Cynthia Chung, Strategic Culture
September 17, 2021
Klaus Schwab, the architect of the World Economic Forum (f. 1971), a
leading, if not the leading, influencer and funder for what will set the
course for world economic policy outside of government, has been the
cause of much concern and suspicion since his announcement of “The Great
Reset” agenda at the 50th annual meeting of the WEF in June 2020.
The Great Reset initiative is a somewhat vague call for the need for
global stakeholders to coordinate a simultaneous “management” of the
effects of COVID-19 on the global economy, which they have eerily named
as “pandenomics.” This, we are told will be the new normal, the new
reality that we will have to adjust ourselves to for the foreseeable
future.
It should be known that at nearly its inception, the World Economic
Forum had aligned itself with the Club of Rome, a think tank with an
elite membership, founded in 1968, to address the problems of mankind.
It was concluded by the Club of Rome in their extremely influential
“Limits to Growth,” published in 1972, that such problems could not be
solved on their own terms and that all were interrelated. In 1991, Club
of Rome co-founder Sir Alexander King stated in the “The First Global
Revolution” (an assessment of the first 30 years of the Club of Rome)
that:
“In searching for a common enemy
against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the
threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would
fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena
do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone
together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into
the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking
symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention
in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and
behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.” [emphasis added]
It is no surprise that with such a conclusion, part of the solution prescribed was the need for population control.
However, what forms of population control was Klaus Schwab in particular thinking of?
In the late 1960s, Schwab attended Harvard and among his teachers was
Sir Henry Kissinger, whom he has described as among the top figures who
have most influenced his thinking over the course of his life.
[Henry Kissinger and his former pupil, Klaus Schwab, welcome
former- UK PM Ted Heath at the 1980 WEF annual meeting. Source: World
Economic Forum]
To get a better idea of the kinds of influences Sir Henry Kissinger
had on young Klaus Schwab, we should take a look at Kissinger’s infamous
NSSM-200 report: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests,
otherwise known as “The Kissinger Report,” published in 1974. This
report, declassified in 1989, was instrumental in transforming US
foreign policy from pro-development/pro-industry to the promotion of
under-development through totalitarian methods in support of population
control. Kissinger states in the report:
“… if future numbers are to be kept within reasonable bounds, it is urgent that measures to reduce fertility be started and made effective in the 1970s and 1980s …[Financial]
assistance will be given to other countries, considering such factors
as population growth … Food and agricultural assistance is vital for any
population sensitive development strategy … Allocation of scarce
resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in
population control … There is an alternative view that mandatory programs may be needed ..” [emphasis added]
For Kissinger, the US foreign policy orientation was mistaken on its
emphasis of ending hunger by providing the means of industrial and
scientific development to poor nations, according to Kissinger, such an
initiative would only lead to further global disequilibrium as the new
middle classes would consume more, and waste strategic resources.
In Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1799), he wrote:
“We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality;
and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of
famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction,
which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets
narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the
plague.” [emphasis added]
As a staunch Malthusian, Kissinger believed that “nature” had
provided the means to cull the herd, and by using economic policies that
utilised the courting of the plague, famine and so forth, they were
simply enforcing a natural hierarchy which was required for global
stability.
In addition to this extremely worrisome ideology that is only a
stone’s throw away from eugenics, there has also been a great deal of
disturbance over the 2016 World Economic Forum video that goes through
their 8 “predictions” for how the world will change by 2030, with the
slogan “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”
It is this slogan in particular that has probably caused the most
panic amongst the average person questioning what the outcome of the
Great Reset will truly look like. It has also caused much confusion as
to who or what is at the root in shaping this very eerie, Orwellian
prediction of the future?
Many have come to think that this root is the Communist Party of
China. However, whatever your thoughts may be on the Chinese government
and the intentions of President Xi, the roots of the Great Reset agenda
can very clearly be traced back to 80 years ago, when an American,
former Trotskyist who later joined the OSS, followed by the CIA, and
went on to become the founding father of neo-conservatism, James
Burnham, wrote a book on his vision for “The Managerial Revolution.”
In fact, it was the ideologies of Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” that triggered Orwell to write his “1984”.
The Strange Case and Many Faces of James Burnham
“[James Burnham is] the real
intellectual founder of the neoconservative movement and the original
proselytizer, in America, of the theory of ‘totalitarianism.’”
– Christopher Hitchens, “For the Sake of Argument: Essay and Minority Reports”
It is understandably the source of some confusion as to how a former
high level Trotskyist became the founder of the neo-conservative
movement; with the Trotskyists calling him a traitor to his kind, and
the neo-conservatives describing it as an almost road to Damascus
conversion in ideology.
However, the truth of the matter is that it is neither.
That is, James Burnham never changed his beliefs and convictions at
any point during his journey through Trotskyism, OSS/CIA intelligence to
neo-conservatism, although he may have back-stabbed many along the way,
and this two-part series will go through why this is the case.
James Burnham was born in 1905 in Chicago, Illinois, raised as a
Roman Catholic, later rejecting Catholicism while studying at Princeton
and professing atheism for the rest of his life until shortly before his
death whereby he reportedly returned to the church. (1) He would
graduate from Princeton followed by the Balliol College, Oxford
University and in 1929 would become a professor in philosophy at the New
York University.
It was during this period that Burnham met Sidney Hook, who was also a
professor in philosophy at the New York University, and who professed
to have converted Burnham to Marxism in his autobiography. In 1933, along with Sidney Hook, Burnham helped to organize the socialist organization, the American Workers Party (AWP).
It would not be long before Burnham found Trotsky’s use of
“dialectical materialism” to explain the interplay between the human and
the historical forces in his “History of the Russian Revolution” to be
brilliant. As founder of the Red Army, Trotsky had dedicated his life to
the spread of a worldwide Communist revolution, to which Stalin opposed
in the form of Trotsky’s “Permanent Revolution”
ideology. In this ideology, Trotskyists were tactically trained to be
militant experts at infighting, infiltration and disruption.
Among these tactics was “entryism,” in which an organisation
encourages its members to join another, often larger organization, in an
attempt to take over said organization or convert a large portion of
its membership with its own ideology and directive.
The most well-known example of this technique was named the French Turn,
when French Trotskyists in 1934 infiltrated the Section Francaise de
l’International Ouvriere (SFIO, French Socialist Party) with the
intention of winning over the more militant elements to their side.
That same year, Trotskyists in the Communist League of America (CLA)
did a French turn on the American Workers Party, in a move that elevated
the AWP’s James Burnham into the role of a Trotsky lieutenant and chief adviser.
Burnham would continue the tactics of infiltrating and subverting
other leftist parties and in 1935 attempted to do a French Turn on the
much larger Socialist Party (SP), however, by 1937, the Trotskyists were
expelled from the Socialist Party which led to the formation of the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at the end of the year. He would resign
from the SWP in April 1940, and form the Workers Party only to resign
less than two months later.
Burnham remained a “Trotskyist intellectual” from 1934 until 1940,
using militant Trotskyist tactics against competing Marxist movements by
turning their loyalties and ransacking their best talent. Although
Burnham worked six years for the Trotskyists, as the new decade began,
he renounced both Trotsky and “the ‘philosophy of Marxism’ dialectical
materialism” altogether.
Perhaps Burnham was aware that the walls were closing in on Trotsky,
and that it would only be a matter of six months from Burnham’s first
renouncement that Trotsky would be assassinated by August 1940, at his
compound outside Mexico City.
In February 1940 Burnham wrote “Science and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky,” in which he broke with dialectical materialism, stressing the importance of the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s approach:
“Do you wish me to prepare a reading
list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the
brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last
century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic),
and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful
represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now
cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.” [emphasis added]
He summed up his feelings in a letter of resignation from the Workers Party on May 21, 1940:
“I reject, as you know, the “philosophy of Marxism,” dialectical materialism. …
The general Marxian theory of
“universal history”, to the extent that it has any empirical content,
seems to me disproved by modern historical and anthropological
investigation.
Marxian economics seems to me for the
most part either false or obsolete or meaningless in application to
contemporary economic phenomena. Those aspects of Marxian economics
which retain validity do not seem to me to justify the theoretical
structure of the economics.
Not only do I believe it
meaningless to say that “socialism is inevitable” and false that
socialism is “the only alternative to capitalism”; I consider that on
the basis of the evidence now available to us a new form of exploitive
society (which I call “managerial society”) is not only possible but is a
more probable outcome of the present than socialism. …
On no ideological, theoretic or
political ground, then, can I recognize, or do I feel, any bond or
allegiance to the Workers Party (or to any other Marxist party). That is
simply the case, and I can no longer pretend about it, either to myself
or to others.” [emphasis added]
In 1941, Burnham would publish “The Managerial Revolution: What is
Happening in the World,” bringing him fame and fortune, listed by Henry Luce’s Life magazine as one of the top 100 outstanding books of 1924-1944. (2)
The Managerial Revolution
“We cannot understand the revolution by restricting our analysis
to the war [WWII]; we must understand the war as a phase in the
development of the revolution.”
– James Burnham “The Managerial Revolution”
In Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution,”
he makes the case that if socialism were possible, it would have
occurred as an outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution, but what happened
instead was neither a reversion back to a capitalist system nor a
transition to a socialist system, but rather a formation of a new
organizational structure made up of an elite managerial class, the type
of society he believed was in the process of replacing capitalism on a
world scale.
He goes on to make the case that as seen with the transition from a
feudal to a capitalist state being inevitable, so too will the
transition from a capitalist to managerial state occur. And that
ownership rights of production capabilities will no longer be owned by
individuals but rather the state or institutions, he writes:
“Effective class domination and
privilege does, it is true, require control over the instruments of
production; but this need not be exercised through individual private
property rights. It can be done through what might be called corporate
rights, possessed not by individuals as such but by institutions: as was
the case conspicuously with many societies in which a priestly class
was dominant…”
Burnham proceeds to write:
“If, in a managerial society, no
individuals are to hold comparable property rights, how can any group of
individuals constitute a ruling class?
The answer is comparatively simple
and, as already noted, not without historical analogues. The managers
will exercise their control over the instruments of production and gain
preference in the distribution of the products, not directly, through
property rights vested in them as individuals, but indirectly, through
their control of the state which in turn will own and control the
instruments of production. The state – that is, the institutions which
comprise the state – will, if we wish to put it that way, be the
‘property’ of the managers. And that will be quite enough to place them
in the position of the ruling class.”
Burnham concedes that the ideologies required to facilitate this
transition have not yet been fully worked out but goes on to say that
they can be approximated:
“from several different but similar
directions, by, for example: Leninism-Stalinism; fascism-nazism; and, at
a more primitive level, by New Dealism and such less influential [at
the time] American ideologies as ‘technocracy’. This, then, is the
skeleton of the theory, expressed in the language of the struggle for
power.”
This is to be sure, a rather confusing paragraph but becomes clearer
when we understand it from the specific viewpoint of Burnham. As Burnham
sees it, all these different avenues are methods in which to achieve
his vision of a managerial society because each form stresses the
importance of the state as the central coordinating power, and that such
a state will be governed by his “managers”. Burnham considers the
different moral implications in each scenario irrelevant, as he makes
clear early on in his book, he has chosen to detach himself from such
questions.
Burnham goes to explain that the support of the masses is necessary
for the success of any revolution, this is why the masses must be led to
believe that they will benefit from such a revolution, when in fact it
is only to replace one ruling class with another and nothing changes for
the underdog. He explains that this is the case with the dream of a
socialist state, that the universal equality promised by socialism is
just a fairy tale told to the people so that they fight for the
establishment of a new ruling class, then they are told that achieving a
socialist state will take many decades, and that essentially, a
managerial system must be put in place in the meantime.
Burnham makes the case that this is what happened in both Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia:
“Nevertheless, it may still turn out that the new form of economy will be called ‘socialist.’
In those nations – Russia and Germany – which have advanced furthest
toward the new [managerial] economy, ‘socialism’ or ‘national socialism’
is the term ordinarily used. The motivation for this terminology is
not, naturally, the wish for scientific clarity but just the opposite.
The word ‘socialism’ is used for ideological purposes in order to
manipulate the favourable mass emotions attached to the historic
socialist ideal of a free, classless, and international society and to
hide the fact that the managerial economy is in actuality the basis for a
new kind of exploiting, class society.”
Burnham continues:
“Those Nations – [Bolshevik] Russia,
[Nazi] Germany and [Fascist] Italy – which have advanced furthest toward
the managerial social structure are all of them, at present,
totalitarian dictatorships…what distinguishes totalitarian dictatorship
is the number of facets of life subject to the impact of the dictatorial
rule. It is not merely political actions, in the narrower sense, that
are involved; nearly every side of life, business and art and science
and education and religion and recreation and morality are not merely
influenced by but directly subjected to the totalitarian regime.
It should be noted that a
totalitarian type of dictatorship would not have been possible in any
age previous to our own. Totalitarianism presupposes the development of
modern technology, especially of rapid communication and transportation.
Without these latter, no government, no matter what its intentions,
would have had at its disposal the physical means for coordinating so
intimately so many of the aspects of life. Without rapid transportation
and communication it was comparatively easy for men to keep many of
their lives, out of reach of the government. This is no longer possible,
or possible only to a much smaller degree, when governments today make
deliberate use of the possibilities of modern technology.”
Orwell’s Second Thoughts on Burnham
Burnham would go on to state in his “The Managerial Revolution” that
the Russian Revolution, WWI and its aftermath, the Versailles Treaty
gave final proof that capitalist world politics could no longer work and
had come to an end. He described WWI as the last war of the capitalists
and WWII as the first, but not last war, of the managerial society.
Burnham made it clear that many more wars would have to be fought after
WWII before a managerial society could finally fully take hold.
This ongoing war would lead to the destruction of sovereign nation
states, such that only a small number of great nations would survive,
culminating into the nuclei of three “super-states”, which Burnham
predicted would be centered around the United States, Germany and Japan.
He goes on to predict that these super-states will never be able to
conquer the other and will be engaged in permanent war until some
unforeseeable time. He predicts that Russia would be broken in two, with
the west being incorporated into the German sphere and the east into
the Japanese sphere. (Note that this book was published in 1941, such
that Burnham was clearly of the view that Nazi Germany and fascist Japan
would be the victors of WWII.)
Burnham states that “sovereignty will be restricted to the few super-states.”
In fact, he goes so far as to state early on in his book that the
managerial revolution is not a prediction of something that will occur
in the future, it is something that has already begun and is in fact, in
its final stages of becoming, that it has already successfully
implemented itself worldwide and that the battle is essentially over.
The National Review,
founded by James Burnham and William F. Buckley (more on this in part
two), would like to put the veneer that although Orwell was critical of
Burnham’s views that he was ultimately creatively inspired to
write about it in his “1984” novel. Yes, inspired is one way to put it,
or more aptly put, that he was horrified by Burnham’s vision and wrote
his novel as a stark warning as to what would ultimately be the outcome
of such monstrous theorizations, which he would to this day organise the
zeitgeist of thought to be suspicious of anything resembling his
neologisms such as “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Two Minutes Hate”,
“Room 101”, “memory hole”, “Newspeak”, “doublethink”,
“unperson”,”thoughtcrime”, and “groupthink”.
George Orwell, (real name Eric Arthur Blair), first published his “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” in May 1946. The novel “1984” would be published in 1949.
In his essay he dissects Burnham’s proposed ideology that he outlines
in his “The Managerial Revolution” and “The Machiavellians” subtitled
“Defenders of Freedom.”
Orwell writes:
“It is clear that Burnham is
fascinated by the spectacle of power, and that his sympathies were with
Germany so long as Germany appeared to be winning the war…curiously
enough, when one examines the predictions which Burnham has based on his
general theory, one finds that in so far as they are verifiable, they
have been falsified…It will be seen that Burnham’s predictions have not
merely, when they were verifiable, turned out to be wrong, but that they
have sometimes contradicted one another in a sensational way…Political
predictions are usually wrong, because they are usually based on
wish-thinking…Often the revealing factor is the date at which they are
made…It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a
continuation of the thing that is happening…the tendency to do this is
not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration…It is a major
mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the
worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice…
Power worship blurs political
judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that
present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will
always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia,
then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured
Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo…The rise and fall of empires,
the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen
with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are
talked about as though they were already at an end. Burnham’s writings
are full of apocalyptic visions…Within the space of five years Burnham
foretold the domination of Russia by Germany and of Germany by Russia.
In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the instinct to bow down
before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as
irreversible.”
Interestingly, and happily we hear, George Orwell does not take
Burnham’s predictions of a managerial revolution as set in stone, but
rather, has shown itself within a short period of time to be a little
too full of wishful thinking and bent on worshipping the power of the
moment. However, this does not mean we must not take heed to the
orchestrations of such mad men.
In Part two of this series, I will discuss Burnham’s entry into the
OSS then CIA, how he became the founder of the neo-conservative movement
and what are the implications for today’s world, especially concerning
the Great Reset initiative.
–
(1) Priscilla Buckley, “James Burnham 1905–1987.” National Review, July 11, 1987, p. 35.
(2) Canby, Henry Seidel. “The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924–1944”. Life,
14 August 1944. Chosen in collaboration with the magazine’s editors.
Source: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/09/17/the-great-reset-how-managerial-revolution-was-plotted-80-years-ago-by-cia-neocon/
