"Managerial Revolution" by James Burnham, recap-and-review.

The year is 1941, the Second World War is already raging on for two years, so long enough to understand that something is different in the world compared to the world of the past.

What is different?

The World War itself is not really new, there has already been one.

The coming of mass ideologies making people seemingly insane is also not new. This is especially true about Marxism, which has been around for many years already.

Burham is well aware of that, because he had been a prominent American Marxist for many years before turning a conservative.

Well, the most influencing things for people are actually things that are close to them, not far. The thing close to Burnham is the New Deal.

The New Deal is a set of government bodies in the U.S.A., which made the government the largest employer in the country, far surpassing any private one. These bodies were employing people for a fixed wage on simple straightforward tasks, mostly building roads, for a wage which was just enough to survive a month during the Great Depression.

Why is the American Government, seemingly so completely controlled by the magnates, organising these public works? Because people are dying form starvation. Adult, healthy, hardworking, people with protestant working ethic are struggling to find a job that would feed even them alone, not even their family.

The interesting thing is that American Government is not trying to conscript them into the army and send to the front lines somewhere out there in order to conquer some land. It is also not helping them establish a peasant swath of land. It is giving them low-complexity industrial jobs.

Why exactly American Government decided to do so it beyond the scope of this book, but for Burnham all those things are a symptom of something that has shifted in the very bottom of the social construction, the base, the foundation. Public works, perhaps, just as government employment, are nothing new, but the new things are: the scale, the efficiency, the striking similarity to the social structure of the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which are both still alive and kicking at the time of writing the book. Moreover, the book was out before the Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, so they are not even fighting each other, against all odds.

Burnham is shocked, and not even once, but twice. The first shock, the failure of the American Model, had shocked him deeply enough to become a Marxist. Here I am deliberately not saying "a Socialist", because "Socialism" has sort of a weird meaning in this book, which I will touch later. But "Marxist", in the sense of taking Marx' words at face value, in the sense of "acting in the interest of the proletarian masses" is still correct.

But every true Marxist eventually has to confront the grim reality which life in the Soviet Union has turned into by the 1930s. (This is when Burnham is shocked the second time.) For Burnham as for a true believer this was devastating, and just as devastating must have been the New Deal, which essentially mimicked the Soviet Practices.

I think this is where the second part of the title comes from. It could have just as well been "what the fuck is going on?".

So Burnham is starting to investigate the process of totalitarianisation of the formerly freest nation in the World, and soon finds a very plausible excuse: the Americans have done nothing wrong, is is the very formation of the world that is changing. The world is not capitalist any more (which also means that his former Marxist ideas of destroying capitalism don't work any more), capitalism has been falling by itself for a while, and will undoubtedly finish falling very soon. What is noteworthy is that no deliberate human intervention was needed to implement its fall, no actual bloody revolution or even a coup.

This is very important, because this indicates a stance which is one of the two most fundamental stances in any social scholarship: "history obeys objective laws, and evolves according to principles similar to scientific", sometimes called "deterministic". The other stance is that "history has no laws, and everything is in the hands of Man", which can be called, perhaps, Popperian, in the honour of Karl Popper, who was a vehement opponent of "historicism".

Both stances are just stances, and I am finding it unlikely to be able to establish which one is true, since we are unable to experiment at such a scale.

But let us see what exactly Burnham suggests as an objective course of evolution.

Okay, so Burnham believes, and he is a very Marxist in this belief, that societies undergo an evolution, moving from a stage to a stage, and in each of those stages there is a "ruling class", which defines and shapes this society.

For him, the objectively observable formations are "feudalism", "capitalism", and "managerialism".

It is curious that he rejects "socialism", in his specific meaning of the word (meaning a classless and egalitarian society), as infeasible, although he mentions that "broad masses hate all kinds of ruling class", and acknowledges that there is some energy stored in the masses, which, for example, Lenin managed to exploit. But time and again he says that the end and the means almost never follow one from the other, and in fact intentional social transformations end up obtaining a result completely opposite to the planned one.

For me it is interesting that he mentions neither a prehistoric society (okay, which is sort of expected), not (which is more interesting) an antiquity, which Lenin called the "slave-owner society". But for Burnham the antiquity and the feudalism are more or less the same thing. And he spends a great deal of work explaining how feudalism transitioned into capitalism, trying to distil from scattered examples an overall theory of social transition.

For him the ruling class is the class which has preferential access to the means of production. In feudalism this is the nobility, and they control the peasants and the land, which are the key to wealth and power in the medieval time. The capitalists are present in the medieval time too, but they barely constitute 1% of the economy. Nevertheless, they have "some" access to the means of production, which can be called a "base", from which they, when the social conditions become favourable, grow to be the dominant social class.

So why would capitalism give way to the next social formation, and what will be that social formation?

He calls this new social formation "Managerial Society", of which the ruling class would be "managers". But I would probably be more accurate nowadays, if I just called this formation "socialism", and the ruling class "bureaucrats". Burnham would disagreee, he would object, and he even spends some effort in the book trying to distinguish between the managers and the bureaucrats, but I refuse to give him this excuse. I will say that "managerialism" has been built into Marxism from the very start, that "classless society" has never been anything more than a propagandist meme, and that the "left" who have split from the Stalinists to become "social democrats" in the West were in no way more capitalist than Stalin, they just wanted to attain the managerial society via covert means rather than via the overt ones.

The bureaucrats exist both in the government, and in private firms, but these two groups are almost indistinguishable in real life by the manner of thinking or acting.

What is the main causes and symptoms for the change from a capitalist society to a socialist one? For him, the main symptom is unemployment, and hence inability to fully utilise all of the productive forces in a society. And that is in spite of having huge underplayed sums of money in the bank accounts of large firms. And when a society is unable to fully utilise its productive forces it has a high likelihood to stop investing into the Armed Forces, which means that it will start losing the international competition. It will have to either adapt or be conquered.

The secondary symptom is the fact that liberal (capitalist) economies stopped being able to raise people to war. Apparently, voluntary military service failed both in Britain, and in the USA during the World War II, and they resorted to conscription.

The process of turning into a socialist country will consist of three steps:

1. Getting rid of capitalists
2. Brainwashing the masses
3. Conquering neighbours

The end result can be measured by looking at the embodiment of the sovereignty in a country.

1. The feudal society will have most of the power in the Upper Chamber of the Parliament.
2. The capitalist society will have most of the power in the Lower Chamber.
3. The socialist society will have most of the power in the Government.

When reading such books, we are often more interested in what will happen, rather than what has been happening before. After all that is what the sub-title is about.

It is funny that the book written in 1941 starts with a phrase that "social sciences are still in their nascence", because I remember a similar phrase being said by Karl Marx a hundred years earlier, and by Alexander Hamilton 50 years before that.

Has "Managerial Society" won? Not yet, but it has advanced significantly. The world we live in is certainly not a free market society.

However, the managers don't seem to have won entirely, at least not yet.