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position and send him to execution or a concentration
camp." "But," he adds, "relatively speaking, such cases,
though conspicuous, do not happen so very frequently."
(Relative to what? How often is frequently? Apparently
more often than this happened in the Soviet purges of
1936-8.) "And even more important," concludes Burnham
solemnly, "though the individual manager may be removed,
it is not a soldier or a policeman but
another manager
who
takes his place." The individual American worker may be
fired, but he is replaced not by a soldier, not by a police·
man, not by an astronomer, not by a saxophonist, but by
...
another workman!
He is furthermore "essential to the
productive process.'' Conclusion: the U.S.A. is a workers'
state.
(4) Just as the absolute monarchs of the 17th and 18th cen·
turies (to whom Burnham compares the modern dictators)
were dependent on the rising bourgeoisie for money to run
the state, so the dictators are dependent on the managers for
the goods to run their social system and to wage war, since
("in practice," of course) these goods "can be assured only
through their collaborating with, and in the end subordi–
nating themselves to, those who are actually directing the
processes of production, to the managers. The sources of
wealth and power are the basic instruments of production;
these are to be directed by the managers; and the managers
are, then, to be the ruling class." I have already dealt with
the theoretical misconception here, .which stems from the
failure to distinguish between determining
what
is to be
produced, and determining
how
it is to be produced. The
historical parallel (which recurs throughout the book) is
also baseless for the same reason: the bourgeois market sys·
tern determined
what
was to be produced; the managerial
system determines merely
how,
and the all-important
what
is strictly the province of the political bureaucracies. Else–
where Burnham correctly states that the managers and the
politicians have "coalesced." But the absolute monarchs and
the early bourgeoisie were far from coalesced; the monarch
played off the two powerful social classes of the time, the
bourgeoisie and the feudal nobility, against each other in
Bonapartist fashion. The "coalition" Burnham notes he·
tween dictators and managers is simply the subordination of
the latter to the former; the politicos, for example, do not
play off the managers against the bourgeoisie, because the
managers have no basis of class power and are not, in fact,
a class at all.
THE
The most significant passage in the book is perhaps the fol·
MEANING
lowing (pp. 155-7):
How will it be in the new society? Will it be the managers
or the political bureaucrats who are the ruling class? In the first
