George Orwell
“James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution”

‘ONE SHILLING NET’

By Daniel J. Leab:

Orwell liked pamphlets. He believed in the efficacy of the pamphlet form, and lamented that “the public is not, so to speak, pamphlet-conscious”. He argued in 1943 (New Statesman, January 9) that even if many of them were “rubbish”, they ought “to be the literary form” of our time. He collected them (his collection of some 2,000 is now in the British Library). This rare and fragile pamphlet, his Polemic critique of Burnham with a new title, was issued by the Socialist Book Centre only a few weeks after the journal article appeared. The director of the Publishing Department of the Centre on seeing the Polemic galleys of the article had written to Orwell proposing to issue it in pamphlet form, but with a different title. Publication originally was to be in June. 3,000 copies were printed. This pamphlet seems to have had limited distribution. Shortly after its publication, Collett's — “the official Communist bookshop in London” — took over the Socialist Book Centre. A “stunned” Orwell, who did not even know how many copies of the pamphlet had been sold, understandably found the situation “simply calamitous”.