THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION
191
To employ for a moment the metaphorical language of the
class struggle: Just as once the early capitalists built up their
power "within the womb of feudal society," but found that their
power could not be consolidated and extended without smashing
the foundations of feudalism; so the managers have built up their
power within the womb of capitalism-more and more
de facto
power coming into their hands as the capitalists proper, pushed
by
technological, social and moral changes, withdraw from produc–
tion to finance to economic idleness. For more than six hundred
years, from the fourteenth century until the first world war, the
curve of capitalist social domination rose without interruption.
The end of every decade found a greater percentage of the total
economy subject to capitalist rule and capitalist social relations
than the beginning. During the course of the first world war, the
curve turned catastrophically downward. The Russian Revolution
snatched at one stroke a sixth of the world's surface and a twelfth
of its population away from the capitalists and capitalism. The
Nazis, it turns
out~
though more slowly are bringing about the
same result in an even more decisive section of world economy.
And in all nations, rapid structural changes are reducing every–
where both the area of the economy subject to capitalist relations
as well as the degree of control exercised by the capitalists. The
continuous economic process is abruptly accentuated, but not
altered in direction, by political explosions.
The managers cannot consolidate their power without smash–
ing the foundations of capitalism. Whether the managers them–
selves realize .it or not, their problem can be solved only by doing
away with "private enterprise" and parliamentarism,
*
and replac–
ing them by state economy and govern:rpent by boards and bureaus.
In the process, the managers do not, of course, do the actual fight–
ing or construct the appropriate ideologies, any more than did the
early capitalists. The masses do the fighting and intellectuals con-
*I am unable, in this article, to discuss the difficult and humanly most important
problem of the relations among the managerial institutional structure, democracy, and
tctalitarianism. This much seems clear: Rapid advance toward the managerial struc–
ture has so far been accompanied by totalitarian politics. Nevertheless, totalitarianism
is
no more identical with the managerial structure than is democracy with the capi–
talist social structure; totalitarianism is merely one political form for the managerial
structure.
It
is certainly at least possible that managerial society, when consolidated,
will
develop its own kind of democracy-though not, it would seem, a parliamentary
democracy, and certainly not capitalist democracy; it is even
possible
that the transi–
tion to managerial society should be accomplished democratically.
