Like everybody who has studied Marxism from a relatively yo…

Like everybody who has studied Marxism from a relatively young age I encountered many quotes of, or comments on, James Burnham's “The Managerial Revolution”. I was quite familiar with Burnham’s ideas but I have not read the book. I don't think that I would have read it, now in 2024, eight-four years after its publications, were it not for the fact that his ideas have been to some extent resuscitated recently. I will mention it in more detail further in the article.
The ideas that Burnham expounded in his 1940 book were to a large extent contradicted by the events which took place during the Second World War. His predictions were entirely wrong. But the predictions are only a secondary, and I think rather unimportant, part of the book. Burnham’s key idea is that the capitalist system is being gradually replaced by “managerialism”, a new social system where private property is nationalized and the real ruling class is composed of state-appointed or state-approved managers of companies. Capitalists, if they still exist, play a purely passive role. The ideology of sanctity of private property disappears.
Burnham’s thesis was revived in a somewhat different form in the 1960s when the idea of convergence between capitalism and socialism became popular. John Kenneth Galbraith’s “The new industrial state” could be seen as an extension or elaboration of Burnham’s original thesis. Raymond Aron at the same time also wrote about the industrial societies where the type of ownership (state or private) was less important, and managers run the system, determine prices and quantities, and eventually take full control. Industrial societies, whether of the Soviet or American type, required the same type of management, Aron thought. Andrei Sakharov, the famous physicist in the Soviet Union, expressed the same ideas. Technocracy, in the language of the 1960s, would rule. But before I discuss Burnham revival or “revival” I think it is important to summarize his key arguments since they may not be as well known today as they used to be.
The book is written in a very unappealing style. It reads like a Stalinist textbook. There are indeed many stylistic similarities between Burnham and Stalin. The early chapters that lay out the main features of capitalism and socialism are written dogmatically and contain almost no reference to any other author. Only Machiavelli is mentioned once and Marx, unavoidably, in passing a couple of times, but without any direct quotes. Burnham’s dogmatic style however has the advantage of being extremely clear, and probably to underline that Burnham at times uses the numbering of paragraphs. These parts read like a textbook of an evening class for the first-year students in Marxism.
The book’s analytics is entirely Marxist. As I mentioned, Burnham begins with a very simplified analysis of what is capitalism and how it has developed within the womb of the feudal society and then discusses Marxist notion of a system that would replace capitalism, namely socialism. In everything that touches on capitalism Burnham is basically 100% in agreement not only with Marx but with Lenin and The Third International. He frequently uses historical analogies highlighting the similarities between the way that capitalism was born within a feudal society, and managerialism is being born within the capitalist society. Some of the historical examples may be right, but they are also cherry-picked and not discussed at any depth or length.
Where Burnham dramatically departs from Marxism is in his view that the system that would replace capitalism will not be socialism but “managerialism”. Socialism is defined, quite reasonably, as a classless, free, and internationalist society. He observes throughout in the book and especially in the chapter written about the Soviet Union (always called just “Russia”) that none of these three features holds true for the Soviet Union. It is a class society where managers and party functionaries have political power, de facto control instruments od production, and have preferential position in the distribution of national output (the latter two points are Burnham’s general definition, applying to capitalism as well, of the ruling class). People are not free but subject to a totalitarian system while workers’ power in enterprises ended two years after the Revolution. Soviets are politically irrelevant, toothless façades. There are almost no traces of internationalism because managerial ruling class is interested in national aggrandizement and national power. Thus the Soviet Union is not a socialist, but a managerial society. It is, in fact, Burnham argues, the first managerial society in history, built on economically underdeveloped foundations; yet a society that is already (at the time of writing) followed by other nascent managerial societies of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and New Deal’s USA.
Burnham rejects the idea that socialism would replace capitalism because workers cannot run complex ec…