that the managerial economy is in actuality the basis for a new kind of exploiting, class society. If the new rulers continue their present verbal usage, a book like this one is not going to change the linguistic outcome. For scientific purposes, however, the necessity remains to distinguish clearly the new economy (whatever it may be called) from the projected economy which was part of the traditional socialist ideal.

Under a completely state-owned economy, preferential distribution could not take place in the same manner as under capitalism. But there would be no difficulty in working out new methods of exploitation. Freda Utley, in her remarkable book on Russia, The Dream We Lost, has shown some of the devices which are at present used in that nation. One is, in effect, a gigantic food tax. The state buys from the peasants, at fixed prices, the food which is to be processed and sold to the rest of the population (in some cases, in processed form back to the peasants themselves). The state then, as the sole important distributor, sells the food to consumers, also at fixed prices. The spread between the prices can be as large as the traffic will bear.

We have seen that the managers cannot solve their problems by becoming themselves capitalists. Nor does any other type of private property right seem to offer solution. Certainly the resumption of feudal forms, which could be adjusted only to a predominantly agricultural economy, is impossible for modern economy; and chattel slavery would be no less impossible. Fusion of the economy with the state, expansion of the state functions to comprise also control of the economy, offers, whether or not the managers individually recognize it, the only available means, on the one hand for making the economic structure workable again after its capitalist breakdown, on the other for putting the managers in the position of ruling class.

Private investment dries up; state investment takes its place. Private enterprise fails to take care of the unemployed; the state gives them jobs. Foreign trade cannot be conducted successfully and profitably on a capitalist basis; the state establishes export and import controls and monopolies. Private enterprise can no longer handle the great projects (roads, dams, steamship lines, electrical plants, shipbuilding…) required to keep contemporary society going; the state intervenes. There is nothing arbitrary about the extension of the state into the economy. It is not the result of a plot or a conspiracy. It seems to offer the only way of meeting the problems which actually arise; and consequently, however many may reject and oppose it, there are always some, and enough, ready to put it into practice.

An increasing number of consumer goods and of services will be supplied without the direct intervention of money payment; that is, an increasing percentage of real income will not take monetary form. Theoretically, there would seem to be no limit in this replacement of money. In practice, however, the convenience of money, and especially its convenience in maintaining differentials in income, seem to guarantee its survival. However (as, again, experience already shows), money will become increasingly and perhaps altogether divorced from any metallic base. The Fort Knox gold pile may well be turned into a monument for posterity, like the Egyptian pyramids.

The “freedom” of proletarians under capitalism is, of course, a curious kind of freedom. It means, in the first place, freedom from ownership rights in the instruments of production. There will be no change in this freedom: effective control of the instruments of production will be held not by workers but by the managers through their state. But proletarian freedom under capitalism also means, to a limited extent, freedom for the workers to sell their labor or not to sell it (though the alternative of not selling it, being starvation, is not too realistic), to sell it to one competing employer as against others, and to bargain over its price. These latter possibilities will not exist in anything like the same form under managerial economy. There being only one major employer (the state), there will be no bargaining among competing employers; and the assignment and transfer of jobs, as well as the fixing of rates of pay, will not be left to the accidents of market bargaining.

The truth is that Russia, Germany, and Italy are not alone in having used the noncapitalist, managerial methods in handling unemployment. The CCC in this country is cut from the same pattern. Relief work in general is a halfhearted variant. If the United States had not resorted to such means, mass unemployment in this country would have been immeasurably worse and would already have sent the economic structure toppling.

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.

A plan does not, of course, have to have one single and narrow aim. It may be directed simultaneously toward several aims, though it is quite possible that in such cases the different aims may interfere with each other. Unfortunately, we already know what two of the aims of managerial planning are: the more effective prosecution of war, and the support of the power and privilege of a new ruling class. There is no doubt that the ability to plan, which follows from the managerial structure, makes it easier to realize these aims, as well as other aims that may also be present. Theoretically, it is true, these aims might include greater happiness, security, and culture for mankind at large.

In an earlier chapter I have referred to the shift in the localization of sovereignty that occurred in connection with the transition from feudal to capitalist society. The result of this shift was to localize sovereignty more and more fully in “parliaments” (by whatever name they were, in different nations, called). History is not as tidy as a geometrical theorem; there is not a perfect equation between the development of capitalist society as a whole and the development of the sovereignty of parliament; but that there is a general correspondence, that in capitalist society sovereignty is typically localized in parliament,[1] could hardly be denied.

It is no news to anyone to point out that during the generation since the first world war, sovereignty has been slipping away from parliaments. No development of this period is more obvious and indisputable; yet, for some reason, it has received far less attention than its unquestionably major importance deserves. It is a remarkable comment on men’s unwillingness to face the facts of their own time that, though in recent decades hundreds of books and articles have been written on the history of how parliaments won sovereignty, there is scarcely a handful of serious studies of how, today, parliaments are losing it or of the implications of this loss.

In the United States, sovereignty may still be chiefly located in Congress (together with the Supreme Court), it may still be the principal “lawmaking” body; but no one with eyes open during the past generation and especially the past decade will believe that its claims are today undisputed. “Laws” today in the United States, in fact most laws, are not being made any longer by Congress, but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing title!), and the other leading “executive agencies.” How well lawyers know this to be the case! To keep up with contemporary law, it is the rulings and records of these agencies that they have chiefly to study. How plainly it is reflected in the enormous growth of the “executive branch” of the government—which is no longer simply executive but legislative and judicial as well—in comparison with that of the other two branches. Indeed, most of the important laws passed by Congress in recent years have been laws to give up some more of its sovereign powers to one or another agency largely outside of its control.

There is no mystery in this shift. It can be correlated easily enough with the change in the character of the state’s activities. Parliament was the sovereign body of the limited state of capitalism. The bureaus are the sovereign bodies of the unlimited state of managerial society. A state which is building roads and steel mills and houses and electric plants and shipyards, which is the biggest of all bankers and farmers and movie producers, which in the end is the corporate manager of all the major instruments of economic production, can hardly be run like the state which collected a few taxes, handled a leisurely diplomacy, and prosecuted offenders against the law. Nor can the same kind of men run it. The new agencies and new kinds of agency are formed to handle the new activities and extensions of activity. As these activities overbalance the old, sovereignty swings, also, over to the new agencies.

The old-line parliamentarians do not do well in the bureaus. One or two of them may be present, as figureheads, for decorative purposes. But the actual directing and administrative work of the bureaus is carried on by new men, a new type of men. It is, specifically, the managerial type, the type we noticed also when considering the structural developments in “private enterprise.” The active heads of the bureaus are the managers-in-government, the same, or nearly the same, in training, functions, skills, habits of thought as the managers-in-industry. Indeed, there is less and less distinction between the two: in Russia, managers-in-industry and managers-in-government are one and the same, since there is no (important) industry apart from government. In all countries, as government expands, it incorporates the tasks and fields which were before left to private industry. Moreover,

We have defined “ruling class” as consisting of the group of persons which has (as a matter of fact, not necessarily of law or words or theory), as against the rest of the population, a special degree of control over access to the instruments of production and preferential treatment in the distribution of the products of those instruments. In many societies, the members of the ruling class in question have also, in their own persons, administered the state: that is, have been the governing officials in the state apparatus. In feudal society, for example, this was usually the case. But it has not always been the case. In some societies, the state has been administered, its chief offices have been occupied, by persons who were not themselves members of the ruling class, or rather who were distinctly subordinate members of the ruling class. This has been the situation most of the time in capitalist society. As we have defined “ruling class,” there is no doubt at all that usually the chief members of the ruling class were not to be found in high governmental office. The chief members were the great industrialists and financiers.

In the first place, we may observe that it really doesn’t make very much difference which of the two groups is correctly to be regarded as the new ruling class; whether, as we might put it, the bureaucrats are to be the servants of the managers or the managers of the bureaucrats. In either case, the general structural and institutional organization will be the same. The same type of economy, the same ideologies, the same political institutions, the same position for the masses would be found whether the state were “bureaucratic” or “managerial”; so that the difference may well be largely one of words.

Indeed, the very raising of the question of who will rule, the bureaucrats or the managers, indicates the persistence of modes of thinking carried over from capitalist society and not strictly applicable to managerial society. The fact that in capitalist society the ruling class was a different group from the governing political administrators is largely the reflection of more basic structural features of capitalist society to which I have several times referred. Capitalist economy proper was the arena of private enterprise, and the capitalist state, we saw, was a limited state. The rulers of capitalist society, as in every society, were those who ruled the economy; and these were not the persons who held the offices of political administration. By the nature of the case, the latter, no matter how supreme they were in their own limited realm, were, in the entire social process, subordinate to the former. In managerial society, however, politics and economics are directly interfused; the state does not recognize its capitalist limits; the economic arena is also the arena of the state. Consequently, there is no sharp separation between political officials and “captains of industry.” The captain of industry is, by virtue of his function, at the same time a state official.

The bureaucrats of today and tomorrow may think, in their own minds, that they pursue an independent course; but their projects, their wars and displays and manipulation of mass sentiment, all require enormous resources. In practice these can be assured only through their collaborating with, and in the end subordinating themselves to, those who are actually directing the processes of production, to the managers. The sources of wealth and power are the basic instruments of production; these are to be directed by the managers; and the managers are, then, to be the ruling class.

Today the managers are carrying on a similar triple battle (let us recall here, as always when we use the language of the class struggle, the partly metaphorical character of that language): against the capitalists, whose interests are bound up with the decaying social order; against the masses, who, obscurely, are a social force tending against oppression and class rule of any kind; and against each other for first prizes in the new world. The hold of the capitalists on the instruments of production must be smashed. The masses must be curbed, and as many as possible of them diverted so that their weight is thrown into the scale on the side of the managers and of the new social structure. The various sections of the managers contend with each other, on a world scale, for mastery. This is a complex process with its elements so intertwined that it is often hard to see through to the major forces. But comparable processes in history indicate that it is worked out by wars and revolutions and persecutions and terror, and by the clash also of rival propaganda and ideologies, all under a bewildering variety of slogans and ostensible motivations.

On the whole, it seems to me that a later democratic development in managerial society is likely. It would, however, be an error for those who like democracy to be over-optimistic about it. It is not certain on the evidence so far. And it does not seem indicated for the next day or year or decade. This much is clear: The democracy of capitalist society is on the way out, is, in fact, just about gone, and will not come back. The democracy of managerial society will be some while being born; and its birth pangs will include drastic convulsions.

Anyone who believes that there is the slightest chance for the restoration of the pre-1939 system in Europe is living in a world of fantastic dreams, not on the earth. The United States can keep declaring from now forever that it will never recognize alterations of boundaries brought about by force (the only way in which important alterations have ever been brought about in history, including those alterations accomplished by the United States), and London and Washington can continue “accepting” the dozen refugee governments that run from one capital to another and will doubtless end up at the North Pole; but these highly moral fictions are not going to pump back one drop of blood into the veins of a political system which is already dead.

Nevertheless, it is extremely doubtful that the world political system of managerial society will be organized, within the discernible future, as a single world-state. If we leave words and get closer to practical details, the organization of the entire world under a single sovereign-state power seems to present difficulties that are close to insuperable. These difficulties are of many kinds. First, there are technical and administrative difficulties. The centralized direction of the whole world and all its peoples would be a task beyond the technical ability of any human group so far as we can judge from the behavior of human groups in the past. The job is just too vast. Second, there is the military and police problem: There seems no reason to believe that any state can organize a military group sufficiently large and sufficiently cohesive to be able to patrol the whole world. Even if, by a lucky chance, some one power might win what would look like a world victory, it could prove only temporary. The disintegrative forces would be sufficient to pull it rapidly to pieces. Third, the ethnic, cultural, social, and climatic diversities of the world are so considerable as to preclude its reduction to a political unity; and these diversities, even if they are not permanent, will continue for as long as we can sensibly pretend to predict about.

We are now in a position to understand the central historical meaning of the first two world wars of the twentieth century. We might put it, over-simplifying but not distorting, in this way: The war of 1914 was the last great war of capitalist society; the war of 1939 is the first great war of managerial society. Thus both wars are transitional in character, are wars of the transition period between capitalist and managerial society. In both wars we find both capitalist and managerial elements, with the former predominant in the war of 1914, the latter immensely increased in the war of 1939. This political characterization of the two wars correlates with and reinforces the conclusions we have reached in our economic analysis, and again motivates our selection of the year, 1914, as the beginning of the social transition to managerial society. We found that from the late Middle Ages until the first world war, the percentage of world economy under the control of capitalists and capitalist economic relations had continuously increased; but from that time on has, also continuously and at a growing speed, declined. Looked at politically, we may say that from the midst of the first world war came the first great abrupt jump toward managerial society—the Russian Revolution. That war and its aftermath (the “Versailles system”) gave the final proof that capitalist world politics could no longer work and were about to end.

This struggle among the three strategic centers for world control will be the fundamental theme of the coming wars of managerial society. Naturally, the fundamental theme will be obscured and complicated, and will be played with variations. The theme only begins to emerge during the present war—though it is daily clearer. Capitalism is not yet dead, and the wars of the present are not “pure” managerial wars. They are also completing the destruction of capitalism, not merely by the effects of military defeat, but also by the internal consequences of war regimes under modern conditions. And the consolidation of the three super-states, even within their immediate strategic areas, is not by any means finished. In Europe, for example, even if Germany is fully victorious in the present war, there still remain Russia and Italy; and Russia is also in Asia along with Japan. Everyone knows, however, that Italy is a subordinate, incapable of a really independent sovereign policy. There is every reason to believe (as we shall discuss in Chapter XIV) that Russia will split apart, with the western half gravitating toward the European base and the eastern toward the Asiatic. But even if a coalition of the future, combined with internal disturbances, should overthrow the Germany of the present, this would be secondary to the main scheme. The result of such a development would not alter the political system toward which managerial society tends. It would merely change the name and some of ...

Such political predictions as I have herein outlined are very much resented in the United States. Our official doctrine still continues in the Wilson tradition: international law and morality; rights of small nations; nonrecognition of territories acquired by force. Washington continues to be crowded with diplomatic representatives of nations which no longer exist. I have no wish to quarrel with the way people like to talk and think and feel, or how they like to use words; my purpose is to discover what is probable on the evidence. In spite of what our spokesmen in the United States say, I do not really think that there are many serious persons here or anywhere else who do not judge the probabilities pretty much as I do.

Scientific theories are always controlled by the facts: they must be able to explain the relevant evidence already at hand, and on their basis it must be possible to make verifiable predictions about the future. Ideologies are not controlled by facts, even though they may incorporate some scientific elements and are ordinarily considered scientific by those who believe in them. The primary function of ideologies—whether moral or religious or metaphysical or social—is to express human interests, needs, desires, hopes, fears, not to cover the facts. A dispute about scientific theories can always be settled, sooner or later, by experiment and observation. A dispute between rival ideologies can never be thus settled. Arguments about ideologies can, and do, continue as long as the interests embodied by them are felt to be of any significance.

The major ideologies of capitalist society, as we noted briefly in an earlier chapter, were variants on the themes of: individualism; opportunity; “natural rights,” especially the rights of property; freedom, especially “freedom of contract”; private enterprise; private initiative; and so on. These ideologies conformed well to the two requirements stated above. Under the interpretations given them, they expressed and served the interests of the capitalists. They justified profit and interest. They showed why the owner of the instruments of production was entitled to the full product of those instruments and why the worker had no claim on the owner except for the contracted wages. They preserved the supremacy of the field of private enterprise. They kept the state to its limited role.

At the same time, these ideologies were able to gain the acceptance and often the enthusiasm of the masses. Men who were not capitalists were willing to swear and die by slogans issuing out of these ideologies. And, as a matter of fact, the way of life embodied in these ideologies was for some while beneficial to large sections of the masses, though never to the extent advertised or in any way comparable to what it was for the capitalists.

Perhaps the most striking proof of the falling off in mass appeal is provided by the complete failure of voluntary military recruiting in England (as well as the entire British Empire) and in the United States. This failure would in itself be remarkable enough. When we remember that voluntary recruiting was tried in England and in the United States at a time when millions were unemployed, and with the help of all the instruments of modern propaganda technique, the significance of the failure is immense. The recruiting was conducted under slogans drawn from the capitalist ideologies. The youth, though it had no jobs and no prospects, simply did not respond. The armies must be gathered by compulsion. No one can challenge the fact; and no one who is honest about it can doubt the significance of the fact.

When old ideologies wear out, new ones come in to take their place. The capitalist ideologies are now wearing out, along with the capitalist society of which they are the ideologies; and many new ideologies are contending for the jobs left vacant. Most of the new ideologies don’t get very far, because they do not fulfill the requirements for great social ideologies. The new “agrarianism,” medievalism, regionalism, religious primitivism pick up a few recruits and may have a few months of notoriety, but they remain the preoccupation of small sects. At the present time, the ideologies that can have a powerful impact, that can make real headway, are, naturally, the managerial ideologies, since it is these that alone correspond with the actual direction of events.

The managers know that with the technological means at their disposal it would be perfectly easy for them to put everyone to work; but the existing setup prevents them from acting. They naturally tend to identify the welfare of mankind as a whole with their own interests and the salvation of mankind with their assuming control of society. Society can be run, they think, in more or less the same way that they know they, when they are allowed, can run, efficiently and productively, a mass-production factory. It is out of such a vision of life, which is that undoubtedly held by very many managers and would-be managers—above all, managers functioning in the governmental apparatus—that the managerial concepts and managerial ideologies arise. It is not the managers themselves who make the ideologies explicit, draw out their implications, systematize them. That is the task of intellectuals. So long as capitalism is providing the managers with large incomes, so long as the social structure doesn’t seem to be cracking to pieces, the managers may accompany these feelings I have sketched with much of the traditional ideology of capitalism. But capitalist ideology is hollow in their living experience. They readily adapt themselves to the new ideologies because the new ideologies correspond much better to their experience, to their way of looking at the world and themselves. Indeed, the intellectuals, without usually being aware of it, elaborate the new ideologies from the point of vie...

The two ideologies are the same also—and this is most influential in developing patterns of attitude—in their scorn and contempt for “capitalist morality,” in their scathing dismissal of “natural rights” as capitalism understands these rights. They unite to attack “individualism,” root and branch. In both ideologies, the “state,” the “collectivity,” “planning,” “co-ordination,” “socialism,” “discipline” replace the “individual,” “free enterprise,” “opportunity,” as attitude-terms to hammer into the consciousness of the masses. Fascist and communist ideologies denounce in the same words the “chaos” and “anarchy” of capitalism. They conceive of the organization of the state of the future, their state, exactly along the lines on which a manager, an engineer, organizes a factory; that is, their conception of the state is a social extension generalized from managerial experience. And they have identical conceptions of “the party”—their party, with a monopoly in the political field.

There can be no doubt that the psychological effect of New Dealism has been what the capitalists say it has been: to undermine public confidence in capitalist ideas and rights and institutions. Its most distinctive features help to prepare the minds of the masses for the acceptance of the managerial social structure.

The development of managerial ideologies has not come to an end, needless to say with contemporary Stalinism and Nazism, any more than capitalist ideologies froze in the sixteenth century. As New Dealism is primitive alongside them, they will seem primitive to the ideologists of the future. There are indefinite possibilites for philosophical elaboration, and there will be plenty of intellectuals anxious for the task. Managerial ideologies will have their Cartesian and Rousseauistic and Kantian “revolutions.” But the main direction can be known now, is to be seen now in what is already at hand.

The consequences of a mass revolution seldom coincide with the slogans and ideas under which it takes place. Capitalism was introduced or strengthened in many places in the world to the accompaniment of mass revolutions. I have never read or heard of such a revolution’s proclaiming in its slogans that its object was to introduce capitalism. There was, it is true, a certain relation between the slogans and what happened; they were, as we saw in the last chapter, slogans which tended to develop attitudes favorable to capitalist institutions and capitalist rule; but the relation is indirect. Similarly, an ostensibly socialist mass revolution does not at all have to lead to socialism. These preliminary remarks are indispensible to clarity about what has happened in Russia.

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.

Russia has not reverted to a capitalist social structure. None of the major distinguishing features of capitalist society is to be found within Russia. The non-capitalist elements of Russian life have been enormously increased and strengthened, not weakened, with the years. Everyone said that the growth of privilege in the new Russia would “inevitably” bring about the reintroduction of capitalism. Privilege has grown, but capitalism has not come back. There are no capitalists of any importance in Russia. Not even imperialist expansion beyond the national borders brings any tendency to return to capitalism; just the contrary. And at the same time there has been not the slightest tendency toward the free, classless society of socialism as socialism was defined in the prior expectations. There is no democracy in Russia. There is no control, social or economic or political, exercised by the masses. There is a stratification in power and privilege which exceeds in degree that to be found in many capitalist nations. There is in Russia, as we have seen, not merely graft and corruption but systematic class exploitation on the basis of the state-owned economy. Russia came by far its closest to socialism in the months immediately following the revolution. In every decisive respect, every year since then has found it further away, not nearer socialism as defined by the fathers.

The possible overthrow of the Russian regime has, in keeping with the assumption which we have examined, always been thought of as meaning the restoration of capitalism, either through conquest by foreign capitalist nations or by internal “counter-revolution.” By now the evidence is fairly conclusive that there is not going to be a capitalist restoration in Russia. Internally the tendencies to capitalist restoration, so often expected, have failed to appear on a serious scale and have been weakened steadily with the years. There is no reason to look for them in the future, above all when we realize that capitalism on a world scale is just about finished.