THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION
195
ment and belief, at a more primitive level, with more capitalist
hangovers, than Bolshevism or Nazism. This the "Tories" (that is,
the capitalists) have, from shortly after the beginning, recognized,
and attested in 1940 by overwhelming and "principled" opposition
to Roosevelt's re-election. How ridiculous to attribute this opposi–
tion to a failure on the part of the Tories to understand "their own
true interests"! The Tories include many shrewd and intelligent
men. They oppose New Dealism because they see that New Dealism
in its consequences is directed against capitalism and thus against
themselves. And already, plainly, the power is shifting from the
capitalist hands into those of the managers and administrators, and
their bureaucratic colleagues. The locus of sovereignty, already,
has nearly completed its shift from parliament (Congress) to the
administrative boards and bureaus. Private enterprise-neces–
sarily the decisive base of capitalism, for the capitalist is the pri–
vate owner-gives way to the state. New Dealism is not Nazism,
any more than Nazism is Bolshevism. There is not a formal
identity among the three; but they are nonetheless linked histori–
cally. They are, all three, variant patterns of the way toward the
same goal, differing in their stage of development as well as in
their local background; they are three of the possible routes from
capitalist society to managerial society. And in the war to come–
which has, in reality, already started-the social transformation
in the United States will leap forward.
6.
We may, from the point of view of the managerial revolution,
discover the historical significance of the first two world wars. In
brief: the war of 1914-18 was the last great war of capitalism; the
present war is the first great formative war of managerial society.
The first world war, we might say, was a final convulsive
effort by capitalism to find a cure for the diseases which were
already, below the skin, eating its substance away. Instead of a
cure, as so often results from such desperate efforts, the disease
was only spread and made mortal. The course of the war itself
showed that capitalism was ending its days, by: the outright break–
ing off of an important section of the world (Russia) from the
capitalist structure; the cumulative weakening of capitalist insti–
tutions in all nations together with the growth of new (managerial)
