In 1942, the former Trotskyist, James Burnham, published The Managerial Revolution, in which he argued that managers in both capitalist and socialist societies were assuming effective control of them, becoming a new ruling class. That “intellectual workers" were seeking to achieve state power by a variety of means was a familiar argument to anarchists. Bakunin had argued that Marxism was the ideology of this new class, and that the modern state was reaching the stage where it wouldfall under the control of the bureaucratic class, rising “into the condition of a machine" (Volume 1, Selection 22). In the following excerpts the anarcho-syndicalist Geoffrey Ostergaard (1926-1990) applies Burnham's analysis to English society, arguing that in England the managerial revolution was spearheaded by the Fabian Society, thegroup of middle class socialists associated with George Bernard Shaw and Sydney and Beatrice Webb. Originally published in Freedom, January 1954; reprinted in The Tradition of Workers’ Control—Selected Writings by Geoffrey Ostergaard (London: Freedom Press, 1997), ed. Brian Bamford.
WHEN THE FUTURE HISTORIAN COMES TO WRITE the history of the managerial social revolution in [England], he will undoubtedly assign a prime role to the Fabians. To them belongs the credit for preparing the way for the peaceful emergence of the new ruling class by the elaboration of a ‘socialist’ ideology which could, at one and the same time, enlist the sympathy ofthe proletariat without antagonizing those elements ofthe old capitalist class which were to be enrolled in the new ruling class of managers...
The popularity of the early Fabians... was in no small part due to their freeing British Socialism from revolutionary ideas and diverting it into constitutional paths, thereby making it respectable for even the middle class ‘do-gooders’ to profess a belief in socialism. The Fabian Society began and has continued as essentially a middle class movement, with middle class men and with middle class ideas and prejudices. No one will deny that the Fabians have often displayed a genuine sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, but however much theywerefor the working class they were never of it. To the Fabian the working class has always appeared at best as a rather stupid helpless child who requires an intelligent guardian to protect him...
No essential change, the Fabians argued, was necessaty, as the Marxists thought, in the apparatus of government. Much iess was it necessary, as the anarchists believe, to destroy the whole conception of the modern centralized State...
All that was required was for the people to gain control ofthe machine through the use of their votes and to perfect it for their own ends. With the acceptance of the democratic State went the tendency to identify it with the community. Such an identification made it possible to regard State control and State ownership as control and ownership by the community in the interests of ‘the community as a whole’ ...
The revolutionary socialists and anarchists, grounding their theory on the prime importance of the ownership of the means of production as the source of power of the ruling class, were led to draw a distinction between capitalist public ownership and genuine socialization. The capitalists as a class, however much certain interested sections ofthem might be hostile to particular acts of nationalization, were not averse to, and indeed supported, a limited extension of it in those services which were natural monopolies and which were of great importance to the functioning of private industry—notably communications, transit and power.
Such nationalization could be welcomed as increasing the general efficiency of private industry, as providing a secure and profitable field for investment, and as producing surpluses which could be used to relieve national and local taxation on property. The extension of public ownership by a capitalist controlled State could, therefore, only mean the strengthening of capitalist domination.
The Fabians, in contrast, showed themselves far less discriminating. Every extension of public ownership and control they welcomed as a victory for the community over the capitalists, and socialism became practically equivalent to the extension of State power and ownership...
The acceptance of the bourgeois State machine with its location of sovereign legal power in Parliament entailed the corollary that any institutions the workers built up should be subordinate to it... Consumers’ co-operation naturally had a part to play in the field of distribution, but elsewhere it suffered from inherent limitations which only the State could overcome. The function ofthe Trade Unionswas to represent the interests of the producers vis-a-vis the consumers. The extent ofTrade Union control was, however, to be strictly limited to a partial control over the conditions of work. In no circumstances was it to extend to interference in the productive side of business management...
Accepting explicitly the development of modern large-scale industry, they underlined... the growing distinction between the capitalist owners and the salaried managers, the latter performing the indispensable function of organizing production while the former, through their property rights, simply laid claim to profits, rent and interest. The progressive development of industry from individual ownership and management to joint stock companies and trusts indicated, they argued, that the next step, as each industry became ‘ripe’ for control, was the elimination of the capitalist owners, the State taking the place of the share holders ‘with no more dislocation... than is caused by the daily purchase of shares on the Stock Exchange’ (Sidney Webb). The managers were further reassured by the categorical statement that there would be no nonsense about equality of wages. The Fabian Society, declared one of its tracts (No. 70, 1896), ‘resolutely opposes all pretensions to hamper the socialization of industry with equal wages, equal hours of labour, equal official status, or equal authority for everyone.’ Management, it was later pointed out, is, or is fast becoming, a specialist technique, and its profession must be organized as such and paid its appropriate reward (Webb: The Works Manager Today, 1916).
With this high regard for bureaucratic and managerial administration went a characteristic managerial ideal—that of social efficiency, an ideal, which, if it has always found expression in socialist literature, has previously been subordinate to the more human values of freedom, mutual aid and social co-operation. The Fabians above all emphasized the economic advantages to be gained from a collectivist economy—the replacement of the ‘anarchy’ of competition by planned production and the elimination of wasteful unemployment and poverty through the establishment of a national minimum standard oflife. The total effect of Fabian doctrine was thus to transform socialism from a moral ideal ofthe emancipation of the proletariat to a complicated problem of social engineering, making it a task, once political power had been achieved, not for the ordinary stupid mortal but for the super-intelligent administrator armed with facts and figures which had been provided by diligent research...
The acceptance of the existing State meant the acceptance of an institution which, while it suited the bourgeoisie and could be, in this country at least, fairly readily adapted to the new ruling class of managers, is incapable of being controlled by the workers. The State and especially its central organs, as all who study its functioning know and as all practical politicians realize, is essentially a power over and above the people and not one readily amenable to their control. It acts in their name but in reality it acts in the interests of the dominant groups in society, which control the instruments of production, however many concessions it may care to make in the way of social welfare schemes. The Fabian theory of State ownership in the interests of the community coupled with the insistence on the subordinate role of the trade unions and co-operatives and on the importance of the experts, the bureaucrat and the manager, is one that is of direct interest to the managerial class, just as it is opposed to the interests of both the workers and (in the long run) to the capitalist owners.
No amount of assertion, statutory or otherwise, that nationalized industries are to be run ‘in the public interest’ can disguise the fact that they are being run in the interests of those in whom the real control is vested.
The concept of ‘the public interest,’ in itself an unanalyzable mumbo-jumbo, is in fact a beautiful ideological smokescreen to hide the interests of the managers while, at the same time, exposing the capitalists to public obloquy and confusing the workers. The limitation ofthe Trade Unions to a subordinate role in the nationalized industries means, moreover, thatthese working class organizations which could and should be operated as a base for building up, ‘within the womb of the old society,’ the power of the proletariat, have been castrated from the outset: the Trade Unions are to be used by the new masters, many ofwhom are ex-Trade Union leaders, only as more refined instruments for disciplining the workers. The emphatic rejection of the revolutionary idea of workers’ control—the most direct threat that the managers had to face—is a signal victory for the new ruling class...
It may be that the managerial society is inevitable if present tendencies continue but this does not mean that the dominance of the managers must be meekly accepted. The proletarian social revolution may be further off than we once thought and the difficulties of bringing it to birth may be more substantial than we once optimistically imagined, but this provides no reason whywe should not continue to work for it. To think otherwise is to accept—as Burnham himself accepts—the fallacy of historical determinism.
Butwe can onlywork for the proletarian social revolution ifwe have cleared our minds ofthe ideology of the managers. Thetime has now come for laying the foundations of a new workers’ movement—a movement which will not be misled by doctrines that appear to hold out the prospect of workers’ emancipation but in reality hands over the workers to new masters, a movement which will cut through the web that the Fabians have so cunningly spun, albeit half-unconsciously, in the interests of the managers...
[Tlhe class struggle must be redefined in such a way as to make clear that the proletariat has two enemies, the old, fast-disappearing capitalist class and the new increasingly powerful managerial class—the men whose social power is based not on their property rights but on the key positions which they hold within the industrial process. The long and bitter struggle ofthe first workers’ movement is drawing to a close. The drama is ending in a Pyrrhic victory for the workers and the stage must now be set for the next and second phase of the class struggle—the struggle against the managerial class.
World History
