We are aware that we live in a technocracy, but we don’t necessarily understand what that means. What is a technocrat, and how does he or, increasingly, she function? A key text to understanding this relatively new style of governance is James Burnham’s 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution. Writing during World War 2, Burnham finds a societal shift analogous to this new kind of warfare, as the West moved “from one type of structure of society to another type”.

The outgoing form of society is that dominated by capitalism, the development of which Burnham dates from the end of the Middle Ages to 1914, and “our purpose is to analyze not capitalism but the type of society which is succeeding it”. Three possibilities are offered up: that capitalism will continue to dominate society, that it will be succeeded by a “socialist revolution”, or that both capitalism and socialism will be replaced by the “managerial revolution” of the book’s title.

The failure of the first great experiment in socialism in Russia after the 1917 revolution, and that nation’s steadfast refusal to accept capitalist practice, along with the rise of historiography, mean that “The Marxian philosophy of dialectical materialism takes its place with the other outmoded speculative metaphysics of the nineteenth century.” This seems to imply, in Burnham’s triumvirate of alternatives, that Russia could only tend towards managerialism. Moving on to consider the struggle for power in a general sense, Burnham states that “To an ever-increasing extent in post-medieval society, the decisive sectors of economy are not agricultural but mercantile, industrial, and financial.” It is already clear that this shift from the old, extractive or “primary” industries to another level of organization lends itself to a new and necessary level of control. And, as feudal society gave way to – or was effectively defeated by – capitalism (partly due to collusion and the fact that the new class of capitalists were largely drawn from the feudal tradition), so too the control of production was accorded to the ever-strengthening bourgeoisie. The proletariat, although championed by the revolutionary socialists in Russia, “did not have the social equipment for the fight”. The stage is set for the managerial revolution.

The coming of this revolution is aided and abetted by accelerated culture, itself an analogue to increasing mechanization. “An unusually rapid rate of change of the most important economic, social, political, and cultural institutions of society”, seems to favor the coming of the managerial class. Wyndham Lewis described World War 1 as “the first mechanized war”, and when Burnham dates the rise of managerialism from what was, until World War 2, known as “the Great War”, the parallels with the acceleration of machine-based technology seem clear. The new class does not exercise its power through property rights, but rather via control of those rights, which is at the heart of managerialism. The managers will control not the means of production and their necessary link to property rights, but rather by controlling those who do. The ideology funding this Burnham calls “technocracy”. Burnham sums up the framework of transition:

In simplest terms, the theory of the managerial revolution asserts merely the following: Modern society has been organized through a certain set of major economic, social, and political institutions which we call capitalist, and has exhibited certain major social beliefs or ideologies. Within this social structure we find that a particular group or class of persons—the capitalists or bourgeoisie—is the dominant or ruling class in the sense which has been defined. At the present time, these institutions and beliefs are undergoing a process of rapid transformation. The conclusion of this period of transformation, to be expected in the comparatively near future, will find society organized through a quite different set of major economic, social, and political institutions and exhibiting quite different major social beliefs or ideologies. Within the new social structure, a different social group or class — the managers — will be the dominant or ruling class.

Burnham turns his attention to the question that bridges his era and our own. Who are the managers? As increasing technological specialization leads to less training time, for example, for engineers, mechanics, and various other secondary industry operatives, so too a new class of coordinators must of necessity arise:

“We may often recognize them as ‘production managers,’ operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians; or, in government (for they are to be found in governmental enterprise just as in private enterprise) as administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on.”

The feudal system required no management in the modern sense, and the early capitalist was his own manager. Burnham uses a fictional car company example to show that, although there are different positions which control the company – executives, stockholders, finance capitalists – the management class splits off from these dominant functionaries and becomes its own separate order. This shows us, writes Burnham, “the mechanism of the managerial revolution”.

As capitalists withdraw further and further away from the means of production, so a vacuum appears for the managerial class to fill:

Throughout industry, de facto control by the managers over the actual processes of production is rapidly growing in terms both of the aspects of production to which it extends and the times in which it is exercised. In some sections of the economy, the managerial control is already fairly thorough, even though always limited indirectly by big capitalist control of the banks and finance.

The new class of managers will not themselves replace the capitalists as the controllers of the means of production, but the management class as a whole will. And this class goes through the next stage of evolution as the government begins to expand into the economy as a whole:

“The actual, day-by-day direction of the processes owned and operated by the government or controlled, without full ownership, by the government is in the hands of individuals strictly comparable to those whom we have called ‘managers’ in the case of private industry.”

And so, as capitalism recedes, the new managerial class fortifies itself not simply with regards to the actual means of production, but to the economy itself.

It is clear that, while socialists favor governmental incursion into the wider economy, capitalists are against it. Today, for us, things are more complex, and a deal seems to have been struck between government and Burnham’s outgoing class. We have all heard of “crony capitalism”. There is, however, a historical determinism at play:

The ‘limited state’ of capitalism is replaced by the ‘unlimited’ managerial state. Capitalist society exists no longer or lingers only as a temporary remnant. Managerial society has taken its place.

And this managerial society, this new ruling class, will be exploitative. Also, it will gain a position from which it can “achieve a certain continuity from generation to generation”.

As Burnham looks to the future, he sees any problems for the new managerial class as being distinct from those that befell the old capitalist class:

“Managerial crises will, it would seem, be technical and political in character”.

The managerial class will, however, be better able to turn new technology to its advantage, as it will not be actuated by profit-and-loss motives. Burnham now moves to the “shift in the locus of sovereignty”.

That capitalist society develops in tandem with the institution of parliament cannot be plotted with accuracy, writes Burnham. It is not “as tidy as a geometrical theorem”. It is a point he makes often, and an important one. It is always a category mistake to expect social or historical theorizing to have the surety of the mathematical, but it is a category mistake still made today. However, with a change in the ruling class must come a change in its executive institutions, and Burnham conjectures what will accompany the rise of the managerial class in terms of its symbolic locus of power.

While the new managerial class can function in a state which is not totalitarian, totalitarianism cannot exist without the managers:

Those nations — Russia, Germany, and Italy — which have advanced furthest toward the managerial social structure are all of them, at present, totalitarian dictatorships.

Totalitarianism is enabled by technological advance, and technological advance is the sine qua non of managerialism.

Burnham considers the apparent conflation of managerialism with bureaucratism, and asks which of this set of functionaries is ultimately to be in charge. It makes little difference, he writes, and is simply a question of nomenclature as, “In either case, the general structural and institutional organization will be the same.” The result is also the same. Technology has enabled management not only to rise within the state system, but also to dictate and regulate that system as though it were itself a technologically enhanced means of production:

“Stalin or Hitler prepares for a new political turn more or less as a production manager prepares for getting out a new model on his assembly line.”

Welcome to the machine.

But the mask of democracy must still be worn, and the masses must continue to be duped by the ring of its name. We see this on a daily basis, as everyone from Donald Trump to Nigel Farage is branded by the new political managers as “a threat to democracy”. Democracy works best the smaller the core of the state which actually casts executive votes, as in Athens, and the new brand which is emerging in parallel with the new managerial class will be somewhat different, another aspect of the malevolent new state we see across the West today:

The democracy of capitalist society is on the way out, is, in fact, just about gone, and will not come back. The democracy of managerial society will be some while being born; and its birth pangs will include drastic convulsions.

Perhaps Burnham’s prediction explains the convulsions felt across the West today. It is not his only foresight which today sounds familiar, as he turns his attention to the “world policy” of the managers, and we detect the grand entrance of globalism, a term flung around today but whose definition is not wholly clear. The existence of many nations, Burnham writes, is simply not compatible with the technologically enhanced new world order. Managers would rather manage one large department than lots of little bureaucratic fiefdoms:

The complex division of labor, the flow of trade and raw materials made possible and demanded by modern technology, were strangled in the network of diverse tariffs, laws, currencies, passports, boundary restrictions, bureaucracies, and independent armies. It has been clear for some while that these were going to be smashed.

This is consistent with the borderless aims of today’s globalists. Any machine will function more efficiently if it is one large structure subject to repair and improvement as a whole, rather than having to modify mechanical sub-catalogues, and Burnham is prescient considering our current predicament:

If political problems were settled by scientific reasoning, we should, most probably, expect that the political system of managerial society would take the form of a single world-state.

However this is achieved, Burnham continues, war will be the catalyst, and he describes the war in which he is writing as the first great war of the managerial age, just as World War 1 was the last of the capitalist era.

What of the managerial ideology? Burnham reprises his distinction between types of truth, and the difference between truth functions is insufficiently attended in our time. Science is fact-based, ideology is not. The classical distinction between ratio and emotio becomes a distinctive feature of ideology compared with more rigorous science:

The primary function of ideologies – whether moral or religious or metaphysical or social is to express human interests, needs, desires, hopes, fears, not to cover the facts.” While scientific disputes can be settled by recourse to experiment and empirical verification or refutation, ideological differences have no such veridical reserve. It is simply a question of power, of Nietzschean kinetics. Burnham is alive to the pragmatics of the conflict between a dying capitalism and the new breed of manager, and also to the notion of adaptation over innovation:

That an ideology should be a managerial ideology, it is not necessary that managers should be its inventors or the first to adopt it. Capitalists did not invent capitalist ideologies; and intellectuals were elaborating them when the ambition of nearly every capitalist was still to be a feudal lord. It is the social effects that count.

Managerialism also unites two infamous ideologies, both ruinous, which are routinely separated today. This is a Venn-type overlap which takes us, once again, back to the model of the production-line:

Fascist and communist ideologies denounce in the same words the ‘chaos’ and ‘anarchy’ of capitalism. They conceive of the organization of the state of the future, their state, exactly along the lines on which a manager, an engineer, organizes a factory.

Considerations of managerial influence in Russia and Germany show that both were vulnerable to the new ideology, and thus were forced to accommodate it:

“What is really involved is a very important consequence of the pattern of the Russian way to managerial society, which we are here studying. This pattern, we saw, calls for first reducing the capitalists to impotence and then curbing the masses. The masses are of course used in accomplishing the first step; and ‘workers’ control’ is a major maneuver in breaking the power of the capitalists. But workers’ control is not only intolerable for the capitalist state: it is, if long continued and established, intolerable for any state and any class rule in society.”

The Russian Revolution, writes Burnham, was not a socialist revolution but a managerial one.

As for Germany, Burnham completes his equivalence in the context of managerialism:

“We find in Germany to an ever-increasing degree those structural changes which we have discovered to be characteristic of the shift from capitalism to managerial society. In the economic sphere, there is a steady reduction, in all senses, of the area of private enterprise, and a correlative increase of state intervention.”

Germany may be at an earlier stage than Russia, but Burnham still sees a larval managerial state.

As for US, although Burnham did not find it to be a managed concern yet, it was well on the way to becoming one:

In the United States, very conspicuously, the great private capitalists have been withdrawing from direct contact with production, traveling from direct supervision of the instruments of production to finance to occasional directors’ meetings to almost complete economic retirement. By this course, they give up, more and more, the de facto control of the instruments of production, upon which social rule in the end rests. Correlatively, more and more of the control over production, both within the arena of private enterprise and in the state, goes into the hands of the managers.

Anyone who has ever worked within a modern management structure, with its line-managers, reports, assessments, duplication, triplication, time-wasting training and ridiculous co-axial, private language, will hear the echoes of Burnham’s book, essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the modern world and its management, or mis-management:

But no one who comes into contact with managers will fail to have noticed a very considerable assurance in their whole bearing. They know they are indispensable in modern society. Whether or not they have thought it out, they grasp the fact that they have nothing to fear from the immense social changes speeding forward over the whole world. When they begin to think, they get ready to welcome those changes, and often to help them along.

It was Sir Geoffrey Howe, Margaret Thatcher’s aide de camp and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who coined the phrase “managing decline”, and that seems more appropriate now than ever. You would be surprised what can’t be managed.