Customer Reviews

The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World

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Burnham's Managerial Revolution was published in 1940, almost 20 years before J.K. Galbraith's more famous The New Industrial State (1958), but contains most of the important ideas concerning the rise of a managerial class with loyalties more to its own class than to the owners of the enterprise (capital, shareholders), which later made Galbraith famous. Other than the fact that Burnham (once a leftist philosophy professor who broke with the left over Stalin's crimes) was a conservative, there is no rational explanation why this is not the famous book and Galbraith an epigonal footnote. Dated of course, but Burham was insightful and prescient. Especially in view of recent evidence of members of the new managerial class looting their companies despite attempts to align their interests more closely with the owners (stockholders) through stock incentive schemes. Read Burnham!

Burnham begins seemingly in a rational, fair, and balanced way. He explores the rise of managers as a group of skilled individuals, meeting the growing need for organization in a complex society as well as in increasingly complex businesses. It seems perfectly appropriate that people specially trained to organize business and government, should have access to information that lets them do the job well, and also should be paid enough to attract additional people to that difficult set of tasks: the tasks of guiding, administering, managing, directing and organizing the processes of production or service delivery.

Soon, however, Burnham's voice becomes more sincere: In the "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 will be successful ... against the masses, who, obscurely, are a social force tending against oppression and class rule of any kind." [The mechanism is] "propaganda and ideologies, all under a bewildering variety of slogans and ostensible motivations" (Burnham, p. 166, 1941):

"The managers, the ruling class of the new society, will for their own purposes require at least a limited democracy. When the ruling group becomes more and more liable to miscalculate, a certain measure of democracy makes it easier for the ruling class to get more, and more accurate, information. Second, experience shows that a certain measure of democracy is an excellent way to enable opponents and the masses to let off steam without endangering the foundations of the social fabric. Democracy, freedom for public minority political expression within a class society, must be so limited as not to interfere with the basic social relations whereby the ruling class maintains its position of power and privilege.

"When the vote has been extended to wide sections of the population, including a majority that is not members of the ruling class, that problem is more difficult. In spite of the wider democracy, however, control by the ruling class can be assured ... when major social institutions upholding the position of the ruling class are firmly consolidated, when ideologies contributing to the maintenance of these institutions are generally accepted, when the instruments of education and propaganda are primarily available to the ruling class...." (Burnham, p. 168, 1941).

This is an important book to read and share because it reveals, plainly spoken, the contempt business managers have, and are taught to have, for the citizens of our nation and the world, as well as the strategies they use to control our actions and even our thoughts.

James Burnham's THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION was the inspiration for George Orwell's famous novel 1984, and despite a number of errors owing to the author's Marxist bias, it is a brilliant book. Writing at the outset of World War II, Burnham maintained that that war represented a revolution away from both capitalism and parliamentary democracy as we knew them to a totally new form of society. His errors themselves actually support this thesis. For instance, he is wrong when he asserts that total war cannot end unemployment. In fact it did, and the new bureaucratic elite liked that solution so much that it decided to keep America on a permanent war footing by creating the National Security State. He is wrong when he asserts that the managers of industry, who know better than the owners how to coordinate all the varied and complex functions of a high-tech corporation, will dominate the bureaucrats, to whom Congress has surrendered most of its sovereignty. But the two groups now have enough in common to work together for sinister ends, in contrast to the old capitalists and the old parliamentary democracy, which so often found themselves in conflict. What Burnham does not say, though it is an obvious conclusion to be drawn from his book, is that in this new, high-tech form of society, BOTH POWER AND WEALTH STEM FROM THE POSSESSION NOT OF THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION, BUT OF INFORMATION, ESPECIALLY INFORMATION WHICH HAS ANY MILITARY APPLICATION.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the way that American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) has allowed its facilities to be used by the National Security Agency (NSA). AT&T is specifically mentioned by Burnham as the classic example of the management-run corporation (p. 88). In 2006 a man named Mark Klein, who had worked for that corporation as a technician for some 22 years, made public his discovery that it was electronically "splitting off" records of the activities of private individuals on the net-- e-mails, websearches, and reviews such as this one-- and sending them to the NSA. As he said, "This potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens." He took his allegations to the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, which filed suit against AT&T, as did the ACLU. So far the results of these suits have been inconclusive. But even if they succeed, one must remember that intelligence agencies have consistently refused to subordinate themselves to the rule of law. If a method exists for doing what they want to do they will do it, regardless of whether it is legal or not.

Meanwhile, the man who was in charge of this program, a despotic bureaucrat of Orwellian stamp, was making progress in his career. General Michael Hayden was director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005. During this time, he developed a strategy to increase the government's use of private industry for domestic surveillance. By the end of his tenure in that office, the government had collected enough information from the internet to nip in the bud any organized protest against drastic new measures, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction against Iran, or the declaration of martial law. And for such dangerous work, he has been amply rewarded, being made Director the CIA, America's premier intelligence agency and the chief promoter of terrorism and lawlessness throughout the world. It is impossible not to think that the repressive methods it has been perfecting-- including torture-- will not be used against the dissidents whose names have been collected through the NSA-AT&T collusion. When one contemplates the horror that the new bureaucratic-managerial elite has unleashed upon our society, it seems very appropriate that the CIA-run PHOENIX program in Vietnam called electrical torture "The Bell Telephone Hour".