The managerial revolution

What Hacker News says

1. archhnApr 2022
   See "The Managerial Revolution" by James Burnham.
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2. AmezarakNov 2020
   One of the people who extensively documented the features of the managerial revolution was a communist completely familiar with the writings of Lenin, James Burnham. See the book by that name.

   > The fact that they let their managers take a cut doesn’t change the power dynamic.

   The managers are not simply taking a cut, they are exerting power over capitalists and winning.

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3. jstewartmobileMay 2020
   Feudalism/Democracy/Socialism/Capitalism/etc. ceased to explain reality a long time ago.

   Regardless of one’s ideological starting point, the complexities of the modern world will necessitate an org chart which is both very broad and very deep.

   A better explanation of what we have—and will continue to have barring some cataclysm—is laid out in Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” and Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy.”

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4. jstewartmobileDec 2019
   I'd recommend James Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution"

   https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.17923/page/n3

   The gist being that the capitalist/socialist arguments--the ones we continue to wear into the ground--ceased to describe reality a very long time ago, and that real power is now concentrated in the hands of high-leverage organizational men: technicians, managers, bureaucrats, executives, etc.

   I've seen his thesis play out so many times in business--where the owner is terrified of what his top salesman, or best engineer might or might not do. Imagine what would happen to Google if their top search guys just walked out one day. Basically, we have a participant who is technically a wage-laborer, yet has more power than an owner. This is even reflected in the share rights (or lack thereof) for many companies.

   Outside of local restaurants and developing countries, long gone are the days of the "bourgeois capitalist"--who knew his business from top to bottom--managing unskilled laborers who were as interchangeable as nuts and bolts.

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5. hgaOct 2013
   Dwight D. Eisenhower if only as a political general who kept the fractious Allied commanders and units together. He gets a special award for being Montgomery's direct report, shielding a lot of people above from having to directly deal with him (not a joke, I'm saying this in all seriousness).

   Churchill: without his resolution and ability, we very possibly would have had to start the invasion of Europe with Ireland or Great Britain, assuming it ever happened.

   Right next to Hitler put Marx and Lenin, who's death toll overwhelms the former.

   FDR, who right next to the above including Lenin's successor Stalin, who also completely changed the nature of his country's government and eventually the country's nature (read The Managerial Revolution). As the then most powerful country in the world, that was a very big thing.

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6. intalentiveApr 2026
   Technology did change the world, and technocrats did shape it. This was part of what Burnham called the "managerial revolution". In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. It has never really changed ever since.

   The permanent war economy of the United States never ceased, the constant monetary tweaking by the Federal Reserve never ceased, the "nudge units" and public relations firms that manage opinion never ceased. The television was and is a technocratic tool. The birth control pill, and pharmaceuticals generally, were and are technocratic tools. They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".

   The main difference between the original technocracy movement, and what actually played out in history, is that the technicians and engineers operating the machinery of population management were never really in charge. They were merely instruments -- means to an end. Aldous Huxley explained the situation in 1958:

   "By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manip­ulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitari­anism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slo­gans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and free­dom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of sol­diers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."

   Today the biggest challenges to the Western technocratic oligarchy are 1) loss of narrative control via the internet, 2) external threats from other great (technocratic) powers, and 3) internal decline and incompetence.

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