Da Revolução Gerencial de J. Burnham ao capitalismo gerencial de G. Duménil & D. Lévy: a persistência da apologia indireta ao capitalismo pela doutrina gerencialista como variante da ideologia da terceira via

Abstract

The objective of the present dissertation was to analyze the continuity of the indirect apology for capitalism in the so-called “managerialist doctrine” or theory of managers in which they would be a new and dominant social class in the supposed transition from the capitalist mode of production to a “management society”. This doctrine or theory is certainly not recent. Arising from a series of developments in the transition between the 19th and 20th centuries, it gained momentum with Bruno Rizzi and James Burnham in the 1930s and 1940s, the second author being a primary source of great diffusion from the book The Managerial Revolution. A second development got momentum with J.K. Galbraith from the 1960s onwards, obtaining considerable diffusion, including in Brazil, through the mediation of intellectuals such as Bresser Pereira. In recent decades, authors such as Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy have emerged as international spokespeople for a renewed approach, supposedly of a Marxist matrix, taking such managers as a social class, culminating in the most recent work called Managerial Capitalism. By delimiting the analysis to the materials and J. Burnham and G. Duménil and D. Lévy, the study carried out can be considered as an exercise of social determination of thought according to the Marxist tradition. The study was mainly based on the foundations of the ontology of the social being of G. Lukács. In this direction, the genesis and function of this theory of managers as a social class were delimited, also operationalizing an immanent analysis based on the chosen texts. Thus, it was possible to identify, despite the differences, a line of continuity from the indirect apology to capitalism from The Managerial Revolution by J. Burnham to Managerial Capitalism by G. Duménil and D. Lévy. In this study, the theory of managers showed itself as a variant of the ideology of the third way, that is, of superficial denial and essential affirmation of the capitalist mode of production in which it is argued that there is a transition to a new society whose pillars, however, remain anchored in the principles of commodity production for private profit. As a variant, the theory in question presents its propositional particularity, whose core is the broad conviction that the capitalist mode of production and its most essential contradictions can be infinitely managed.