Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946) | Hacker News Reader

Second Thoughts on James Burnham (1946)

orwell.ru

36 pointsallthebest11 comments

> Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority.

The managerial class described by Burnham reaps some of the rewards in exchange for the services they provide in facilitating it. But they are trapped in the system as well.

Power is not a means, it is an end. The only way to discover the limits of your freedom is to go too far.

This style of writing is highly misleading.

With careful reading, one can see that author restricts the necessity of fraud to situations where the masses create value for a minority with no external benefit to themselves or anything else.

However this isn’t at all clear at first glance. Read casually, the text appears to state that fraud is necessary for all exercise of power.

The pivotal word of “simply” makes the text difficult to read because the author uses the word to express exclusivity despite the common use of the word to express something like “essentially” or “easily”. This word choice allows the reader to be mislead into thinking that all use of power requires fraud rather than some specific use of power requires fraud.

Because Burnham's neoconservatism is a sort of fusion of Marxist vanguardism and Walter Lippmann's panels of experts making decisions for the Phantom Public and selling them with lies. Burnham thought that the only possible way to maintain a civilization was through a small group of executive elites with access to the truth, but who kept the mass of the ignorant public docile through patriotic myths and slogans, and policing.

There's no possible stable order for Burnham within a society that is not run by a minority in its own interest.

>It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.

This is an interesting insight. It seems to apply to Klaus Schwab / the NGO-academic-media complex pretty accurately.

But his theory, for all its appearance of objectivity, is the rationalisation of a wish. There is no strong reason for thinking that it tells us anything about the future, except perhaps the immediate future. It merely tells us what kind of world the ‘managerial’ class themselves, or at least the more conscious and ambitious members of the class, would like to live in.

And, of course, a theme of this essay is that these predictions did not in fact come true when Burnham predicted them, and did not generally prove out over the next 20-30 years. We could debate what happened in the 80s, but the context is so different that Burnham might not have much to say about it.

It seems that many of the predictions are at least somewhat true, or are becoming truer with time, though some of them are too vague to assign a truth value. Whether they happen faster or more slowly than he predicted is not really relevant to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXmcl1MCQCI is an interesting talk on Burnham and explains how Orwell designed 1984 to reflect Burnham's insights, even though he didn't like them at all.

Burnham is the father of Neoconservatism, which oddly is a heretical branch of Trotskyism created by the "Burnham-Shachtman Split" - the same event that ultimately spawned the recently important DSA.

History is bizarre.

The split in the Socialist Workers Party between the majority (Leon Trotsky, James Cannon) and the minority factions (Max Schachtman, James Burnham)

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/fi/1938-1949/...

James Burnham: Letter of resignation from the Workers Party

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/burnham/1940/0...

> It is important to bear in mind what I said above: that Burnham's theory is only a variant — an American variant, and interesting because of its comprehensiveness — of the power worship now so prevalent among intellectuals. A more normal variant, at any rate in England, is Communism. If one examines the people who, having some idea of what the Russian régime is like, are strongly russophile, one finds that, on the whole, they belong to the ‘managerial’ class of which Burnham writes. That is, they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige. These people look towards the USSR and see in it, or think they see, a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves. It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip. Burnham at least has the honesty to say that Socialism isn't coming; the others merely say that Socialism is coming, and then give the word ‘Socialism’ a new meaning which makes nonsense of the old one. But his theory, for all its appearance of objectivity, is the rationalisation of a wish. There is no strong reason for thinking that it tells us anything about the future, except perhaps the immediate future. It merely tells us what kind of world the ‘managerial’ class themselves, or at least the more conscious and ambitious members of the class, would like to live in.

Orwell certainly didn't pull any punches.

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