“James Burnham’s book, THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION, made a considerable stir both in the United States and in this country at the time when it was published, and its main thesis has been so much discussed that a detailed exposition of it is hardly necessary.”
– George Orwell in his essay “James Burhnam and THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION”
Previous member of the Trotskyite organization and disenchanted by Marxian visions of the Soviet state, James Burnham (1905-1981) broke all ties to communism and to socialism in general.
He wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941, during the world’s second great war. Surrounded by political upheaval and faced with a majority of the world’s population in economic unrest, Burnham perhaps felt compelled to analyze the world at an economic level.
George Orwell has well summarized his thesis as this:
‘Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers”. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.’
In shorter words, the characteristic feature of modern industrial societies is the rise of managers as the effective wielders of power, particularly in the economy. In capitalist societies this means that capitalists (in the sense of owners) are losing power; in state socialist or communist societies, that politicians or the working class are losing it.
His book heavily influenced George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” notably on Warfare. 1984 (which he wrote in 1948) envisaged a division of the world into three warring blocks, following James Burnham’s book. The Orwellian state in Britain, as part of Oceania (the Anglo-American block), depicted in 1984, would be based not on Stalin’s system but on INGSOC (the Newspeak acronym for “English Socialism”).
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