Binary scheme of democracy and centralism

[bantam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

>

G'day Charles,

> CB: Thanks , Rob.  What is your take on the usual usage that a "big
> bureaucracy" is a bad thing , implying that making it "smaller" would
> improve it  ? Seems to me the problem you summarize is the dictatorial
> or "undemocratic" structure of socalled bureaucracies.  This implies
> that it is the small number of autocrats, not the large number of
> people who make up the "bureaucracy" that would be the problem.
>
> I understand your wish to preserve Weber's insights. My concern is
> that right now, the term bureaucracy is always used to argue for
> privatization. Weber's examples of private companies is specifically
> not the widespread meaning in this context, otherwise there would be
> no argument that privatisation gets rid of the problems of
> "bureaucracy".
>
> If the Taylor system is a bureaucracy, is a factory system a
> bureaucracy ?

Yep.  Bureaucracy, in the Weberian sense, is the rule of the human world
by what he calls western rationality (you and I might see this 'western
rationality' as a function of capitalism, but I suspect Weber'd have it
the other way 'round - a potentially big disagreement, but not on what
we're talking about here).  Bureaucracy is the top-down imposition of
the ensuing principles - that way, we're all enmeshed in what Weber
called 'the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality'.  Anything that
bubbles from the bottom up is anathema to it - potentially fatal to it.
A distaste for bureaucracy is a distaste for high capitalism to my mind,
but a tendency more to Shliapnikov's or Trotsky's ideas of an economy
run by decentralised workers' councils, in concert (for the latter) with
limited markets, than to a centralised command economy.  Modern
computing power might solve a lot of the problems that defeated the SU
planning nomenklatura, but it wouldn't solve the one we're on about.

> I think we should use the term "dictatorship" and "bourgeois
> dictatorship " to refer to corporate structures , including factory
> systems.

I've no problem with that.  But I reckon we have explicitly to add a bit
of Marx to our Weber here - to highlight that it's not bureaucratic
rationality that's producing the system (although it helps reproduce
it), but the system that's producing the bureaucratic rationality.

Cheers,
Rob.