Like everybody who has studied Marxism from a relatively young age I encountered many quotes of, or comments on, James Burnham's “The Managerial Revolution”. I was quite familiar with Burnham’s ideas but I have not read the book. I don't think that I would have read it, now in 2024, eight-four years after its publications, were it not for the fact that his ideas have been to some extent resuscitated recently. I will mention it in more detail further in the article.
A great complementation to Burnham’s book is a long forgotten text of radical marxist thinker Bruno Ricci, which was published in 1939 and which both challenged Burnham, and outraged Stalin and the popular front - ‘The bureaucratization of the world’. It is looking at an elitist managerial class in the highly bueraucratized planned economy of the stalinist state capitalism of the Sovietunion in the 30’s and argues that the marxist model of social development became frozen in a stage of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ and has even been creating a new class of managers - something I consider to have been proven right given the state and development of the soviet economy in the post-stalinist era and particularly in the eighties before leading to thew Wallstreet backed Yeltsin-style kleptocracy.
On a different note: Why someone, who obviously has familiarized himself with socialist ideas, would regurgitate the typical liberal bourgeois claptrap through disparaging wording like ….’ the elite thought control exercised by the Communist Party of China’… to characterize a society of a transitory marxist-lenisist framework of Socialism (with chinese characters) is beyond me and doing the otherwise excellent post a disservice.
Last but not least capitalism has been failing to generate steady growth for its middle class and creeping along to produce ever shortening crises of booms and slumps - probably now entering its final stage of devestating rent seeking neoliberalism and tech-feudaqlism, which - quoting Rosa Luxemburg - will either end in barbarism or socialism
Burnham and Shumpeter described well the euthanasia of capitalism that was under way with Keynesianism in Europe and US. If Keynes said that a balance was to be found between "economic efficiency, social justice, and freedom", Freedom was always the read-headed stepchild of the utilitarian and populist agenda.
Hayek's made a remarkable pivot to freedom, and further authors like Orwell, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman influenced people that matter. Here is a review of the other major book of Burnham, addressing the question of elites and freedom: https://polsci.substack.com/p/the-machiavellians-defenders-of-freedom
«John Kenneth Galbraith’s “The new industrial state” could be seen as an extension or elaboration of Burnham’s original thesis. Raymond Aron at the same time also wrote about the industrial societies where the type of ownership (state or private) was less important, and managers run the system [...] Technocracy, in the language of the 1960s, would rule. [...] The managerial society, according to Burnham, can exist only when the ownership of most means of productions is vested in the state »
So our blogger has made a strong case that Burnham's argument was about *state* managerialism, but Galbraith made an argument about *private* managerialism, not *state* managerialism, and that argument is still important:
«[...] The American dominant class is imbued by a strong capitalist spirit, it defends its property, and controls the government.»
Many USA businesses are listed on stock exchanges and their ownership is diffused and passive, so they are controlled by a narrow managerial class. This managerial class is indeed “imbued by a strong capitalist spirit, it defends its property” but *their own capital* (which is their position in the business, not their investment in it) and *their personal property*, not that of their anonymous shareholders. Many writers have noticed that is not so different from state capitalism. This said there are still large chunks of USA businesses that are privately owned by a small and active shareholder base, therefore what “controls the government” is a mix of managerial class and owner class lobbies, the "oligarchs".
Our blogger argument that Burnham's definition was limited strictly to state capitalism seems right to me, but my guess is that he seems to agree with that, which seems a mistake to me. Even that bearded guy from Trier had noticed that in his time "shareholder capitalism" would lead in many cases to a separation of ownership and control, and he is quoted thus in this interesting article which I found accidentally:
“A sort of industrial kings have been created, whose power stands in inverse ratio to their responsibility – they being responsible only to the amount of their shares, while disposing of the whole capital of the society – forming a more or less permanent body, while the mass of shareholders is undergoing a constant process of decomposition and renewal, and enabled, by the very disposal of the joint influence and wealth of the society, to bribe its single rebellious members. Beneath this oligarchic Board of Directors is placed a bureaucratic body of the practical managers and agents of the society ... It is the immortal merit of Fourier to have predicted this form of modern industry, under the name of Industrial Feudalism.”
Excellent and thoughtful review as always. My experience so far has been that anyone who uses such an ill-defined buzzword as "wokeism" as if it encompasses a singular ideological project is not someone to be taken seriously. Whatever reactionaries mean by the term, they can and should say explicitly rather than hiding behind vagaries.
Thank you for an interesting synopsis of Burnham’s main work.
It may be worth mentioning that before reaching the conclusion that industrial societies were evolving toward managerialism, Burrnham was a Marxist of Trotskyist persuasion. By the time he wrote The Managerial Revolution, he had however rejected not only the praxis of Marxism but its gnoseology and economic theory:
I reject, as you know, the "philosophy of Marxism," dialectical materialism. …
The general Marxian theory of "universal history", to the extent that it has any empirical content, seems to me disproved by modern historical and anthropological investigation.
Marxian economics seems to me for the most part either false or obsolete or meaningless in application to contemporary economic phenomena. Those aspects of Marxian economics which retain validity do not seem to me to justify the theoretical structure of the economics.
Although his political predictions proved shortly spectacularly wrong and even the more successful idea of convergence between the socialist system of the Soviet Union and the capitalist system of the US was put to rest by the collapse of the Soviet system and the globalisation of capitalism, the focus on the working of (great) organisations relative to that of markets is shared not only by the later (today dated) works of Galbraith but also the still relevant of Herbert Simon.
A great complementation to Burnham’s book is a long forgotten text of radical marxist thinker Bruno Ricci, which was published in 1939 and which both challenged Burnham, and outraged Stalin and the popular front - ‘The bureaucratization of the world’. It is looking at an elitist managerial class in the highly bueraucratized planned economy of the stalinist state capitalism of the Sovietunion in the 30’s and argues that the marxist model of social development became frozen in a stage of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ and has even been creating a new class of managers - something I consider to have been proven right given the state and development of the soviet economy in the post-stalinist era and particularly in the eighties before leading to thew Wallstreet backed Yeltsin-style kleptocracy.
On a different note: Why someone, who obviously has familiarized himself with socialist ideas, would regurgitate the typical liberal bourgeois claptrap through disparaging wording like ….’ the elite thought control exercised by the Communist Party of China’… to characterize a society of a transitory marxist-lenisist framework of Socialism (with chinese characters) is beyond me and doing the otherwise excellent post a disservice.
Last but not least capitalism has been failing to generate steady growth for its middle class and creeping along to produce ever shortening crises of booms and slumps - probably now entering its final stage of devestating rent seeking neoliberalism and tech-feudaqlism, which - quoting Rosa Luxemburg - will either end in barbarism or socialism
https://www.marxists.org/archive/rizzi/bureaucratisation/index.htm
Burnham and Shumpeter described well the euthanasia of capitalism that was under way with Keynesianism in Europe and US. If Keynes said that a balance was to be found between "economic efficiency, social justice, and freedom", Freedom was always the read-headed stepchild of the utilitarian and populist agenda.
Hayek's made a remarkable pivot to freedom, and further authors like Orwell, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman influenced people that matter. Here is a review of the other major book of Burnham, addressing the question of elites and freedom: https://polsci.substack.com/p/the-machiavellians-defenders-of-freedom
«John Kenneth Galbraith’s “The new industrial state” could be seen as an extension or elaboration of Burnham’s original thesis. Raymond Aron at the same time also wrote about the industrial societies where the type of ownership (state or private) was less important, and managers run the system [...] Technocracy, in the language of the 1960s, would rule. [...] The managerial society, according to Burnham, can exist only when the ownership of most means of productions is vested in the state »
So our blogger has made a strong case that Burnham's argument was about *state* managerialism, but Galbraith made an argument about *private* managerialism, not *state* managerialism, and that argument is still important:
«[...] The American dominant class is imbued by a strong capitalist spirit, it defends its property, and controls the government.»
Many USA businesses are listed on stock exchanges and their ownership is diffused and passive, so they are controlled by a narrow managerial class. This managerial class is indeed “imbued by a strong capitalist spirit, it defends its property” but *their own capital* (which is their position in the business, not their investment in it) and *their personal property*, not that of their anonymous shareholders. Many writers have noticed that is not so different from state capitalism. This said there are still large chunks of USA businesses that are privately owned by a small and active shareholder base, therefore what “controls the government” is a mix of managerial class and owner class lobbies, the "oligarchs".
Our blogger argument that Burnham's definition was limited strictly to state capitalism seems right to me, but my guess is that he seems to agree with that, which seems a mistake to me. Even that bearded guy from Trier had noticed that in his time "shareholder capitalism" would lead in many cases to a separation of ownership and control, and he is quoted thus in this interesting article which I found accidentally:
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/workersparty/neither-nor/ch5-2-draper.htm
“A sort of industrial kings have been created, whose power stands in inverse ratio to their responsibility – they being responsible only to the amount of their shares, while disposing of the whole capital of the society – forming a more or less permanent body, while the mass of shareholders is undergoing a constant process of decomposition and renewal, and enabled, by the very disposal of the joint influence and wealth of the society, to bribe its single rebellious members. Beneath this oligarchic Board of Directors is placed a bureaucratic body of the practical managers and agents of the society ... It is the immortal merit of Fourier to have predicted this form of modern industry, under the name of Industrial Feudalism.”
Excellent and thoughtful review as always. My experience so far has been that anyone who uses such an ill-defined buzzword as "wokeism" as if it encompasses a singular ideological project is not someone to be taken seriously. Whatever reactionaries mean by the term, they can and should say explicitly rather than hiding behind vagaries.
Thank you for an interesting synopsis of Burnham’s main work.
It may be worth mentioning that before reaching the conclusion that industrial societies were evolving toward managerialism, Burrnham was a Marxist of Trotskyist persuasion. By the time he wrote The Managerial Revolution, he had however rejected not only the praxis of Marxism but its gnoseology and economic theory:
I reject, as you know, the "philosophy of Marxism," dialectical materialism. …
The general Marxian theory of "universal history", to the extent that it has any empirical content, seems to me disproved by modern historical and anthropological investigation.
Marxian economics seems to me for the most part either false or obsolete or meaningless in application to contemporary economic phenomena. Those aspects of Marxian economics which retain validity do not seem to me to justify the theoretical structure of the economics.
Although his political predictions proved shortly spectacularly wrong and even the more successful idea of convergence between the socialist system of the Soviet Union and the capitalist system of the US was put to rest by the collapse of the Soviet system and the globalisation of capitalism, the focus on the working of (great) organisations relative to that of markets is shared not only by the later (today dated) works of Galbraith but also the still relevant of Herbert Simon.