James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution is another essay by George Orwell from 1946, and is a commentary on the character of the theories of James Burnham that are described in the books The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians.#

First, Orwell describes the theories of James Burnham.#

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of 'managers'. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new 'managerial' societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.

The other main theory of Burnham's, that follows this paragraph but that I will not quote, is a derivation of Machiavelli and his followers. This is the theory that all politics is just the struggle and competition for power and that this fact is unavoidable. The consequence of this is that rulers will always try to stay in power and the best way to do this is to ensure that the people have no reason to not want you in power. This either means destroying their will to improve themselves, or guaranteeing their satisfaction.

Orwell continues to discuss these theories and makes references to earlier instances in literature when they have been described. Notably he mentions Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The other interesting thing he mentions it that one of the prime perpetrators of this new movement is the United States with the changes brought about by New Deal. This is the primary item that concerns me, but I will return to it later.#

Orwell does not seem to buy this prediction, or at least would not attribute the rightful credit to Burnham. This is primarily because of the many flaws in the way that Burnham describes his theory. Orwell describes with painful detail the many ways that Burnham has contradicted himself and modified his theory to predict that whomever was most powerful at that time was the one who would lead the world wide revolution in this direction.#

It will be seen that Burnham's predictions have not merely, when they were verifiable, turned out to be wrong, but that they have sometimes contradicted one another in a sensational way. It is this last fact that is significant. Political predictions are usually wrong, because they are usually based on wish-thinking, but they can have symptomatic value, especially when they change abruptly.

[...many examples...]

It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship or power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.

Now that Orwell has proved Burnham to be providing empty rationalizations and false objectivity, he begins to wonder why Burnham would possess this particular opinion. #

The primary observation is that Burnham has many sympathies for the Communists and Nazis and belongs to the 'managerial' class that he is always writing about.

If one examines the people who, having some idea of what the Russian régime is like, are strongly russophile, one finds that, on the whole, they belong to the 'managerial' class of which Burnham writes. That is, they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige. These people look towards the U.S.S.R. and see in it, or think they see, a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves. It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip. Burnham at least has the honesty to say that Socialism isn't coming; the others merely say that Socialism is coming, and then give the word 'Socialism' a new meaning which makes nonsense of the old one. But his theory, for all its appearance of objectivity, is the rationalization of a wish. There is no strong reason for thinking that it tells us anything about the future, except perhaps the immediate future. It merely tells us what kind of world the 'managerial' class themselves, or at least the more conscious and ambitious members of the class, would like to live in.

Another small note, it is in this section of the essay that Orwell describes technology and the machine as a device that makes servitude unnecessary because anything that would previously require (or benefit from) slavery can not be much better accomplished with machinery. Thus, he says the upper classes have no function--i.e. implying that their function is to be master over the slaves--in the modern world. I think that this is a very weak point and can only find justification for it by saying that Orwell was imagining the far future that is even science fiction today--that of pervasive use of robots. (Which of course brings the question of "Is that not slavery?")

Luckily, this was a barely significant portion of the essay and is excused by my judgment.

On America Being The Leader of 'Managerialism'#

It is interesting to look at these theories and predictions almost sixty years later. Some of them are still wrong--now the U.S.S.R. did fall--while others are more correct--that the U.S.S.R. would split up and the eastern portion would join Eastern Europe (i.e. the 10 new EU members) and the western portion would join more to the Asiatic countries (i.e. Mongolia and "-kstan"s.) But the one I am more interested in is the general idea that the United States and Europe would become not capitalist, nor socialist.

I feel that is rather obvious with both the lack of truly free markets and the lack of a complete control economy and all-powerful government that the United States and Europe are neither capitalist and neither socialist. Additionally, with the European Union there is an element of the European super-State predicted by Burnham and with the United Nations there is an element of the international collusion amongst States.

On comparison, its seems as though the Europeans are far more prone to socialism, while not actually moving toward it, and the Americans are currently more prone to capitalism with the two major parties moving away from it in different ways. The Democrats are pursuing a more European managerialism closer to socialism, and the Republicans are seeking a more straight up managerialism where capitalism is thrown out the window and the government is the granted of monopolies and conqueror of foreign resources.

I don't think my observation is particularly novel, but it interesting to think that despite Burnham's self-serving justification he may not have actually been incorrect in his prediction--at least on a broad basis.