80
PARTISAN REJIIEW
lowed business-as-usual policies so faithfully as to reduCb the
production program to chaos, while Baruch is in the ascendant,
working closely with the managerial Leon Henderson, who bases
his price control policies on the experiences of Baruch's War
Industries Board of 1917 and who differs from Baruch only in
advocating a
less
drastic intervention of Government into the
price field. Thus the capitalist Baruch advocates 'managerial'
policies, while the 'manager' Knudsen remains true to capitalism.
THE
"I mean by managers," Burnham writes on p. 80, "those who
THESIS
already for the most part in contemporary society are actually
managing, on the technical side, the actual process of produc–
tion."* He lists some typical managerial occupations: "'production man·
agers', operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers,
supervisory technicians; or, in government ... administrators, commis–
sioners, bureau heads...." He distinguishes them, in business, from
the
stockholders, the bankers, and those executives who are chiefty concerned
with sales and profits; in government, likewise, managers are
no~
to
be
confused with politicians. The operating heads of General Motors and
T.V.A., for example, are managers, while Chairman Sloan of G.M. and
President Roosevelt are not.
It is these managers, who "actually" and "in practice" run modem
industry, that are the ruling class of the future. "This drive," pronounces
Burnham, the scientific critic of Marxian inevitability, "will be success–
ful." Parliaments are yielding to administrative bureaux as the loci of
sovereignty, private capitalism to a managerially directed collectivised
economy. The managers control modern industry as the bourgeoisie con·
trolled their property in early capitalism, and the historical results
wiU
he analogous.
This is a very neat theory, especially satisfying if one's thinking
is
of the crude economic-determinist variety which Burnham and myself,
ill
the Trotskyist movement, used to call "mechanical Marxism." But it is not
difficult to show that it is not the managers, but the politicians, who
are
and will remain-barring socialist revolution-the new ruling class.
The
distinction between those who determine policies
(wluu
is to be done) and
those who carry them out
(how
it is to be done) would seem elementary.
Burnham himself makes it when he excludes from the managerial category
chemists, physicists, non-executive engineers and similar highly trained
professionals because, while they exercise a technical skill necessary to
the
productive process, "they have no functions of guiding, administerin«o
managing, organizing the process of production," that is, they exercilt
their skill only within the limits of a general policy handed down to
thf'll
by the managers. Carry the distinction one step higher, and what are
the
• Aspiring propap;andists should note, by the wav, how frequently such expreuMJ.
as "actually," "really," "in practice" and "in fact" crop up in this work-a note
J
pragmatic reassurance which is especially attracti"e to the American bent of mind.
