James Burnham, a former Totskyist who ended up as a anti-Comunist Cold Warrior, in 1941 wote a book called The Managerial Revolution. Here he argued that the owners of capital were being replaced as the 'ruling class' by the organisers of capital accumulation: the managers. Fascism, Communism, and 'organized capitalism' were all on the same route of travel. Burnham's book was widely noticed at the time, and allegedly had an influence on Orwell's 1984.
Interestingly, Burnham compared the position of managers
in the mid-twentieth-century to that of the bourgeoisie in the sixteenth-century. In the sixteenth-century there had been a
“triple battle” of capitalists against the feudal lords and the masses. In the twentieth-century, it was now managers seeking to smash the hold of capitalists on
the instruments of production, and to curb and co-opt the masses. In both epochs, the medium term result was a balance of forces that tended to create the
circumstances favourable to state-dictatorships rising above the contending forces.
As the sixteenth century balance produced absolutism, so the twentieth century
stalemate generated totalitarianism. Just as liberal constitutionalism eventually emerged
from the triumph of capitalism in the nineteenth century, however, a completed
managerial revolution would eventually generate democracy. This was the cheerfully optimistic conclusion absent in Orwell. In 1984, if there was any hope - and there wasn't much - it lay only with the proles.
There was no 'bourgeoisie' in the Marxist sense in the 16th-century and thus no struggle with feudal Lords or the masses. Your claims are nonsense as any specialist in the period will tell you.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that, anon. You should probably direct your corrections to the ghost of James Burnham, however. He, as you can see, is the chap actually making the claims.
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