The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

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The theory of the managerial revolution predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by “managerial society” (the nature of which will be later explained), that, in fact, the transition from capitalist society to managerial society is already well under way.

Oddly enough, the belief that capitalist society will continue is seldom put in theoretical form. It is rather left implicit in what people say and do, and in the writings and sayings of most historians, sociologists, and politicians. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the majority of people in the United States hold this belief, though it has been somewhat shaken in recent years.

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The unemployed hover on the fringe of society, on the one hand like a terrible weight dragging it down and bleeding it to death, on the other a constant irritant and reservoir of forces directed against the society.

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France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war—as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship, from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals; but they must at least believe in those ideals.

In truth, the bourgeoisie itself has in large measure lost confidence in its own ideologies. The words begin to have a hollow sound in the most sympathetic capitalist ears. This, too, is unmistakably revealed in the policy and attitude of England’s rulers during the past years. What was Munich and the whole policy of appeasement but a recognition of bourgeois impotence? The head of the British government’s traveling to the feet of the Austrian housepainter was the fitting symbol of the capitalists’ loss of faith in themselves. Every authentic report during the autumn of 1939 from Britain told of the discouragement and fear of the leaders in government and business. And no one who has listened to American leaders off the record or who has followed the less public organs of business opinion will suppose that such attitudes are confined to Britain. All history makes clear that an indispensable quality of any man or class that wishes to lead, to hold power and privilege in society, is boundless self-confidence.

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The determining characteristics of what they mean by socialist society are that it is classless, fully democratic, and international. By “classless” is meant that in socialist society no person or group of persons has, directly or indirectly, any property rights in the instruments of production different from those possessed by every other person and group; it amounts to the same thing to say that in socialist society there are no property rights in the instruments of production, since a property right has meaning only if it differentiates the status of those who have it from that of those who do not. The democracy of the hypothetical socialist society is to extend, and completely, to all social spheres—political, economic, and social. And socialist society is to be organized on an international scale; if this cannot be done completely in the first stages, at least this is to be the tendency of socialism. If not at once international, it is to be always internationalist—as indeed it would have to be if it is ever to become actually international.

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Socialist society means, we have seen, a society which is classless, democratic, and international.

The only way out of the theoretical jam is to recognize that the assumption must be dropped, that socialism and capitalism are not the sole alternatives, that Russia’s motion has been toward neither capitalism nor socialism, but toward managerial society, the type of society now in the process of replacing capitalist society on a world scale.

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But we must remember that the language of the struggle for power in metaphorical. No more than in the case of the capitalists, have the “managers” or their representatives ever got together to decide, deliberately and explicitly, that they were going to make a bid for world power. Nor will the bulk of those who have done, and will do, the fighting in the struggle be recruited from the ranks of the managers themselves; most of the fighters will be workers and youths who will doubtless, many of them, believe that they are fighting for ends of their own. Nor have the managers themselves been constructing and propagating their own ideologies; this has been, and is being, done for the most part by intellectuals, writers, philosophers. Most of these intellectuals are not in the least aware that the net social effect of the ideologies which they elaborate contributes to the power and privilege of the managers and to the building of a new structure of class rule in society. As in the past, the intellectuals believe that they are speaking in the name of truth and for the interests of all humanity.

Its prediction is simply that the process which has started and which has already gone a very great distance will continue and reach completion. The managerial revolution is not just around the corner, that corner which seems never quite to be reached. The corner of the managerial revolution was turned some while ago. The revolution itself is not something we or our children have to wait for; we may, if we wish, observe its stages before our eyes. Just as we seldom realize that we are growing old until we are already old, so do the contemporary actors in a major social change seldom realize that society is changing until the change has already come. The old words and beliefs persist long after the social reality that gave them life has dried up. Our wisdom in social questions is almost always retrospective only. This is, or ought to be, a humiliating experience for human beings: if justice is beyond us, we would like at least to claim knowledge.

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