Random Footnotes

...Not only did the bureaucracy in Russia constitute a new class, argued Bruno R., against Trotsky's conception that because property was socialized the regime was historically a progressive one, but the men of this class—politicians, administrators and technicians—formed part of a new social revolution in the world, a new ruling class...

...But Trotsky refused to consider the alternative of bureaucratic collectivism...

...In conversation with Draper, Rizzi accepted as authentic the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and even stated that the First International was a Jewish conspiracy, although Marx himself was unaware of this...

...Bruno R., according to Draper, was not an anti-fascist Italian refugee, but a commercial traveler who before the war journeyed freely between France and Italy...

...Bureaucratic collectivism" certainly was a felicitous phrase...

...As a footnote to the radical history of the forties, however, the search for Bruno R. is finished...

...In April 1958...

...A strange picture emerges...

...Even more curiously, no one seemed to be able to find the book which, for Trotsky, represented the only real challenge to his ideas...

...In Paris, about 1938, Rizzi had sought membership in the party, but the refugee Italian Trot-skyites feared that he might be a Fascist spy, or, at best, a political eccentric...

...In the March 1959 issue of Le Contrat Social, two pertinent letters appeared on the subject—one from Bruno R. himself, very much alive, the other from Hal Draper, the former editor of Labor Action...

...One might add that a whole current of Marxist opinion was similarly deluded...

...Whatever Trotsky's unwillingness to face up to the conclusions of the theory, the phrase, bureaucratic collectivism, found immediate echo in the radical world...

...Despite other successes (one of which, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was made into a movie), B. Traven has never come to the fore...

...From his windows," writes Draper, "one sees the mountains, the sky and the water, but no signs of human beings...

...Random Footnotes By Daniel Bell The Strange Tale of Bruno R. IN THE WORLD of letters and politics there occasionally appears a man who, by his writing, makes a mark, yet prefers the shadow of obscurity (and perhaps the secret delight of watching unnoticed) to the flickering light of public notice...

...Mussolini's police knew him well...

...It is assured because it does not depend upon a military victory by Germany, which is in any case likely...

...identifying himself as the author...

...In a curious way, this amoralism permeated Burnham's book...

...As Souvarine notes, in an editorial coda, there is no proof that Burnham actually "plagiarized" Bruno R. Since no copy of the book was available, there could be no literal borrowing of text...

...In it, he asserted that the new mes-sianism of socialism masked an ideology of discontented intellectuals who were using the proletariat as a vehicle simply to gain power for themselves...

...Eight years later he had first read the article and was astonished to find that a group of Socialists was espousing the theory...

...These fears are understandable...

...The idea itself was "in the air...

...No one knows who he is, what he looks like, where he lives, or any other fragment of biographical detail...

...For 20 years, Bruno R. was almost forgotten...

...He remarks that he first told Trotsky, "who I loved and regarded even as my teacher," of his ideas in 1938...

...B. Traven, whose novel, The Death Ship, published by Knopf in 1934, was hailed as one of the few authentic proletarian accounts of a sailor's life...

...And one can go back . . . but these are other searches...

...In the queer muddle of judgments about politics, Rizzi equally accepted—and still does today, says Draper—many of the racist slanders that anti-Semites had written about the Jews...

...In fact, the dissident Trotskyite faction, led by Max Schactman, adopted the phrase...

...Such a man was (is...

...In fact, Rizzi was never a Trotskyite...

...The more general theory however, that "the managers" (politicians, administrators and technicians), because they play a similar role based on function or power rather than ownership of property, form a common class and represent a new social stage in history, was too loose to be meaningful...

...A member of the Schact-manite faction, Draper had long sought, and finally in 1948 had located, a copy of Bruno R.'s book...

...How often people confuse history—and progress—with necessity...

...The French Communist Jacques Doriot, the Belgian Socialist Henri de Man, and a wing of the French Socialist party, led by Spinasse and Rives, supported Hitler at the outbreak of the war on the grounds that his victory would destroy capitalism and unify Europe...

...However onerous . . . the perspective may be," as Trotsky put it, if the Stalin regime was not merely an "abhorrent relapse" on the road to socialism, but a new exploiting class, then true believers everywhere would have to repudiate the Soviet state and refuse to defend it as progressive...

...out of the blue, Draper received a letter from Italy, signed Bruno Rizzi...

...Now, in the long wash of the discussion of Djilas' theoretical analysis of Russian society, comes a strange denouement...

...in the dim debates of Russian Marxism, one can go back to the 1870s and 1880s and the disputes between Peter Tkachev and Paul Akselrod on the role of the "conscious minority" in leading a socialist revolution...

...Draper points out that Rizzi, at first, thought that Hitler and Mussolini were "historically progressive...

...But it is Draper's letter which, for the first time, provides some biographical detail about this elusive character...

...In a similar, but minor way, there was, for 20 years, a political mystery about a man known only as Bruno R. Bruno R. came to life only once, in 1939, as the protagonist in an ideological life-and-death struggle between Trotsky and an opposing faction over the attitude of Marxists to Russia and the war...

...Draper and his wife, then in Europe, paid a call on Rizzi...

...That year, in Labor Action, he printed the only account that had yet appeared of Bruno R.'s ideas...

...In 1937, in Milan, he had published under his own name a book entitled Dove va URSS, which contained the seed of his theory, but which was allowed to circulate, said Draper, "because according to the theories of Rizzi, Fascism was in the line of social progress...

...The general outcome of the second war is also assured," he wrote...

...Even if England could win] the same general result would follow . . . the consolidation of the European strategic base, with England compelled to integrate into it...

...He also denounces Burnham for plagiarizing his book, and in doing so taking only the "negative side...

...It seemed to congeal all the groping efforts by independent radicals to characterize, in theoretical terms, the Stalinist regime...

...There is no possible solution on a capitalist basis...

...In 1956...

...For Trotsky, as for all Marxists, there was a direct political corollary to the first of these theses...

...Although, one might note that in a new context, and in new terminology, the idea forms the core of ? Wright Mills' The Power Elite...

...In fact, as Max Nomad has often claimed, the source of many of these conceptions goes back to the theories of Waclaw Machajski, a Polish anarcho-syndicalist who published, in 1899, a small book, The Evolution of Social Democracy...

...For it ignored the differences in ideology, culture, tradition, and type of political organization—in short, the values which distinguish one society from another...

...But the general thesis of the book, as reported by Trotsky, was even more sweeping in its stark and powerful simplicity...

...Bruno R., identifying himself as a man named Bruno Rizzi, tells only sketchily about the writing of his book, and nothing about himself...

...In the November 1958 issue of Le Contrat Social, a political bi-monthly edited by Boris Souvarine in Paris, there appeared an article by Georges Henein, entitled "'Bruno R. and the 'New Class,' " which traced back Djilas's idea to La Bureaucratisation du Monde...

...It was the obvious source of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, although Burnham, who had opposed Trotsky's views on Russia, never mentioned Bruno R. And, in the climate of political debate in the last 20 years, the recognition of the fact that Russia was ruled by a new exploiting class has caused many Communists, most notably Milovan Djilas, to repudiate Bolshevism...

...Also, except for a flurry of interest in the '40s, it was never seriously accepted in social theory...

...In the longer perspective, if the larger thesis was true, that socialism was no longer the inevitable stage after capitalism, then...

...Trotsky took the phrase—and the idea of—bureaucratic collectivism from a book published in Paris in 1939 called La Bureaucratisation du Monde (The Bureaucratization of the World), by a man who signed it only "Bruno R." No one knew Bruno R., although Trotsky called him "an Italian 'left-Communist' who formerly adhered to the Fourth International...

...Unfortunately, said Henein, Bruno R. was dead...

...his isolation from the world seems complete...

...Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and even Roosevelt's New Deal, were all part of a common historical phenomenon...

...not the biological theories, but the pervasive role of the Jews in spreading capitalism...

...In what was to be his last theoretical pronouncement, an article written shortly after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Trotsky told his followers a new historic caesura had been reached: Since the "further existence of the disintegrating capitalist world is impossible," either the proletariat would organize the world for socialism or a new social form, "bureaucratic collectivism," would establish itself on the stage of history...

...Thus, the garish end of a man who won derivative fame as the father of the theory of "bureaucratic collectivism...