78
PARTISAN REVIEW
cause they realize ... that the New Deal is in direction and tendency .anti·
capitalist." (The New Deal is, according to Burnham, a "primitive" mana·
gerial system.) First, where do the figures "probably three-quarters" and
"above
90ro"
come from? And what is a "bona fide" capitalist exactly?
(Maybe it's a capitalist who votes against Roosevelt.) Next, granting for
argument's sake the figures as correct- and meaningful, is not ·Burnham's
explanation much
too
simple (as are most of his explanations)? It is not
even good formal logic: that capitalists oppose Roosevelt does not
of
itself
-and Burnham rests his case wholly on the mere fact of opposition–
show that the issue is capitalism. It is logically possible that the choice
before the bourgeoisie in 1936 and 1940 was between two varieties of
capitalism and that they voted for the more palatable variety. Historically,
this happens frequently in politics. For many generations the bourgeoisie
have united to fight against trade unions, which doesn't make unions any
the less a part of the institutional structure of capitalism; similarly,
the
business community in the last three New York City elections has been
solidly behind LaGuardia, without Tammany thereby becoming an 'anti·
capitalist tendency.' Coming back to Burnham's point: is there any de·
cisive difference between the 'anticapitalist tendencies' of the New Deal
and those of much earlier analogous reformist tendencies in Europe, such
as Bismarck's 'Prussian socialism' of the nineties and the Liberal-Labor
upsurge in England led by Lloyd George just before the last war?
If
New
Dealism is "primitive" managerialism, is not the Weimar Republic, which
superimposed additional state controls on the already existing legacy of
Bismarck, a much more mature type of
maTWgerial
society? Thus we
get
the
absur~
result that the Nazis merely replaced one managerialism with
another. Burnham naturally
presen~s
the Weimar-Nazi struggle as being
between capitalism and managerialism, since the other presentation (which
flows logically from his definition of the New Deal) would show that his
concept of 'managerialism' has no historical meaning.
Burnham's semantic difficulties with the word "Marxist" are also
worth a little attention. He insists on applying the term indiscriminately
to all three existing Internationals, on the grounds that, since each claims
to be the only "true" Marxist movement, all their claims must be disre–
garded and the term used for all of them. Again this violates formal
logic, since the fact there is disagreement among the groups does not
of
itself
prove that all three claims are equally valid (or invalid). Again
it
also is false historically, since the single term "Marxist'' cannot sensibly
be stretched to describe the behavior and beliefs of reformist socialists,
Stalinist nationalists, and Trotskyite world revolutionaries. The advantage
of Burnham's procedure, of course, is that
all
the defects
ofall
the move–
ments can be laid at the door of "Marxism," as when he calls the French
Popular Front, "the last distorted partial upsurge of the Marxist parties."
(Shades of Trotsky-and Daladier!) This satisfying procedure, however,
threatens to get him into trouble later on when he comes to describe
the
Soviet Union as the "most mature" of existing managerial systems.
For
