Branko Milanović and Nils Gilman
In April 1941, with the Wehrmacht in Paris and the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact still in force, the political theorist James Burnham published “The Managerial Revolution,” which famously declared that capitalism was finished. His claim was not that it ought to be finished, but that it was, as a matter of observable fact, being replaced. The successor system would not, however, be socialism, as he had hoped during his earlier days as a Trotskyist. Socialism, he argued, was a utopia: it required abundance, and since human wants are unlimited, abundance is unreachable.
What was coming instead was a new economic system he termed “managerialism,” in which the instruments of production pass to the state and the state passes them on to the men who know how to run things — managers. If capitalists survived at all, it would be merely as a decorative residue: playing golf in Florida while the managers made every decision that mattered. The USSR was the first managerial society; Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and New Deal America were the next. Burnham noted with some relish that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1940 re-election campaign had stopped using the language of “businessmen” and “bankers” and instead had turned to phrases like “technicians in industry” and “managers.”
Πηγή: NOEMA Magazine