The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

by James Burnham

they are all managerial ideologies.

The critiques of capitalist society made by communist and fascist theoreticians are, for practical purposes, identical. There are certain verbal and metaphysical differences, but these are of no serious importance. The anticapitalist pages of fascist and communist analyses could usually be interchanged without anyone’s being able to tell which came from which.

in their scorn and contempt for “capitalist morality,” in their scathing dismissal of “natural rights” as capitalism understands these rights.

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.

A communist could subscribe to nine-tenths at least of Hitler’s careful discussion of the party in Mein Kampf; and the Nazis, on their side, took over many of their ideas on the party direct from the communists.

And, in passing, the capitalist methods of party organization do not stand a chance against them.

The most important of all examples, and a crucial one, is however the Stalin-Hitler pact of August, 1939, which precipitated the second world war.

we try to understand ideologies by merely taking their words at face value, as if they were scientific statements of fact, we can never comprehend history and politics.

New Dealism too has spread abroad the stress on the state as against the individual, planning as against private enterprise, jobs (even if relief jobs) against opportunities, security against initiative, “human rights” against “property rights.” 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.

as New Dealism develops it draws always closer to the other managerial ideologies. The notion that there is only one party—the New Deal party—that can represent the American people is no longer unfamiliar. The successful propaganda for a third term was simply a native expression of the doctrine of an indispensable leader. In each Roosevelt election the ideological line has been sharper.

The New Dealers never win any votes when they appeal to “free enterprise” and “opportunity” and the safeguarding of property.

What I am maintaining is simply this: Communism (Leninism-Stalinism), fascism-Nazism, and to a more-partial and less-developed extent, New Dealism and Technocracy, are all managerial ideologies. That is, in short: as ideologies they contribute through their propagation to the development of attitudes and patterns of response which are adverse to the continuance of capitalism and favorable to the development of managerial society, which are adverse to the continued social acceptance of the rule of the capitalists, and favorable to the social acceptance of the rule of the managers.

Passionate feeling, unfortunately, however appropriate it may be for some purposes—winning or losing a war, for instance—is a poor foundation for understanding.

The subject of this book is knowledge, not passion. We are trying to find out what is happening, in Russia and Germany as elsewhere, not what to feel about it or what to do about it.

To solve the first two parts of this problem (the third part is never wholly solved) means the destruction of the major institutions and ideologies of capitalist society and the substitution for them of the major institutions and ideologies of managerial society along the lines that we have already surveyed. To accomplish this solution, large sections of the masses must be enlisted, under suitable slogans, on the side of the managers and of the managerial future.

A wide campaign of “education” was undertaken to show the people why “workers’ rule” meant, in practice, managers’ rule. Where necessary, the education by the word was supplemented with education by firing squad or concentration camp or forced labor battalion.

Russia speaks in the name of freedom, and sets up the most extreme totalitarian dictatorship ever known in history. Russia calls for peace, and takes over nations and peoples by armed force. In the name of fighting fascism Russia makes an alliance with the world’s leading fascist. Proclaiming a fight against power and privilege, Russia at home drives a great gulf between a stratum of the immensely powerful, the vastly privileged, and the great masses of the people.

The Russian Revolution was not a socialist revolution—which, from all the evidence, cannot take place in our time—but a managerial revolution.

Today Russia is the nation which has, in structural aspects, advanced furthest along the managerial road.

above all when we realize that capitalism on a world scale is just about finished.

managerial society. A preliminary observation, to which I have already referred, must be repeated. By a “decadent” society, I shall mean no more than a type of society which is nearing its end in time and history.

Mass unemployment is the primary indication of the collapse of a given form of society. The great capitalist powers have proved that they cannot get rid of mass unemployment under capitalist institutions.

This is why genuine Fifth Columns (whether Nazi or Stalinist) cannot be wiped out. Wiping them out is not a question of catching spies and intelligence agents at work; it would have to include changing innermost feelings, loyalties, ideologies; and the propaganda based on capitalist ideologies is no longer strong enough to do this fully.

Rather is Hitler’s rise to power a phase of the basic managerial developments and a political expression of the fact that during these last eight years Germany has been turning the corner from the down-road of decadent capitalism, with managerial intrusions, to the up-road of early managerial society, with capitalist remnants.

Virtually all economic enterprise is subject to rigid state control; and it is control which we have seen to be decisive in relation to the instruments of production. Legal forms, even income privileges, are in the end subordinate to de facto control.

This reduction toward impotence of the capitalists is accompanied by the rise of precisely the class which we found to be at the top in Russia: the managers, together with their bureaucratic and military colleagues. This is the class (in which some individual capitalists have found a place) that even today in Germany holds the largest share of control over the instruments of production, wields the effective power, and already is receiving the lion’s share of the privileges. Even in Nazi law, the position of the manager is beginning to be openly recognized.

For the managers realize that the society which is developing is their society.

The direction counts; and the direction is toward the dropping of the remaining capitalist elements. But, though structurally less advanced, Germany is without most of those major weaknesses which we noted in the case of Russia. Its industrial and technological foundation is far stronger; the rising managerial class is much larger, better trained, more able. This is why Hitler had no qualms about the Russian Pact; he knew that, in the Pact, Russia was the minor partner.

The second world war is the first great war of managerial society. In this war the capitalist institutions no longer have a chance of winning.

continuation of the strategic extension begun in 1935. This phase, the consolidation of the European base, was completed with France’s surrender. It is completed irreversibly and can no longer be undone whatever the outcome of the succeeding phases of the war, which are really other wars. This consolidation, fundamental to the world politics of managerial society, is not going to be dissolved, not even if the present German regime is utterly defeated. In fact, no one expects it to be, not even the English statesmen. The day of a Europe carved into a score of sovereign states is over; if the states remain, they will be little more than administrative units in a larger collectivity.

The general outcome of the second war is also assured. It is assured because it does not depend upon a military victory by Germany, which is in any case likely. The hopelessness of the position of the British capitalists has been shown from the beginning of the second world war by the fact that they have absolutely no peace plans

And the masses would not permit the reversal of direction. The road back to capitalism would mean, as the masses would see it, going back to the unemployment, the humiliations, the confusions, the moral and social pointlessness of 1932.

What will emerge, as we have seen, will be a super-state based upon the European area of advanced industry. The Germany of 1933 and of now is the nuclear first stage in the development of that super-state.

In the United States, very conspicuously, the great private capitalists have been withdrawing from direct contact with production, traveling from direct supervision of the instruments of production to finance to occasional directors’ meetings to almost complete economic retirement.

Already in the United States, the tendency away from capitalism and toward managerial society has received a specific native ideological and institutional expression. This expression, suited to an earlier stage in the process than that reached in Russia or Germany, is the “New Deal,” which we have surveyed in some of its ideological aspects.

The firmest representatives of the New Deal are not Roosevelt or the other conspicuous “New Deal politicians,” but the younger group of administrators, experts, technicians, bureaucrats who have been finding places throughout the state apparatus: not merely those who specialize in political technique, in writing up laws with concealed “jokers,” in handing Roosevelt a dramatic new idea, but also those who are doing the actual running of the extending government enterprises: in short, managers.

They are ready to work with anyone and are not so squeamish as to insist that their words should coincide with their actions and aims. They believe that they can run things, and they like to run things.

Money left its “free” metallic base to become “managed currency” under the direction of the state. In utter disregard of capitalist-conceived budgetary principles, the state permitted itself annual deficits of billions of dollars and used the national debt as an instrument of managerial social policy. Tax bills were designed to secure social and political ends, rather than income.

The managers, in the governmental apparatus and in private enterprise, flourished while the capitalists lamented among themselves about “that man.” Congress, with occasional petty rebellions, sank lower and lower as sovereignty shifted from the parliament toward the bureaus and agencies. One after another, the executive bureaus took into their hands the attributes and functions of sovereignty; the bureaus became the de facto “law-makers.” By 1940, it was plain that Congress no longer possessed even the war-making power, the crux of sovereignty.

The New Deal is not Stalinism and not Nazism. It is not even a direct American analogue of them, for the New Deal is far more primitive with respect to managerial development, and capitalism is not yet over in the United States. But no candid observer, friend or enemy of the New Deal, can deny that in terms of economic, social, political, ideological changes from traditional capitalism, the New Deal moves in the same direction as Stalinism and Nazism. The New Deal is a phase of the transition process from capitalism to managerial society.

The fact of the matter is that the New Deal’s liberalism and progressivism are not liberalism and progressivism in the historical meaning of these terms; not, that is to say, capitalist liberalism and progressivism. Its progressivism, if we wish to call it that, consists of the steps it takes toward managerial society.

Moreover, the history of the New Deal relations with farmers’ and consumers’ organizations parallels the labor movement tendencies. The examples of Russia and Germany have already taught us that the early forms of managerial society require fusion of the popular organizations with the state. The bureaucrats in charge of the popular mass organizations, in fact, take their places among the managers. This tendency, like the other managerial tendencies, is conspicuous in the New Deal.

In the first place, capitalism cannot hold its own economically against managerial economic organization. This has been shown, in fact and by analysis, in connection with South America.

Almost all able economists in this country are lately agreed that capitalist institutions, “private initiative,” will not hold up against the controlled managerial methods in an economic battle over South America.

It is further stressed by the inability of capitalism, in this case United States capitalism, to get rid of the Fifth Column. The Fifth Column can be got rid of, not by any conceivable number of G-men, but only when the ideologies and methods that call it into being can be challenged by at least equally effective ideologies and methods.

Denunciation may persuade people not to believe what the book says. But truth is a function, not of belief, but of evidence.

The aim of propaganda is to persuade people to accept certain ideas or feelings or attitudes. The aim of science is to discover the truth about the world. The propagandistic aim is usually best served by being thoroughly one-sided, by presenting only what is favorable to your case and suppressing all that might weaken it and bolster your opponent. As Hitler remarks in one of his shrewd chapters on propaganda, you don’t sell your brand of soap by pointing out that a rival brand is really just as good.

It is perhaps worth remarking that there is an interesting piece of psychological evidence for the assured social position of the managers. The managers—these administrators, experts, directing engineers, production executives, propaganda specialists, technocrats—are the only social group among almost all of whose members we find an attitude of self-confidence.

Once again: what is being destroyed is our civilization, not civilization.

by unexamined acceptance of one or the other of the two assumptions which we have so often noticed: the very naïve assumption that capitalism is the only possible form of human social organization because it is somehow a part of eternal human nature; or the more common assumption that in modern times capitalism and socialism are the only possible alternative forms of social organization. Not only do these assumptions prevent us from knowing what the future is to bring; they compel us, more and more during the past two decades, to distort and twist our understanding of what is happening before our eyes.