420
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Better Rihbentrop than Trotsky!") The alternative, fascism or socialism,
is not a theoretical alternative rightly open to criticism, it is a fact of the
class struggle and it is never permissible to forget it. The defeats of the
socialist movement are not necessarily defeats for Marxism. Marxism is
an impassioned method of scientific investigation (in the service of man·
kind), socialism is a kind of rational social consciousness, an emotional
aspiration, a movement, one might almost say a myth. Agreed that we are
today defeated, we socialists, that should not discourage us too much if we
see clearly why and how we have been beaten. After all, we are used to
it, we know that we must he the defeated for a long time in order no longer
to be so one day. And we have, in spite of everything, enough victories
behind us to keep us going, provided we don't renounce the compass Marx
has left to us.
_ Who would deny that the theories of Marx in 1848 need revision?
On one vital point it is plain their expectations have been unrealised,
although Trotsky in
The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx
tries to defend
them even today. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 declares that the
middle classes are incapable of playing a decisive role in events. A new
middle class, quite different from the one Marx knew, has come into being
and plays a decisive role in the revolutions and counter-revolutions of
today. I am quite in agreement with Burnham on this matter of the 'mana·
gerial' class. A Russian Marxist had this idea before the 1917 revolution,
Bogdanov, who was to some extent the intellectual rival of Lenin in the
Bolshevik Party, and who put forward a theory about the dictatorship of
the administrators. (Bogdanov made a show of opposition to Lenin; he
died from the results of a scientific experiment in blood transfusion.)
When industrialization began, Soviet engineers used to talk among them–
selves about the time when 'socialised industry will be controlled by the
technicians.' This attitude seemed so dangerous to the ruling bureaucracy
that the trial of the "Industrial Party" was staged partly to combat it. In
France and Germany there was much talk of Technocracy. And finally, I
find in my work-notes the following, which fits in perfectly with Burn–
ham's ideas:
The next European revolution will be fought on the terrain
of planned economy-no longer for or against strangled capi–
talism ... hut over the question of management-for whom? to
whose benefit? ... The category of managers will tend to crystal–
lize into a class and to monopolize power.
The general conception has thus been in the air some time. Burnham's
theory has the merit, nowise incompatible with Marxism, of making clear
the profoundly revolutionary character of the wars now going on. Capi–
talist economy is going under, yielding to new types of transitional planned
economies; capitalism is so hopeless that we see the counter-revolutions
it incited now forced to strangle their begetter, as in Germany and Italy
and tomorrow elsewhere perhaps under other forms. But this does not do
away with the problem of socialism. It remains in the very heart of these
