As a brief departure from the flow of American Revolution 1776 era posts, here is a far more recent revolution which shows that change doesn't always need muskets and battlefields, or kings, or politics, or even the accountability of elections.
"It is no news to anyone to point out that during the generation since the First World War, sovereignty has been slipping away from parliaments... In four of the major nations of the modern world (Germany, Russia, Italy, France) sovereignty has already altogether departed from parliament; in two (Japan and England) parliament retains a small shred; and even in the last refuge, the United States, parliamentary (Congressional plus Supreme Court) sovereignty is more than half way into its grave".
So wrote James Burnham (Wikipedia here) in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World, in chapter 10 entitled 'The Managers Shift the Locus of Sovereignty'.
Burnham argued that - even in the midst of World War 2 - the concept of national sovereignty, as had been understood "from the Middle Ages to 1914", was effectively over. Administrators had taken over the world.
• Online here on Archive.org
• Here is the intro to George Orwell's critique 'Second Thoughts on James Burnham' (1946)
"... 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..."
0 comments:
Post a Comment