PARTISAN REYIEJT
For "managerial" to the American reader (and, I suspect, to Burnham
himself) has good connotations ("production," "efficiency") while "bu–
reaucratic" or "political" have bad connotations ("war," "class conflict,"
"dictatorship''). Our detached scientist has thus loaded the semantic dice
before the game hegins. Furthermore, though he nowhere describes
the
social outlook of the dictators, he has at least two very soothing descrip·
tions of how their alleged co-rulers, the managers, look at things: "The
managers tend to think of solving social and political problems as they
coordinate and organize the actual process of production." And again:
"Society can he run, they think, in more or less the same way that now
they, when they are allowed, can run, efficiently and productively, a mass·
production factory." A cursory acquaintance with the literature of tech·
nocracy and the public utterances of managers like Tugwell, Kettering
and Henry Ford confirms the accuracy of this description. But this is not
the way Hitler or Roosevelt approach such matters. It is rather the ap·
pro~ch
whose theoretical organ is
Common Sense
and whose practitioners
include the early New Deal "planners" (Berle, Tugwell, Frank, Coyle)
and, at the other end of the political spectrum, Herbert Hoover,
''the
Engineer in the White House," and the quasi-fascistic ideas of Henry
Ford. But, as Hoover found out in a most spectacular way, political prob–
lems do not yield to such an approach because their factors (not the least
important being the class struggle) are quite different from those involved
in running a mass-production factory.
The nature of Burnham's approach, and the main reason for its popu·
lar vogue, should now be clear. He has combined the Marxist concept of
a revolutionary new class based on an economically progressive reorgan·
ization of the productive forces and invested with the mystic aura of his–
torical inevitability, with the technocratic-"planning" illusion of solving
society's problems the way engineers solve the problems involved
in
build·
ing a bridge. He has used both concepts, especially the Marxist, at their
crudest (and most propagandistically effective) level. The result is some–
thing we have already seen coming into existence abroad in the conquered
nations, in the pro-fascist propaganda of such former Marxist leaders as
Deat and Henri De Man, but which has not hitherto appeared over here.
As expounded in his book, Burnham's thesis seems to me to create at least
three highly dangerous illusions: (1) by presenting the "new order''
in
specifically managerial-productive terms and playing down the role of
the
dictators, it makes it appear desirable from the standpoint of materialistic
progress; (2) it greatly exaggerates the strength, the internal consistency,
and the conscious planning of these totalitarian systems; (3) by present·
ing fascism as historically inevitable with a finality which would have
shocked Marx, and by underestimating the subjective, I venture even to
say the
moral,
factors working on the other side, Burnham's theory para–
lyzes the will to fight for a more desirable alternative.
