But also homogeneous consumers

Mass production requires not only homogeneous goods and services, produced by the same molds and processes, but also homogeneous consumers, who cannot vary in their tastes, values, and patterns of consumption and who must consume if the planning of the corporations is to be effective. The comparatively compact and differentiated institutions of the bourgeois order sustain its heterogeneity and constrain the consumption of mass-produced goods and services. Managerial capitalism must therefore articulate and sponsor an ideology of cosmopolitanism that asserts universal identities, values, and loyalties, challenges the differentiations of the bourgeois order, and rationalizes the process of homogenization. In the cosmopolitan view of man, family, local community, religious sect, social class, sexual and racial identity, and moral character are at best subordinate considerations and are regarded as artificial, repressive, and obsolete barriers to the fulfillment of human potential. Cosmopolitanism thus rationalizes the adoption of the mass framework and collective disciplines that characterize the managerial regime and the homogenization of production and consumption through which the multinational organizations and economies of managerial capitalism operate.

– Samuel T. Francis in Leviathan and Its Enemies (2016)

Three unmet conditions

“If most people did indeed want peace, plenty, and freedom from all forms of exploitation and tyranny; and if (what is just as necessary, though less often remarked) they also knew the means whereby these were to be got; and if they were willing and courageous and strong and intelligent and self sacrificing enough to bring about those means to those ends; then no doubt the world would achieve a society organized in such a way as to realize peace, plenty, and freedom. But there is not any evidence at all from past or present history that all three (and all three would be required) of these conditions will be met. On the contrary, the evidence of the analogies from the past and the circumstances of the present is that people will act and wish and hope and decide in ways that will aid in the managerial revolution, in the carrying through of the social transition which will end in the consolidation of managerial society.”

— James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution (1941)