THE CULTURE OF MANIPULATION

by James Lawrence

@JWLawrence85

The magnum opus of the late Sam Francis, Leviathan And Its Enemies, significantly expanded and improved upon James Burnham’s theory of the managerial revolution. One way in which Francis built upon the original framework of Burnham was to make a distinction between soft managerialism, the consent-manufacturing type practiced in Western ‘liberal democracies’, and hard managerialism, the coercive type practiced in the authoritarian states of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. This aspect of Francis’s theory deserves attention, I think, because it makes an important correction to Burnham that itself requires fuller clarification.

BREAKING THE LIBERAL SHELL

Previously published at our back-up site on September 17th.

by James Lawrence

Contrary to popular belief, the natural world provides several parallels for the behaviour of decadent humans. One of the most dramatic of these is found in the behaviour of a caterpillar after being stung by a parasitoid wasp, which injects its larvae directly into the caterpillar’s body. As the wasp larvae feed on its insides and grow to maturity, the parasitised caterpillar goes on munching away on vegetation as if nothing had happened — until the larvae finally chew their way out of its body. Whereupon the caterpillar spins a protective coccoon around them and ferociously defends them from predators as if they were its own young, until the wasps are ready to fly away and the exhausted caterpillar helpfully starves to death.

ARE WE RIGHT? (PART II)

by James Lawrence

This is the second part of a three-part article. Go to Part I.

We have explored the question of how to clearly define ‘the Right’, and found that the macro-historical pattern identified by Bertrand de Jouvenel provides us with the best rule of thumb. In de Jouvenel’s narrative, Power (the governing authority) is shown to expand itself by allying with the lowest classes of people so as to subvert the social order, which is defended by traditional authorities such as the aristocracy. If the governing authority wins this struggle, the outcome is a levelled or inverted social landscape dominated by an unconstrained Power; if the aristocrats win it, they establish a strong social order overseen by a constrained Power, whose legitimacy depends on its role as a guardian and symbol of this order.

OF NAZI PUGS AND SOVIET PIGS

by James Lawrence

In Scotland, a hate crime trial is currently being held over a “grossly offensive” incident last year, in which a local yob persuaded his ugly and defective pet beast to pay homage to a murderous 20th century regime. The defendant is the Chief Constable in command of Police Scotland, a notoriously defective police force, which has previously been known to arrest people for internet comments but leave young women to die in mortal emergencies. He has been accused of a hate crime for his sick impersonation of an NKVD commissar, in which he not only disrespected the memory of millions of victims of the Soviet regime, but actually sent thugs in uniforms to harass and imprison a man for saying something he didn’t like. The defence pleads the case for treating the event and the police force in question as a bad joke, but local people continue to express disgust at the lack of taste, especially as the offending behaviour was made at the defendant’s workplace.

…Whoops! Sorry, that doesn’t quite sound like the wonderful free democratic society of modern Britain, does it? Let’s try again.

ON MORALFAGGING

by James Lawrence

The vast information reserves of the internet offer us paths paved with gold, fringed all around by wildernesses made of total and utter shit. Like most of us, I try to avoid wrong turnings that lead to junk content, but don't always succeed - especially when people who usually post good stuff sometimes veer off into personal ego-drama and histrionics. Lately I have been making the best of my occasional excursions into nonsense, by trying to extract some sort of useful insight from them.

KOREAN MISSILES AND THE MESSY MIDDLE

Audio version available here.

by Colin Liddell

James Burnham, in his 1941 classic The Managerial Revolution identified the managerial class and the managerial system as the new, ascendant form of power. This system, which still dominates the present-day power structure, has some troubling aspects that help to explain the growing dysfunction and decline of our society. I want to draw attention to two in particular.

First, because power is based on control rather than on ownership, there is a constant need to justify it through appeals to the emotions of the masses. Rather than being defined by the interests of the masses, democracy is defined by what can be sold to the masses, which is definitely not the same thing. Secondly, the need to demonstrate competence outweighs the need to have actual competence.

The great irony is that these two characteristics are produced by a system dedicated to efficient control and getting results, but in effect they work against efficiency and results. An interesting example is provided by the problem presented by North Korea, a so-called "rogue" nation that is rapidly developing its rocket and nuclear weapon technology.

CONTRA COSMOPOLITANISM

by James Lawrence

  

In common with many others in this movement, I see European racial self-defence as the foundation of the Alt-Right. This does not mean, as some would have it, that this foundation is also the pinnacle, or that the Alt-Right can be reduced to it and nothing else. But in a future where the European people have been replaced, and the civilisation of Europe no longer exists in any form distinct from the modernist anti-culture to which it gave birth, everything else good and true on the Alt-Right ends up reduced to so much meaningless blog chatter.

However, I have long been aware of a serious shortcoming in ethnonationalism, which runs through all of its discourse like cracks in a wall. On the one hand, most if not all of the ethnonationalist charges against ‘foreigners’ (blacks, Muslims, Jews etc.) are both carefully reasoned and backed up with solid facts. On the other hand, cheek by jowl with these, we find statements and assumptions about ‘our own people’ (white Europeans) that are not only arbitrary and slapdash, but do not even accord with basic common sense.

THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION BY JAMES BURNHAM

The Managerial Revolution
by James Burnham
Buy at Amazon.com

Reviewed by Matt Forney

Assuming you even know who James Burnham is at all, he probably occupies a footnote at best in your mind. A notable political theorist and activist during the mid-20th century, he began his public life as a Marxist and Trotskyist but later transitioned to conservatism, spending the latter decades of his life as a columnist for National Review. Shortly after the fall of France in World War II, he wrote The Managerial Revolution, a radical tract that deserves to be more widely read.

Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism”; rule by managers.