I pretty much write off everything as aphasia nowadays – in myself and in others. And I’m very glad that the bureaucratic idea seems to be working for you…

Jasper,

I am definitely going to read the Meszaros. Hopefully tonight if I can finish the fraction of the novel I need to read for tuesday teaching in a decent amount of time… Hopefully then I’ll have more to say. I’m also going to do a little bit of work on “scarcity”…

The Meszaros article on the website handles all of this with real finesse.

And yes, I meant that as a caveat. It’s almost always a skipped step or three from National Socialism to general principles.

Anyway, one last thought about “bureaucracy”: the more I think about it, the more I see it as a missing term that could reorient discussions of other topics. For instance, I’ve sometimes argued with friends devil’s advocate fashion that the death penalty is less objectionable than arming police or dropping bombs in war, since at least the death penalty involves mediation by a court. But maybe this is the wrong way to put it–maybe it’d make more sense to talk about varying relationships between bureaucracy and state-sanctioned murder. Hm.

I definitely don’t think that private companies are more efficient than public institutions, at least not when the metrics that we both favor are in play. What I meant was simply that the drive for cost-efficiency informs the bureaucratic techniques that these companies employ. Both companies and public institutions aim for efficiency – one would hope that that later would employ a more holistic metric to test for efficiency, though of course that hasn’t always or often been the case.

What if I replaced the word “market” with “scarcity” in this sequence: “the heading of the imperatives of the value-form and the market”? Because I do think, until we get the cold fusion that’s coming to us, we will still be confronted with the issue of scarcity, and all that that entails, perhaps even more so in a more egalitarian society.

Ben,

Ah thanks for the compliment. Believe it or not, I think we met briefly a few years ago as you were potentially on your way into a place that I was on my way out of. (They didn’t let me go on dinners anymore once I was on my way out, so we never actually sat down and dined together, as you likely did with everyone else there… But I was at your talk, and I think I said hi…)

You’re right about the bureaucracy book to come. I am sort of thinking about these things for what I’m going to do next, but your idea is a good one, I think. Maybe it already exists. I’ll have to take a peek around.

Taking this topic to the camps is fair and a good reminder, and there is no doubt that the camps embodied the sublimely satanic perfection of many modern developments, bureaucracy included. But national socialism incorporated lots of modern developments that we’d perhaps not want to throw away just because they’d been taken up by that complicated regime. It’s more a caveat, to my mind, than anything else… which is I’m sure how you meant it.

But thanks for the comment, and for the compliment…

With that in mind, I think you’re right to claim “bureaucracy” as a neutral term. But that very claim supports Jasper’s point, doesn’t it, that bureaucracy and hierarchy are far from incompatible? Anyway, he’s certainly right there; the link between the two is what gave Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann so much force.

This was brought home to me on a recent visit to Bergen-Belsen. The museum has an extensive display of documents, including some twenty or thirty examples of the paperwork kept by the camp on its Russian and Italian POWs. Here’s the front and back of one such item::

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mongibeddu/3273516631 (front)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mongibeddu/3273516355 (back)

Note the notations on the back, which have to do with forced-labor assignments, and note the rubber stamp that was used for entering information on death. I can’t remember the exact figures, but something like 70% of the Russians and 40% of the Italians were killed. That’s one example of the bureaucratic sublime (if it isn’t too flip to say so), checked boxes and all.

Really enjoy your writing, btw.

Let’s put it this way: there are bureaucracies that are redistributive and (sort of) responsive to the will of the people–the NHS, for instance–but then there are bureaucracies that do not serve any redistributive purpose whatsoever. One thinks of the courts, the prison system, ICE. I do think ultimately that a case can be made that all of these forms of the organization of work and life come under the heading of the imperatives of the value-form and the market (which is more than and different than cost- efficiency), but I’ll save that for another day.

I’m going to start writing all this down soon, this summer. The everyday, simplicity – I’m finally starting to figure out what it is that I was talking about way back when. But I simply can’t see the NHS and Wal-mart in anything like the same light, even though I understand the argument.

But the bit about the tide reversing and the relationship between the sort of weirdly semi-contrarian argument that I’m advancing and those from the beginnings of the new left is very very interesting and I’m going to keep thinking about it for sure.

In any case, in my view, the alienation of Wal-Mart and the alienation of the large bureaucracy, are just two faces of the same coin–class rule–even if they are ostensibly opposed in the pages of The Nation and The National Review. That’s how they’re “symmetrical”–the argument for and against bureaucracy depends upon the same rhetorical strategy, one that, in my mind, misses much.

Here’s the thing: in the 50s and 60s, leftists who argued that the alliance between monopoly capitalism, Keynesianism and social democracy of that period was alienating and stultifying were not wrong or ideological–they were right, it did suck–even if those arguments were then used against them after ’73 in the creation of a neoliberal order based upon “flexibility,” “creativity” and other such bullshit which was in fact much worse. This is just the way history works (and here I’m hopelessly Hegelian). But by the same measure, those who argue for a benevolent bureaucracy today, at the end of the neoliberal period, must be careful, lest what happened to the left in the 60s and 70s happen again, in reverse. . .There are all kinds of hell.

Oh, lastly: your tone is fine, CR. It’s always a pleasure to debate such things here. [I, too, worried about the tone in my first comment--jeez, the internet is so weird, such an affect-scrambler].

More important: neoclassicism or neoliberalism most definitely argue both for and against bureaucracy, no? But more against than for. (Look into neoclassical economics and arguments in re employment, labor markets, and the like in the mid-nineteenth century. Social welfare bureaucracy emerges along with marginalism along with the very concept of unemployment itself during the late 1880s and 1890s (what the Kafka review was talking about above…) It seems to be that the most standard tactic of those that’ve been administering things for the last few decades is bureaucratic reductionism – the market can handle things far better than crusty govt staffed offices etc.

There’s a huge gap between “price signal / bureaucracy” in your response above. I’ve heard very little of the “administrators should set the price of milk” line over the past decades.

And certainly “people actually have no say in the decisions that bear upon their lives” is exactly the “citizens choice” line so common in privatisation drives of late. Isn’t that just what Bush used to say about Social Security?

God, sorry if the tone is wrong sounding or this is scattershot. Writing while my daughter begs me to play with her – you know how that goes… But it’s a start. I guess I just see bureaucracy and the bureaucratic as one of the primary ways that neoliberalism advertised the changes it desperately desired / desires to make….

I’ll definitely read the doc later tonight!

Paperwork and forms and waiting, sure. But bureaucracy, no. That’s to say, in my book the term means rule by administrators, and it means, essentially, a system in which, whether or not goods are better distributed, people actually have no say in the decisions that bear upon their lives. The strawman of “anarchist utopia” actually serves to preclude examination of the kinds of pragmatic and philosophical attempts to think through these problems. See the readings here, for instance: http://sites.google.com/site/imwgucberkeley/recent-meetings/speculative-economics–life-after-capital