Branko Milanovi\u0107 and Nils Gilman<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In April 1941, with the Wehrmacht in Paris and the Ribbentrop\u2013Molotov pact still in force, the political theorist James Burnham published \u201cThe Managerial Revolution,<\/em>\u201d which famously declared<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was coming instead was a new economic system he termed \u201cmanagerialism,\u201d 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 \u2014 managers<\/em>. 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\u2019s 1940 re-election campaign had stopped using the language of \u201cbusinessmen\u201d and \u201cbankers\u201d and instead had turned to phrases like \u201ctechnicians in industry\u201d and \u201cmanagers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u03a0\u03b7\u03b3\u03ae: NOEMA Magazine<\/p>\n\n\n\n