>>1875Your theory has in fact been expressed before. James Carter Burnham, a former Trotskyite thay helped form the Socialist Workers' Party, had a 1941 book called
The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening In The World that detailed the new theory he had dropped Marxism in favor of.
According to Burnham, dialectical materialism had been broken when a new and distinct class arose between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He callded this class the "managers", and they specifically represented the layers of middle management between owner and laborer. What made the managers distinct was that they provided a techincal expertise which the bourgeoisie did not themselves have, and which was needed to make the conditions for proletarian labor possible. We may think of aspects such as supply-chain management, humans relations, research and development, accounting, the legal department, sales management, payroll, recruitment, and on and on.
The significant change which occurred according to Burnham was that many business roles which were traditionally carried out by the owner at the petite bourgeois level had, by the time of the Industrial Revolution and the haute bourgeoisie, become so knowledge intensive and vast in scope that many business practices became full time jobs in and of themselves. The simple layer of middle management hired at first to free the haute bourgeoisie to manage their business as a commercial entity within a market (rather than manage a plethora of materially intricate practices of production within a firm) morphed into a distinguishable class because of how specialized the tasks had become. By the time of the book's writing, Burnham identified that virtually all haute bourgeoisie would be incapable of running the busineeses they owned or held stock in, as 20th century production had become a vast field of sciences distinct from running a business within a commercial marketplace.
According to Burnham, the managers' class identity hinges on the fact that they have immense private control over the means of production, but not private ownership. The managers' derive their power from their position within an organization. While the bourgeois nature is to own and squeeze profit out of things, and the proletarian nature is to sell oneself into directly mixing labor with material, the managerial nature is to make the productive activities of an organization possible via an institutionally empowered application of technical expertise. The manager is a truly corporate being as unlike the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, he derives his class not from serving himself as himself, but from serving himself as the appendage of an organization.
Burnham pointed out that Marxist doctrine had not been able to predict that a dictatorship of the proletariat would morph into state socialism, nor had it predicted the phenomenon of fascism. All later Marxist explanations of the former as a degenerated workers' state (or socialism in one country if you were sympathetic to it) and of the latter as decadent and militant last stage capitalism were after-the-fact attempts to shoehorn historical developments into existing dialectical materialist thought. Rather than state socialism and fascism being unforeseen nuances in revolutionary strategy and capitalistic decay, respectively, each could be better explained as a revolution by the managers against the bourgeoisie. Each of the totalitarian systems involved the creation of a state with absolute ownership and hold over life. Each was a single organization replacing the many competing organizations of liberal-democracy, and provided the greatest potential for managers to have power and prosperity given their class nature as facilitators within an institution.
Burnham indicated that even though fascism had not established a system as totalitarian as state socialism, each of the regimes (Italy and Germany) embodying fascism were steadily expanding the reach of the state into the sovereign dominion of the bourgeoisie, so that in time the fascist regimes would resemble the state socialist regime (USSR) in almost every way. This is because both fascism and state socialism were managerial revolutions employing different managerial ideologies (systems of thought supporting managerial totalitarianism) to induce the prolterariat to rally to the managers' cause, the same way the peasantry and urban proto-proletariat had rallied to the cause of the bourgeoisie against the nobility.
According to him, even America under the New Deal was experiencing a managerial revolution at far slower and primitive pace with its expanindg state bureaucracies spilling into what had been the sovereign dominion of the market.