Bureacracy: Forwarded from Jurriaan

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Michael,

I notice with interest some discussion about bureaucracy on
PEN-L. As
someone who has worked as tutor, education officer, research
officer and
archivist/documentalist for various public service institutions,
I have
often had occasion to think about this topic. From personal
experience,
I've concluded that the study of "bureaucracy" is crucial for
socialists
and Marxists. There are at least two good reasons for that:

Firstly, one of the chief targets of neoliberal ideology today is
precisely
"bureaucracy", the claim being that public services based on a
redistribution of income by the state are inefficient and
necessarily
degenerate bureaucratically, hence should be replaced by
market-mechanisms
as much as possible. The bureaucratic characteristics of
corporations in
the private sector are conveniently ignored,as is the despotism
of the
market, which drives those lacking disposable income straight
back into the
arms of various state bureaucracies who cannot cope with them
adequately.
The concept of "economic efficiency" used by neo-liberals is of
course
largely ridiculous - it is "efficiency" from the standpoint of
the few as
against the misery of the many.

The second reason is that, insofar as socialists want to regulate
markets
(a la Diane Elson or Alec Nove) or do away with them altogether
(a la
Mandel), they have to invent some other allocative devices
instituted by
law (a legal framework) and operated through democratic political
processes
(workers councils, parliaments, consumer associations, planning
institutes,
the Internet or whatever). In other words, specific socialist
institutions
are necessary which consciously seek to match the supply of
society's
resources with social needs. Now unless one is totally naive, it
is obvious
that as soon as some institutions are in put in charge of
allocating
resources and judging what the social needs for particular
resources are,
there is at least the possibility that they may abuse their
position in a
bureaucratic sense, asserting their sectional interest against
the interest
of society as a whole. This applies to socialism just as much as
to
capitalism. Hence the need for a profound Marxist analysis.

There does actually exist a small amount of Western Marxist
literature on
bureaucracy, as somebody already mentioned, including:
- Hal Draper's study of Marx in Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution,
Vol. 1
- Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, and other writings
- Christian Rakovsky, The Professional Dangers of Power
- Isaac Deutscher, The roots of bureaucracy
- Ernest Mandel, Power and Money: A Marxist analysis of
bureaucracy (and
other writings).
- Catherine Samary, Plan, Market & Democracy
- Agnes Heller, Dictatorship over Needs

This type of literature by no means constitutes an exhaustive
analysis of
bureaucracy, but it is a useful starting point. Its weakness is
that it
provides very few guidelines and principles on how to prevent
bureaucratic
evils, beyond a few rules modelled on what Marx already said in
his
writings on the Paris Commune. That is, it often lacks positive
theories of
socialist organisation and management. Odes to "democratic
participation"
are well and good, but how to create durable democratic
institutions and
methods of information management which reduce, rather than
increase,
bureaucracy is another matter.

Al Szymanski made an interesting point once (I think in his book
Is the Red
Flag Flying ?). He said that if you compared the proportion of
bureaucratic
functionaries relative to the population in the USSR and the USA,
you would
actually find that there were proportionally more "bureaucrats"
in the USA
than the USSR. I don't know if this is true, not having the
necessary
statistical information to hand, but I think it's plausible.

The Marxist critique of Weber is not that his descriptive
typology of
bureaucratic forms is in itself wrong or inaccurate. It is rather
that
Weber lacks a political and class analysis of bureaucracy and
fails to
explain satisfactorily where bureaucracy comes from, its origins.
He
regards it more or less as an inevitable product of the growing
"complexity" of society (i.e. ultimately as an inevitable product
of the
division of labour and specialisation).

That is basically why bureaucracy is the "iron cage of the
future"
according to Weber (leaving aside the inherent tendency of
bureaucracy, if
unchecked, to expand its field of operation). But this is
essentially a
technocratic interpretation of bureaucracy, which abstracts from
power
politics, class conflict and historical variations or change. The
division
of labour in any society is itself never simply a question of
"technical"
or "economic" necessity, but very much an outcome of all sorts of
power
struggles and socio-political conflicts. This conclusion, already
reached
by Marx in "Capital", is the real point of departure for a
socialist
analysis of bureaucracy.

Regards

Jurriaan



--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx