# The Managerial Revolution  ## Metadata - Author: [[James Burnham]] - Full Title: The Managerial Revolution - Category: #books ## Highlights - Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized 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’. ([Location 58](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=58)) - Tags: [[blue]] - 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. ([Location 62](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=62)) - Tags: [[blue]] - What Burnham is mainly concerned to show is that a democratic society has never existed and so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. ([Location 69](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=69)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority. ([Location 76](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=76)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Machiavelli and his followers taught that in politics decency simply does not exist, and, by doing so, Burnham claims, made it possible to conduct political affairs more intelligently and less oppressively. A ruling class which recognized that its real aim was to stay in power would also recognize that it would be more likely to succeed if it served the common good, and might avoid stiffening into a hereditary aristocracy. ([Location 82](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=82)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Acknowledging the true purpose of a system allows you to tune it to better serve that purpose - Burnham lays much stress on Pareto’s theory of the ‘circulation of the élites’. If it is to stay in power a ruling class must constantly admit suitable recruits from below, so that the ablest men may always be at the top and a new class of power-hungry malcontents cannot come into being. This is likeliest to happen, Burnham considers, in a society which retains democratic habits – that is, where opposition is permitted and certain bodies such as the press and the trade unions can keep their autonomy. ([Location 85](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=85)) - Tags: [[blue]] - it has always been obvious that a planned and centralized society is liable to develop into an oligarchy or a dictatorship. Orthodox Conservatives were unable to see this, because it comforted them to assume that Socialism ‘wouldn’t work’, and that the disappearance of capitalism would mean chaos and anarchy. Orthodox Socialists could not see it, because they wished to think that they themselves would soon be in power, and therefore assumed that when capitalism disappears, Socialism takes its place. As a result they were unable to foresee the rise of Fascism, or to make correct predictions about it after it had appeared. ([Location 113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=113)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality and internationalism. There is not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere, and the one great country in which something described as a proletarian revolution once happened, i.e. the U.S.S.R., has moved steadily away from the old concept of a free and equal society aiming at universal human brotherhood. In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger. But at the same time, Burnham insists, there has been no tendency to return to capitalism. What is happening is simply the growth of ‘managerialism’, which, according to Burnham, is in progress everywhere, though the manner in which it comes about may vary from country to country. ([Location 137](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=137)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The real question is not whether the people who wipe their boots on you during the next fifty years are to be called managers, bureaucrats, or politicians; the question is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy or to true democracy. ([Location 158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=158)) - Tags: [[blue]] - the banquet we assign to the gods of the Heroic Ages in tribute to the insight that insolence, and indifference, and brutality on such a scale remove beings from the human level. . . . Stalin’s political techniques shows a freedom from conventional restrictions that is incompatible with mediocrity: the mediocre man is custom-bound. Often it is the scale of their operations that sets them apart. It is usual, for example, for men active in practical life to engineer an occasional frame-up. But to carry out a frame-up against tens of thousands of persons, important percentages of whole strata of society, including most of one’s own comrades, is so far out of the ordinary that the long-run mass conclusion is either that the frame-up must be true – at least ‘have some truth in it’ – or that power so immense must be submitted to – is a ‘historical necessity’, as intellectuals put it. . . . There is nothing unexpected in letting a few individuals starve for reasons of state; but to starve, by deliberate decision, several millions, is a type of action attributed ordinarily only to gods. ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=226)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice. ([Location 287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=287)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. ([Location 309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=309)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In The Machiavellians, Burnham insists that politics is simply the struggle for power. Every great social movement, every war, every revolution, every political programme, however edifying and Utopian, really has behind it the ambitions of some sectional group which is out to grab power for itself. Power can never be restrained by any ethical or religious code, but only by other power. The nearest possible approach to altruistic behaviour is the perception by a ruling group that it will probably stay in power longer if it behaves decently. But curiously enough, these generalizations only apply to political behaviour, not to any other kind of behaviour. In everyday life, as Burnham sees and admits, one cannot explain every human action by applying the principle of cui bono? ([Location 355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=355)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If one examines the people who, having some idea of what the Russian régime is like, are strongly russophile, one finds that, on the whole, they belong to the ‘managerial’ class of which Burnham writes. That is, they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige. These people look towards the U.S.S.R. and see in it, or think they see, a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves. It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip. Burnham at least has the honesty to say that Socialism isn’t coming; the others merely say that Socialism is coming, and then give the word ‘Socialism’ a new meaning which makes nonsense of the old one. ([Location 392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=392)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It seems, however, possible to describe the chief constituents of what can intelligibly be meant by a “social revolution” without committing ourselves in advance to any special theory. These chief constituents seem to be three: 1. There takes place a drastic change in the most important social (economic and political) institutions. The system of property relations, the forms under which economic production is carried on, the legal structure, the type of political organization and regime, are all so sharply altered that we feel compelled to call them different in kind, not merely modified in degree. Medieval (feudal) property relations, modes of economic production, law, political organization are all replaced by modern (bourgeois or capitalist) property relations, modes of production, law, and political organization. During the course of the revolution it often happens that the old institutions are quite literally smashed to pieces, with new institutions developing to perform analogous functions in the new society. 2. Along with the changes in social institutions there go more or less parallel changes in cultural institutions and in the dominant beliefs which men hold about man’s place in the world and the universe. This cultural shift is plainly seen in the transition from feudal to modern capitalist society, both in the reorganization of the form and place of such institutions as the Church and the schools, and in the complete alteration of the general view of the world, of life, and of man which took place during the Renaissance. 3. Finally, we observe a change in the group of men which holds the top positions, which controls the greater part of power and privilege in society. To the social dominance of feudal lords, with their vassals and fiefs, succeeds the social dominance of industrialists and bankers, with their monetary wealth, their factories and wage-workers. ([Location 491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=491)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Production in capitalist economy is commodity production. Thousands of diverse goods are turned out by the processes of production, diverse in their nature and suited to the fulfillment of thousands of different human needs. Some can warm us, some decorate us, some feed us, some amuse us, and so on. But in capitalist economy all of these diverse goods can be directly compared with each other in terms of an abstract property—sometimes called their “exchange value”—represented either exactly or approximately (depending upon the economic theory which analyzes the phenomenon) by their monetary price. ([Location 588](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=588)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Products looked at from the point of view, not of those qualities whereby they can satisfy specific needs, but of exchange value, in which respect all products are the same in kind and differ only in quantity, are what is meant by “commodities.” ([Location 594](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=594)) - Tags: [[blue]] - even where goods entered into exchange in other societies, again notably in feudal society, they ordinarily did not do so as commodities. Exchange for the most part in the Middle Ages was not for money or through the intermediary of money but in kind; and there, too, what interested the buying or selling peasant was not the price he could get or would have to pay but whether he had a surplus of one kind of goods capable of satisfying one kind of need that he could trade for something else satisfying some other need. ([Location 603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=603)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The all-important, all-pervasive role of money is an equally obvious feature of capitalist economy, is indeed a necessary consequence of commodity production. Money is not an invention of capitalism; it has been present in most other societies, but in none has it played a part in any way comparable to what capitalism assigns it. ([Location 607](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=607)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In capitalist society, money has not one but two entirely different major economic functions. In the mighty development of the second of these lies another of the distinguishing features of capitalist economy. On the one hand, money is used as a medium of exchange; this is the use which is found in other types of society, and with respect to this use capitalism differs from them only, as we have seen, in the far greater extent, coming close to totality in developed capitalism, to which exchange is carried out through the intermediary of money. On the other hand, money is used as capital; “money makes money”; and this function was developed little, often not at all, in other types of society. Under capitalism, money can be transformed into raw materials, machines, and labor; products turned out and retranslated into money; and the resultant amount of money can exceed the initial amount—a profit, that is to say, can be made. This process can be carried out, moreover, without cheating anyone, without violating any accepted legal or moral law; but, quite the contrary, fully in accordance with accepted rules of justice and morality. ([Location 619](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=619)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Normal capitalist production is carried on for profit in the sense that a capitalist enterprise must operate, over a period, at a profit or else close down. What decides whether a shoe factory can keep going is not whether the owner likes to make shoes or whether people are going barefoot or badly shod or whether workers need wages but whether the product can be sold on the market at a profit, however modest. If, over a period of time, there continues to be a loss instead of a profit, then the business folds up. Everybody knows that this is the case. ([Location 652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=652)) - Tags: [[blue]] - this was not the case in medieval economy. In agriculture, by far the chief industry, production was carried on not for a profit but to feed the growers and to allow for the exactions (in kind, for the most part) of feudal suzerains and the Church. In other industries (amounting in all to only a minute percentage of the economy) the medieval artisan usually made goods (clothes, say, or furniture or cloth or shoes) only on order from a specific person because that person wanted them; and he usually made the goods out of raw materials supplied by the customer. ([Location 656](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=656)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Capitalist economy is strikingly characterized by a special kind of periodic economic crisis, not met with or occurring only very rarely and on limited scales in other types of society. These capitalist crises of production have no relation either to “natural catastrophes” (drought, famine, plague, etc.) or to people’s biological and psychological needs for the goods that might be turned out, one or the other of which determined most crises in other types of society. The capitalist crises are determined by economic relations and forces. ([Location 661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=661)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In capitalist economy, production as a whole is regulated, so far as it is regulated, primarily by “the market,” both the internal and the international market. There is no person or group of persons who consciously and deliberately regulates production as a whole. The market decides, independently of the wills of human beings. In the earliest (mercantile) and again in the late stages of capitalist development, monopoly devices and state intervention try to gain some control over production. But they operate only in restricted fields, not in the total productive process, and even in narrow fields they never succeed in emancipating production altogether from the market. ([Location 668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=668)) - Tags: [[blue]] - One of these classes is comprised of those who as individuals own, or have an ownership interest in, the instruments of production (factories, mines, land, railroads, machines, whatever they may be); and who hire the labor of others to operate these instruments, retaining the ownership rights in the products of that labor. This class is usually called the bourgeoisie or the capitalists. The second class, usually called the proletariat or the workers, consists of those who are, in a technical sense, “free” laborers. They are the ones who work for the owners. They are “free” in that they are “freed from,” that is, have no ownership interest in, the instruments of production; and in the further sense that they are free to sell their labor to those who do hold such ownership, renouncing, however, ownership rights in the product of their labor. They are, in short, wage-workers. ([Location 680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=680)) - Tags: [[blue]] - That the owner of a factory should own also its products; that we need money to buy things; that most people should work for wages for others; that a business has to lower production or cut wages or even stop when it can’t make a profit—all this seems as natural to many as the need to breathe or eat. Yet history tells flatly that all of these institutions are so far from being inevitably “natural” to man that they have been present in only a small fraction, the last few hundred years, of the lengthy history of mankind. ([Location 703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=703)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Such a system and conception are in the widest contrast to the medieval system and conception. The central and controlling political relation for each individual person under feudalism (with the exception of the inhabitants of a few towns) was not to be the citizen of the abstracted institution, the nation, but to be “so-and-so’s man,” the vassal or serf of such and such a suzerain. His political loyalty and duty were owed to a person, and, moreover, to the person who was his immediate superior in the feudal hierarchy. Dante’s Satan occupies the lowest point in Hell for the gravest of all feudal sins: “treachery to his lord and benefactor.” ([Location 722](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=722)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Capitalist society was the first which had, in some measure, a world extent. From one point of view, the world ramifications were a result of economic developments: the search for markets, sources of raw materials, and investment outlets was extended everywhere. But along with this most of the earth was brought in one way or another within the orbit of capitalist political institutions. The great powers, including within their own immediate borders only a small fraction of the territory and population of the world, reduced most of the rest of the world to either colonies or dominions or spheres of influence or, in many cases, to weak nations dependent for their continued existence upon the sufferance of the powers. ([Location 738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=738)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The prime interest of liberalism was the promotion of the capitalist economic process. According to the liberal theory of the state, the business of the state was to guarantee civil peace (“domestic tranquillity”), handle foreign wars and relations, and with that to stand aside and let the economic process take care of itself, intervening in the economic process only in a negative way to correct injustices or obstacles and to keep the market “free.” ([Location 762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=762)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Actual states always did intervene in the economic process more actively than the theory called for: with subsidies, tariffs, troops to put down internal disturbances or follow investments to foreign parts, or regulations benefiting one or another group of capitalists. In the early days of capitalism, intervention by the “mercantilist” state was even more widespread. But in spite of this gap between theory and fact, there was a large kernel of truth in the liberal theory and a decisive, if only partial, correspondence with capitalist reality. The capitalist state intervened in the economic process, but the interventions, in extent and depth, never went beyond what was after all a fairly narrow limit. In the economic field, we might say, the state always appeared as subordinate to, as the handmaiden of, the capitalists, of “business,” not as their master. ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=766)) - Tags: [[blue]] - There is a simple reason for this relation: capitalist economy is the field of “private enterprise,” based upon private property rights vested in individuals as individuals; an invasion by the state beyond a certain point into the economic process could only mean the destruction of those individual property rights—in fact even if not in legal theory—and therefore the end of capitalist economic relationships. ([Location 772](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=772)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Political authority, sovereignty, cannot remain up in the clouds. It has to be concretized in some man or group of men. We say that the “state” or “nation” makes the laws that have to be obeyed; but actually, of course, the laws have to be drawn up and proclaimed by some man or group of men. This task is carried out by different persons and different sorts of institutions in different types of society. The shift in what might be called the institutional “locus” of sovereignty is always an extremely significant aspect of a general change in the character of society. From this point of view, the history of the political development of capitalism is the history of the shift in the locus of sovereignty to parliament (using the word in its general sense) and more particularly to the lower house of parliament. In almost all capitalist nations, the authority to make laws was vested in a parliament, and the laws were in fact made by the parliament. Moreover, the political shift to parliament as central authority coincided historically, on the whole, with the general development of capitalist society. ([Location 778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=778)) - Tags: [[blue]] - we must, particularly today, stress the point that political democracy and capitalism are not the same thing. There have been many politically democratic states in societies which were not capitalist; and there have been many nondemocratic states in capitalist society. ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=806)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Ideologies capable of influencing and winning the acceptance of great masses of people are an indispensable verbal cement holding the fabric of any given type of society together. Analysis of ideologies in terms of their practical effects shows us that they ordinarily work to serve and advance the interests of some particular social group or class, and we may therefore speak of a given ideology as being that of the group or class in question. However, it is even more important to observe that no major ideology is content to profess openly that it speaks only for the group whose interests it in fact expresses. Each group insists that its ideologies are universal in validity and express the interests of humanity as a whole; and each group tries to win universal acceptance for its ideologies. This is true of all the ideologies mentioned in the preceding paragraph. ([Location 826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=826)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Among the elements entering into the ideologies typical of capitalist society, there must be prominently included, though it is not so easy to define what we mean by it, individualism. Capitalist thought, whether reflected in theology or art or legal, economic, and political theory, or philosophy or morality, has exhibited a steady concentration on the idea of the “individual.” ([Location 834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=834)) - Tags: [[blue]] - According to the prevailing capitalist idea, the fundamental unit of politics, psychology, sociology, morality, theology, economics was thought of as the single human individual. This individual was understood as complete “in himself,” in his own nature, and as having only external relations to other persons and things. Though Hegel and his followers notoriously reject this conception, it is unquestionably typical, and is implicit where not explicit in most of the influential doctrines and public documents of the fields just mentioned. The Church, the state, the ideal utopia, are not realities in themselves but only numerical sums of the individuals who compose them. ([Location 845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=845)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In keeping with the general ideology of individualism was the stress placed by capitalist society on the notion of “private initiative.” Private initiative, supposed, in the chief instance, to provide the mainspring of the economic process, was discovered also at the root of psychological motivation and moral activity. ([Location 851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=851)) - Tags: [[blue]] - in capitalist society, the theological and supernatural interpretation of the meaning of world history was replaced by the idea of progress, first appearing in the writers of the Renaissance and being given definite formulation during the eighteenth century. There were two factors in the idea of progress: first, that mankind was advancing steadily and inevitably to better and better things; and, second, the definition of the goal toward which the advance is taking place in naturalistic terms, in terms we might say of an earthly instead of a heavenly paradise. ([Location 858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=858)) - Tags: [[blue]] - That problem is to discover, if possible, what type (if indeed it is to be a different type) of social organization is on the immediate historical horizon. With reference to this specific problem, all of the theories, with the exception of those few which approximate to the theory of the managerial revolution, boil down to two and only two. The first of these predicts that capitalism will continue for an indefinite, but long, time, if not forever: that is, that the major institutions of capitalist society, or at least most of them, will not be radically changed. The second predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by socialist society. The theory of the managerial revolution predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by “managerial society” (the nature of which will be later explained), that, in fact, the transition from capitalist society to managerial society is already well under way. ([Location 890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=890)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The first, and perhaps crucial, evidence for the view that capitalism is not going to continue much longer is the continuous presence within the capitalist nations of mass unemployment and the failure of all means tried for getting rid of mass unemployment. The unemployed, it is especially significant to note, include large percentages of the youth just entering working age. Continuous mass unemployment is not new in history. It is in fact, a symptom that a given type of social organization is just about finished. ([Location 928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=928)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The volume of public and private debt has reached a point where it cannot be managed much longer. The debt, like the unemployed, sucks away the diminishing blood stream of capitalism. And it cannot be shaken off. Bankruptcies, which formerly readjusted the debt position of capitalism, hardly make a dent in it. The scale of bankruptcy or inflation which could reduce the debt to manageable size would at the same time—as all economists recognize—utterly dislocate all capitalist institutions. ([Location 951](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=951)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Capitalism is no longer able to find uses for the available investment funds, which waste in idleness in the account books of the banks. This mass unemployment of private money is scarcely less indicative of the death of capitalism than the mass unemployment of human beings. Both show the inability of the capitalist institutions any longer to organize human activities. During the past decade in the United States, as in other capitalist nations, new capital investment has come almost entirely from state, not from private, funds. ([Location 962](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=962)) - Tags: [[blue]] - France collapsed so swiftly because its people had no heart for the war—as every observer had remarked, even through the censorship, from the beginning of the war. And they had no heart for the war because the bourgeois ideologies by which they were appealed to no longer had power to move their hearts. Men are prepared to be heroes for very foolish and unworthy ideals; but they must at least believe in those ideals. ([Location 998](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=998)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nowhere is the impotence of bourgeois ideologies more apparent than among the youth, and the coming world, after all, will be the youth’s world. The abject failure of voluntary military enlistment in Britain and this country tells its own story to all who wish to listen. It is underlined in reverse by the hundreds of distinguished adult voices which during 1940 began reproaching the American youth for “indifference,” “unwillingness to sacrifice,” “lack of ideals.” How right these reproaches are! And how little effect they have! ([Location 1001](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=1001)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The determining characteristics of what they mean by socialist society are that it is classless, fully democratic, and international. ([Location 1037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=1037)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By “classless” is meant that in socialist society no person or group of persons has, directly or indirectly, any property rights in the instruments of production different from those possessed by every other person and group; it amounts to the same thing to say that in socialist society there are no property rights in the instruments of production, since a property right has meaning only if it differentiates the status of those who have it from that of those who do not. The democracy of the hypothetical socialist society is to extend, and completely, to all social spheres—political, economic, and social. And socialist society is to be organized on an international scale; if this cannot be done completely in the first stages, at least this is to be the tendency of socialism. ([Location 1041](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=1041)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Put very simply, the Marxist movement understands the process as follows: the working class will take over state power (by insurrectionary means according to the Leninist wing of Marxism; by parliamentary means according to the reformist wing); the state will then abolish private property, either all at once or over a short period of time; and, after a certain period of adjustment (called by the Leninist wing the “dictatorship of the proletariat”), socialism will be ushered in. Under socialism itself, in keeping with its fully democratic, classless structure, state power in the sense of the coercive institutions of government (police, army, prisons) will disappear altogether. (Anarchism differs from Marxism in believing that the state cannot be used for ushering in the free classless society, but must be abolished at once, with the job of socialization to be carried out by the workers’ organizations—unions, co-operatives, etc. The net result, however, is the same.) ([Location 1053](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=1053)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The second assumption is, in effect, the following: that the abolition of capitalist private property rights in the instruments of production is a sufficient condition, a sufficient guarantee, of the establishment of socialism—that is, of a free, classless society. Now we already have available historical evidence, both from ancient and modern times, to show that this assumption is not correct. Effective class domination and privilege does, it is true, require control over the instruments of production; but this need not be exercised through individual private property rights. It can be done through what might be called corporate rights, possessed not by individuals as such but by institutions: as was the case conspicuously with many societies in which a priestly class was dominant—in numerous primitive cultures, in Egypt, to some degree in the Middle Ages. In such societies there can be and have been a few rich and many poor, a few powerful and many oppressed, just as in societies (like the capitalist) where property rights are vested in private individuals as such. ([Location 1089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=1089)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Far from showing tendencies toward socialism, far from taking steps in the direction of socialism, the Russian revolutionary society developed in a plainly contrary direction. With respect to the three decisive characteristics of socialist society—classlessness, freedom, and internationalism—Russia is immeasurably further away today than during the first years of the revolution; nor has this direction been episodic but rather a continuous development since those early years. This has occurred in direct contradiction to Marxist theory: in Russia the key conditions, as it was thought, for the advance, if not to socialism at least well into its direction, were present—the assumption of state power by a Marxist party “of the workers,” and above all the supposedly crucial abolition of private property rights in the chief instruments of production. ([Location 1154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=1154)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The capitalists were, with trivial exceptions, eliminated from Russian society and have not returned. In spite of this, a new class stratification, along economic lines, has proceeded to such a point that it equals or exceeds in sharpness that found in capitalist nations. This is shown on the one hand in the absolute elimination of the great masses of the people from any shred of control (the crux of property right) over the instruments of production. It is shown equally well in the income stratification. According to Leon Trotsky, in an article published in late 1939, and to my personal knowledge based on a careful collation and analysis of statistics published in the Soviet press, the upper 11% or 12% of the Soviet population now receives approximately 50% of the national income. This differentiation is sharper than in the United States, where the upper 10% of the population receives approximately 35% of the national income. ([Location 1160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=1160)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Though Russia did not move toward socialism, at the same time it did not move back to capitalism. This is a point which is of key significance for the problem of this book. All of those who predicted what would happen in Russia, friends and enemies, shared the assumption which I have already discussed in this chapter: that socialism is the “only alternative” to capitalism; from which it followed that Russia—since presumably it could not stay still—would either move toward socialism or back to the restoration of capitalism. Neither of these anticipated developments has taken place. All of the attempts to explain the present Russian setup as capitalist—of which there have recently been a number—or about to become capitalist have broken down miserably (no capitalist has any illusions on that score). Trotsky, otherwise the most brilliant of all analysts of Russia, to his death clung desperately to this “either … or” assumption, and in late years consequently became less and less able to explain sensibly or predict what happened. The only way out of the theoretical jam is to recognize that the assumption must be dropped, that socialism and capitalism are not the sole alternatives, that Russia’s motion has been toward neither capitalism nor socialism, but toward managerial society, the type of society now in the process of replacing capitalist society on a world scale. ([Location 1201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07MMDWBQN&location=1201)) - Tags: [[blue]]