The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

Germany, he kept repeating, is not merely sending a remarkably organized military machine across its borders. Her military machine is the carrier of a social revolution which is transforming the social system on the European continent.

The outworn fallacies of the belief in the military isolation of the United States from the rest of the world are not one tenth so grave as the fallacies of the belief in our social isolation.

There takes place a drastic change in the most important social (economic and political) institutions.

Along with the changes in social institutions there go more or less parallel changes in cultural institutions and in the dominant beliefs which men hold about man’s place in the world and the universe.

Finally, we observe a change in the group of men which holds the top positions, which controls the greater part of power and privilege in society.

With the help of these assumptions, I shall present a theory—which I call “the theory of the managerial revolution”—which

This warning, I know, will not be enough to prevent many who read this book from attributing to it a program and a morality. The elimination of such considerations is extremely rare in what is written about history, society, and politics. In these fields we are, perhaps understandably, more anxious for salvation than for knowledge; but experience ought to teach us that genuine salvation is possible only on the foundation of knowledge. And, though this book contains no program and no morality, if the theory which it puts forward is true, or partly true, no intelligent program or social morality is possible without an understanding of the theory.

Production in capitalist economy is commodity production. Thousands of diverse goods are turned out by the processes of production, diverse in their nature and suited to the fulfillment of thousands of different human needs.

All things appear on the capitalist market as commodities; everything, thus, shoes and statues and labor and houses and brains and gold, there receives a monetary value and can, through monetary symbols, go through the multitudinous operations of which money is capable.

The all-important, all-pervasive role of money is an equally obvious feature of capitalist economy, is indeed a necessary consequence of commodity production.

certain belief in connection with money is worth mentioning, though it is not peculiar to capitalist society: the belief, namely, that all forms of money, such as paper money, drafts, credits, etc., have an ultimate dependence upon metallic money, especially silver and gold, and, in developed capitalism, above all on gold.

In capitalist society, money has not one but two entirely different major economic functions. In the mighty development of the second of these lies another of the distinguishing features of capitalist economy. On the one hand, money is used as a medium of exchange; this is the use which is found in other types of society, and with respect to this use capitalism differs from them only, as we have seen, in the far greater extent, coming close to totality in developed capitalism, to which exchange is carried out through the intermediary of money. On the other hand, money is used as capital; “money makes money”;

Under capitalism, production is carried on for profit. Some

Capitalist economy is strikingly characterized by a special kind of periodic economic crisis, not met with or occurring only very rarely and on limited scales in other types of society.

In capitalist economy, production as a whole is regulated, so far as it is regulated, primarily by “the market,” both the internal and the international market.

The institutional relations peculiar to capitalist economy serve, finally, to stratify large sections of the population roughly into two special classes. These two classes are not to be found in other types of society for the evident reason that the classes are defined by relations peculiar to capitalism; and neither class can exist without the other, again because they are defined partly in terms of each other.

bourgeoisie or the capitalists. The second class, usually called the proletariat or the workers, consists of those who are, in a technical sense, “free” laborers.

The political division of capitalist society has been into a comparatively large number of comparatively large national states.

Dante’s Satan occupies the lowest point in Hell for the gravest of all feudal sins: “treachery to his lord and benefactor.”

Capitalist society was the first which had, in some measure, a world extent.

By the term, “the state,” we are referring to the actual central political institutions of society—to the governmental administration, the civil bureaucracy, the army, courts, police, prisons, and so on. The role of the state in capitalist society has varied greatly from time to time and nation to nation, but some traits have remained fairly constant.

In the economic field, we might say, the state always appeared as subordinate to, as the handmaiden of, the capitalists, of “business,” not as their master.

Political authority, sovereignty, cannot remain up in the clouds. It has to be concretized in some man or group of men. We say that the “state” or “nation” makes the laws that have to be obeyed; but actually, of course, the laws have to be drawn up and proclaimed by some man or group of men.

The restriction of range of the state’s activities, noted in 3 above, must not be thought to have any necessary connection with political democracy;

Among the elements entering into the ideologies typical of capitalist society, there must be prominently included, though it is not so easy to define what we mean by it, individualism.

According to the prevailing capitalist idea, the fundamental unit of politics, psychology, sociology, morality, theology, economics was thought of as the single human individual. This individual was understood as complete “in himself,” in his own nature, and as having only external relations to other persons and things.

In keeping with the general ideology of individualism was the stress placed by capitalist society on the notion of “private initiative.” Private

The status of the capitalist individual was further defined with the help of doctrines of “natural rights” (“free contract,” the standard civil rights, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” etc.) which are held to belong in some necessary and eternal sense to each individual.

Finally, in capitalist society, the theological and supernatural interpretation of the meaning of world history was replaced by the idea of progress,

developed capitalist society it is evident that the position of greatest social power and privilege was occupied by the capitalists, the bourgeoisie.

That all of these features, and many others along with them, will disappear—and disappear in a matter of years, or decades at the most, not generations—is the negative half of the theory of the managerial revolution.

The second predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by socialist society.

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.

against the society. Experience has already shown that there is not the slightest prospect of ridding capitalism of mass unemployment. This

The volume of public and private debt has reached a point where it cannot be managed much longer. The debt, like the unemployed, sucks away the diminishing blood stream of capitalism. And it cannot be shaken off.

Since shortly after the first world war, there has been in all major capitalist nations a permanent agricultural depression.

Capitalism is no longer able to use its own technological possibilities.

“Technological unemployment” is present in recent capitalism; but it is hardly anything compared to what technological unemployment would be if capitalism made use of its available technology.

On the one hand, the scientific pretensions of these ideologies have been exploded. History, sociology, and anthropology are not yet much as sciences; but they are enough to show every serious person that the concepts of the bourgeois ideologies are not written in the stars, are not universal laws of nature, but are at best just temporary expressions of the interests and ideals of a particular class of men at a particular historical time.

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.

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.

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.

The determining characteristics of what they mean by socialist society are that it is classless, fully democratic, and international.

Under socialism itself, in keeping with its fully democratic, classless structure, state power in the sense of the coercive institutions of government (police, army, prisons) will disappear altogether.

All the evidence indicates that the tyranny of the Russian regime is the most extreme that has ever existed in human history, not excepting the regime of Hitler.

Stalin worse thah hitler

But the fact remains that Stalin did get into power, that the other nations did not successfully revolt, and that the revolution did take place in a backward country; and that the Russian revolution led not toward socialism but toward something most unlike socialism. Russia was, and this is admitted by all parties, the “first experiment in socialism.” The results of this experiment are evidence for the view that socialism is not possible of achievement or even of approximation in the present period of history.

Though Russia did not move toward socialism, at the same time it did not move back to capitalism. This is a point which is of key significance for the problem of this book.

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.

One point of great importance has been proved conclusively by the Russian events: namely, that the second assumption we have discussed—the assumption that the abolition of capitalist private property rights in the instruments of production is a sufficient condition, a sufficient guarantee, of the establishment of socialism—is false.

The problem of bringing socialism—the free, classless, international society of Marx’s ideal and Marx’s predictions—has always been thought, by all varieties of Marxists, to be, in final analysis, that of doing away with bourgeois private property rights. Now we know that this is not enough to bring socialism.