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The workers, the proletarians, could not, by themselves, run the productive machine of contemporary society.
But victory is today seen to depend upon complicated mechanical devices—airplanes, tanks, and the rest—to produce and handle which requires, once more, considerable skill and training.
in general, there is no necessary correspondence between the professed aims of a political party and what happens when it takes power. But
What has happened to the members of the Marxist parties is that many of them, particularly including many of the most vigorous, have been absorbed into the fascist movements;
This fact does not, as some think, prove anything about the moral quality of the socialist ideal. But it does constitute unblinkable evidence that, whatever its moral quality, socialism is not going to come.
It may also be observed that the two chief factors in control (control of access and preferential treatment in distribution) are closely related in practice.
Put more simply: the easiest way to discover what the ruling group is in any society is usually to see what group gets the biggest incomes.
By our definition, the bourgeoisie or capitalists are the ruling class in modern society. Since the society recognizes these rights, we may properly speak of it as bourgeois or capitalist society.
and the propagation on a mass scale of new ideologies suited to break the moral power of feudalism and to establish social attitudes favorable to the bourgeois structure of society.
In the wars and peace treaties, the elections of popes or emperors, the voyages of explorers and conquering armies during the sixteenth century, we always find a most prominent part played by the money of the Fugger or Medici or Welser or the other great merchant-bankers of Augsburg or Antwerp or Lyons or Genoa.
This transition is from the type of society which we have called capitalist or bourgeois to a type of society which we shall call managerial.
What is occurring in this transition is a drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class, by the social group or class of the managers
This drive, moreover, is world-wide in extent, already well advanced in all nations, though at different levels of development in different nations.
no direct property rights in the major instruments of production vested in individuals as individuals.
The managers will exercise their control over the instruments of production and gain preference in the distribution of the products, not directly, through property rights vested in them as individuals, but indirectly, through their control of the state which in turn will own and control the instruments of production. The state—that is, the institutions which comprise the state—will, if we wish to put it that way, be the “property” of the managers. And that will be quite enough to place them in the position of ruling class.
Leninism-Stalinism; fascism-nazism; and, at a more primitive level, by New Dealism and such less influential American ideologies as “technocracy.”
Within the new social structure a different social group or class—the managers—will be the dominant or ruling class.
Many of the early capitalists sincerely fought for the freedom of individual conscience in relation to God; what they got as a result of the fighting was often a harsh and barren fundamentalism in theology but at the same time political power and economic privilege for themselves.
the managers are simply those who are, in fact, managing the instruments of production nowadays.
It is this third type of function which, in the fullest and clearest meaning, I call “managing”; and those who carry out this type of function are they whom I call the “managers.” Many different names are given them. We may often recognize them as “production managers,” operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians; or, in government (for they are to be found in governmental enterprise just as in private enterprise) as administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on. I mean by managers, in short, those who already for the most part in
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The organization and co-ordination of industry as a whole is carried on through the instrumentality of “the market,” without deliberate and explicit management exercised by specific managers, or indeed, by anyone else.
order to distinguish this group from the first, I shall call the individuals who make it up “finance-executives” or simply “executives,” reserving the terms “management” and “managers” for the first group only.
In fact, with profit in the capitalist sense eliminated, the technically necessary functions of the finance-executives of Group 2 become part of the management functions of Group 1, if management is extended over all or most of industry. Management could, that is to say, absorb all of the technically necessary functions of the non-managing executives.
Not only is this development conceivable: it has already been almost entirely achieved in Russia, is approached more and more nearly in Germany, and has gone a considerable distance in all other nations. In the United States, as everywhere, it is precisely the situation to be found throughout state enterprise.
The USSR didn't continue to "prove" this
It is a historical law, with no apparent exceptions so far known, that all social or economic groups of any size strive to improve their relative position with respect to power and privilege in society.
Especially in a bureaucracy
And, in general, there is a source of permanent conflict: the managers proper receive far less reward (money) than the executives and especially the finance-capitalists, who get by far the greatest benefits.
All four of these groups, to one or another degree, are powerful and privileged as against the great masses of the population, who have no interest of ownership, management, or control in the instruments of production and no special preferential treatment in the distribution of their products.
The position, role, and function of the most privileged of all the groups, the finance-capitalists, are, however, entirely bound up with capitalist property and economic relations, and their preservation is decisive for even the continued existence of this group.
But mass unemployment cannot be eliminated without invading and finally abolishing capitalist property and economic relations.
??? Not so true
These two rights (control of access and preferential treatment in distribution) are fundamental in ownership and, as we have noted, determine the dominant or ruling class in society—which consists simply of the group that has those rights, or has them, at least, in greater measure than the rest of society, with respect to the chief instruments of production.
The turning point in capitalist control over the economy was reached during the first world war (this is why I selected the date, 1914, as that of the beginning of the social transition from capitalist to managerial society).
This is indicated in one very interesting and important way by a phenomenon which might be called the withdrawal of the big bourgeoisie from production. 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.
The instruments of production are the seat of social domination; who controls them, in fact not in name, controls society, for they are the means whereby society lives.
where owners, in the legal and historical capitalist meaning, have scarcely anything to do with the corporations beyond drawing dividends when the managers grant them.
Stock value
The survival of capitalism, as we have seen, does not depend upon the survival of any given individual capitalists but of a ruling capitalist class, upon the fact that the social place of any individual capitalists who are eliminated is taken by other capitalists. This
The chance to build up vast aggregates of wealth of the kind held by the big bourgeois families no longer exists under the conditions of contemporary capitalism.
Bad guess
But the other individuals will do so by themselves becoming managers, not capitalists, because the new ruling class will be the managerial class. **
This restriction in the government’s sphere of activity—whatever the form of the government, dictatorial or democratic, in the political sphere—is not a coincidence, but, it must be stressed again, an integral part of the whole social structure of capitalism. 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.
but if we include the employees of state, county, and municipal governments, the army, navy, courts, prisons, the recipients of all types of relief, we find that already in the United States half or more of the entire population is dependent wholly, or in determining part, upon government for the means of living.
However, disintegration of the social domination (that is, control over the instruments of production) of the capitalists is nevertheless going on within the very womb of capitalism, and domination by new groups, above all by the managers, is growing.
But the theory is part of an ideology; ideologies are not subject to the canons of science and logic; and with the help of “dialectics”—which are from one point of view simply a device for reconciling theoretical contradictions with the dictates of practice—the theory is adapted to the practical need.
(Once again I must stress that such an extension is marked as much or even more by an increase in governmental control as by formal government “ownership”: since control is the decisive factor in ownership.)
The rate of the process is enormously speeded at certain points as in Russia in 1918, in Germany from 1933 on, and everywhere by the effects of the second world war. The base of capitalist leverage is undermined; the relative weights of governmental and private enterprise alter.
And in US from 1933 on
The “limited state” of capitalism is replaced by the “unlimited” managerial state.
economy would have eliminated capitalism altogether. But it is equally deceptive to speak of “state socialism.” According to traditional and historical usage, “socialism” means, so far as economic structure goes, an economically classless society. An economically classless society, as we have discussed, is a society in which no group of men, by virtue of special social or economic relations, has any special rights of ownership in the instruments of production—that
“Capital,” so far as it would be proper to use the term, will be supplied entirely, or almost entirely, through the state.
They, too, through the possession of privilege, power, and command of educational facilities, will be able to control, within limits, the personnel of the managerial recruits; and the ruling class of managers will thus achieve a certain continuity from generation to generation.
We have seen that the managers cannot solve their problems by becoming themselves capitalists.
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Private enterprise proves unable to keep the productive process going; the state therefore steps in. Modern total war demands the co-ordination of the economy; this can be done only through state control. 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,
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We have seen that its structure is based upon the state ownership and control of the major instruments of production, with the state in turn controlled by, and acting in the primary interests of, the managers. This in turn means the disappearance of capitalist private property rights vested in individuals.
