Reading George Orwell, both novels and essays. Questions addressed are often of perennial interest. For example: are the US, UK, etc. democracies? If so, what kind? If we accept Burnham’s idea(s) presented by Orwell below, what is called democracy is elite control and fraud – a propaganda system. Such a system can never be effective if admitted; so information must be in some ways controlled. Is this argument convincing, in whole or in part?
The propaganda premise suggests, in critical information literacy, considering a radically different view of US education and media; when news might be trusted, or history lessons doubted as too narrow. Yet CIL is not skepticism as an empty attitude, but resistance to views without careful analysis. The educational point is never to lead anyone toward a single position or ideology. Individual initiative and evaluation of alternatives are important values. With this in mind, the Orwell material is recommended, in addition to the classic novels; both for maintaining basic questions about information and democracy, and as an aid for building balanced views.
(Excerpts) James Burnham and The Managerial Revolution. By George Orwell.
(First published in 1946. The University of Adelaide Library. University of Adelaide, South Australia. (https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/james_burnham/) This essay was originally printed in Polemic under the title “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”, and later reprinted as a pamphlet with the present title.)
“James Burnham’s book, The Managerial Revolution, made a considerable stir both in the United States and in this country at the time when it was published, and its main thesis has been so much discussed that a detailed exposition of it is hardly necessary. As shortly as I can summarise it, the thesis is this:
Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers”. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new “managerial” societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.
In his next published book, The Machiavellians, Burnham elaborates and also modifies his original statement. The greater part of the book is an exposition of the theories of Machiavelli and of his modern disciples, Mosca, Michels, and Pareto: with doubtful justification, Burnham adds to these the syndicalist writer, Georges Sorel. What Burnham is mainly concerned to show is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. Burnham does not deny that “good” motives may operate in private life, but he maintains that politics consists of the struggle for power, and nothing else. All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or “the classless society”, or “the Kingdom of Heaven on earth”, are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way into power. The English Puritans, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, were in each case simply power seekers using the hopes of the masses in order to win a privileged position for themselves. 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. In each great revolutionary struggle the masses are led on by vague dreams of human brotherhood, and then, when the new ruling class is well established in power, they are thrust back into servitude. This is practically the whole of political history, as Burnham sees it.” [Emphasis added.]
