The Triumph of the Managerial Revolution

Michael Miller takes on the "managerial capitalism run by an enlightened elite--politicians, business leaders, technology gurus, bureaucrats, academics, and celebrities--all gathered together trying to make the economic world smarter or more humane" — Davos Capitalism: Adam Smith's Nightmare.

"The late Samuel Huntington coined the term Davos Man -- a soulless man, technocratic, nation-less, and cultureless, severed from reality," he writes. "The modern economics that undergirded Davos capitalism is equally soulless, a managerial capitalism that reduces economics to mathematics and separates it from human action and human creativity."

Justin Raimondo, in Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, explains how the Trotskyites who were to become the Neo-conservatives embraced this notion, especially in the person of James Burnham, about whom, there is a brilliant essay by none other than George Orwell on the man and his thesis — James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution. This was written in 1946, two years before his most famous novel:

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.

Speaking of Orwell, Mr. Miller in his article notes that "Davos capitalism has become equated with free markets." He explains how it being "politically unacceptable to use the language of centralized planning," "astute politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair used market-friendly language" and "spoke about a smarter capitalism, managed globalization, the government working with business, and public/private partnerships." Says Mr. Miller, "They used market language while pursuing managerial capitalism."