Burnham does not, of course, deny that the new ‘managerial’ régimes, like the régimes of Russia and Nazi Germany, may be called Socialist. He means merely that they will not be Socialist in any sense of the word which would have been accepted by Marx, or Lenin, or Keir Hardie, or William Morris, or indeed, by any representative Socialist prior to about 1930. Socialism, until recently, was supposed to connote political democracy, social equality and internationalism. There is not the smallest sign that any of these things is in a way to being established anywhere, and the one great country in which something described as a proletarian revolution once happened, i. e. the USSR, has moved steadily away from the old concept of a free and equal society aiming at universal human brotherhood. In an almost unbroken progress since the early days of the Revolution, liberty has been chipped away and representative institutions smothered, while inequalities have increased and nationalism and militarism have grown stronger. But at the same time, Burnham insists, there has been no tendency to return to capitalism. What is happening is simply the growth of ‘managerialism’, which, according to Burnham, is in progress everywhere, though the manner in which it comes about may vary from country to country.
Now, as an interpretation of what is happening, Burnham’s theory is extremely plausible, to put it at the lowest. The events of, at any rate, the last fifteen years in the USSR can be far more easily explained by this theory than by any other. Evidently the USSR is not Socialist, and can only be called Socialist if one gives the word a meaning different from what it would have in any other context. On the other hand, prophecies that the Russian régime would revert to capitalism have always been falsified, and now seem further than ever from being fulfilled. In claiming that the process had gone almost equally far in Nazi Germany, Burnham probably exaggerates, but it seems certain that the drift was away from old-style capitalism and towards a planned economy with an adoptive oligarchy in control. In Russia the capitalists were destroyed first and the workers were crushed later.
In Germany the workers were crushed first, but the elimination of the capitalists had at any rate begun, and calculations based on the assumption that Nazism was ‘simply capitalism’ were always contradicted by events. Where Burnham seems to go most astray is in believing ‘managerialism’ to be on the up-grade in the United States, the one great country where free capitalism is still vigorous. But if one considers the world movement as a whole, his conclusions are difficult to resist; and even in the United States the all-prevailing faith in laissez-faire may not survive the next great economic crisis. It has been urged against Burnham that he assigns far too much importance to the ‘managers’, in the narrow sense of the word-that is, factory bosses, planners and technicians — and seems to assume that even in Soviet Russia it is these people, and not the Communist Party chiefs, who are the real holders of power. However, this is a secondary error, and it is partially corrected in The Machiavellians. The real question is not whether the people who wipe their boots on us during the next fifty years are to be called managers, bureaucrats, or politicians: the question is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy or to true democracy.
But curiously enough, when one examines the predictions which Burnham has based on his general theory, one finds that in so far as they are verifiable, they have been falsified. Numbers of people have pointed this out already. However, it is worth following up Burnham’s predictions in detail, because they form a sort of pattern which is related to contemporary events, and which reveals, I believe, a very important weakness in present-day political thought.
To begin with, writing in 1940, Burnham takes a German victory more or less for granted. Britain is described as ‘dissolving’, and as displaying ‘all the characteristics which have distinguished decadent cultures in past historical transitions’, while the conquest and integration of Europe which Germany achieved in 1940 is described as ‘irreversible’. ‘England,’ writes Burnham, ‘no matter with what non-European allies, cannot conceivably hope to conquer the European continent.’ Even if Germany should somehow manage to lose the war, she could not be dismembered or reduced to the status of the Weimar Republic, but is bound to remain as the nucleus of a unified Europe. The future map of the world, with its three great super-states is, in any case, already settled in its main outlines: and ‘the nuclei of these three super-states are, whatever may be their future names, the previously existing nations, Japan, Germany, and the United States.’
Burnham also commits himself to the opinion that Germany will not attack the USSR until after Britain has been defeated. In a condensation of his book published in the Partisan Review of May-June 1941, and presumably written later than the book itself, he says:
As in the case of Russia, so with Germany, the third part of the managerial problem — the contest for dominance with other sections of managerial society — remains for the future. First had to come the death-blow that assured the toppling of the capitalist world order, which meant above all the destruction of the foundations of the British Empire (the keystone of the capitalist world order) both directly and through the smashing of the European political structure, which was a necessary prop of the Empire. This is the basic explanation of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which is not intelligible on other grounds.
The future conflict between Germany and Russia will be a managerial conflict proper; prior to the great world-managerial battles, the end of the capitalist order must be assured. The belief that Nazism is ‘decadent capitalism’ … makes it impossible to explain reasonably the Nazi-Soviet Pact. From this belief followed the always expected war between Germany and Russia, not the actual war to the death between Germany and the British Empire. The war between Germany and Russia is one of the managerial wars of the future, not of the anti-capitalist wars of yesterday and today.
However, the attack on Russia will come later, and Russia is certain, or almost certain, to be defeated. ‘There is every reason to believe … that Russia will split apart, with the western half gravitating towards the European base and the eastern towards the Asiatic.’ This quotation comes from The Managerial Revolution. In the above quoted article, written probably about six months later, it is put more forcibly: ‘the Russian weaknesses indicate that Russia will not be able to endure, that it will crack apart, and fall towards east and west.’ And in a supplementary note which was added to the English (Pelican) edition, and which appears to have been written at the end of 1941, Burnham speaks as though the ‘cracking apart’ process were already happening. The war, he says, ‘is part of the means whereby the western half of Russia is being integrated into the European super-state’.
Sorting these various statements out, we have the following prophecies:
Germany is bound to win the war.
Germany and Japan are bound to survive as great states, and to remain the nuclei of power in their respective areas.
Germany will not attack the USSR until after the defeat of Britain.
The USSR is bound to be defeated.
However, Burnham has made other predictions besides these. In a short article in the Partisan Review, in the summer of 1944, he gives his opinion that the USSR will gang up with Japan in order to prevent the total defeat of the latter, while the American Communists will be set to work to sabotage the eastern end of the war. And finally, in an article in the same magazine in the winter of 1944-5, he claims that Russia, destined so short a while ago to ‘crack apart’, is within sight of conquering the whole of Eurasia. This article, which was the cause of violent controversies among the American intelligentsia, has not been reprinted in England. I must give some account of it here, because its manner of approach and its emotional tone are of a peculiar kind, and by studying them one can get nearer to the real roots of Burnham’s theory.
The article is entitled ‘Lenin’s Heir’, and it sets out to show that Stalin is the true and legitimate guardian of the Russian Revolution, which he has not in any sense ‘betrayed’ but has merely carried forward on lines that were implicit in it from the start. In itself, this is an easier opinion to swallow than the usual Trotskyist claim that Stalin is a mere crook who has perverted the Revolution to his own ends, and that things would somehow have been different if Lenin had lived or Trotsky had remained in power.
Actually there is no strong reason for thinking that the main lines of development would have been very different. Well before 1923 the seeds of a totalitarian society were quite plainly there. Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win
