[A rival theory that has to be better than the dominant 90 percent explanation” cannot go wrong very often and still stay in the contest. For the challenger of a 50 percent incumbent, some shortcomings are not that fatal. This comparative situation has to be remembered as argued by James Burnham:]… we must keep in mind an obvious principle of scienti?c method. To disprove the theory, it is not enough to show that it is not 100% certain, that dif?culties confront it, and certain evidence seems to be against it. It must be further shown that it is less certain than alternative theories covering the same subject matter, that there are in its case more dif?culties, more negative evidence than in the case of at least one alternative theory. No theory about what actually happens and will happen is ever ‘certain’.
We are now in a period of social transition, a period characterized, that is, by an unusually rapid rate of change of the most important economic, social, political, and cultural institutions of society. This transition is from the type of society which we have called capitalist or bourgeois to a to a type of society which we shall call managerial.
The Russian revolution was not a socialist revolution… but a managerial revolution… Today Russia is the nation which has, in its structural aspects, advanced furthest along the managerial road.