The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
is only 180 pages long — three essays, an introduction and an
afterword — but I made more than 80 notes as I read it, underlining
passages and dog-earing pages I wanted to come back to and/or read aloud
to other people and talk about further.
Unlike the enormous and comprehensive Debt, Utopia of Rules
is mostly argument, not history. It sets out to investigate the problem
of “bureaucracy” — basically, rules, and the simmering threat of
violence that underpins them. Hidebound adherence to awful, runaround
bureaucracy was always the sin laid at the feet of slow-moving,
Stalinist states under the influence of the USSR. Capitalism, we were
told, was dynamic, free, and open. But if that’s so, why is it that
since the USSR imploded, bureaucracy under capitalism has exploded?
If you live in a western, capitalist state, you probably spend more
time filling in paperwork, waiting on hold, resubmitting Web-forms,
attending performance reviews, brainstorming sessions, training
meetings, and post-mortems than any of your ancestors, regardless of
which side of the Iron Curtain they lived on.
Moreover, the anti-authoritarian Left has always had a critique of this
kind of hidebound adherence to rules. The left-wing uprisings in 1968
spraypainted walls with “Demand the impossible!” Today, if the Left can
critique bureaucracy, it can only do so in the language of the Right: by
attacking civil servants and unions, when almost all the red tape you
encounter in your daily life comes from trying to get your “free market”
HMO to pay up, get your bank to correct its errors — or, if you’re
unlucky enough to need welfare in America or the UK, from dealing with
“accountability” officers, much beloved by the right, who require you to
complete paperwork straight out of a USSR-themed Ren Faire, all the
time. Sometimes in triplicate.
Bureaucracy is pervasive and metastatic. To watch cop-dramas, you’d
think that most of the job of policing was crime-fighting. But it’s not.
The police are just “armed bureaucrats.” Most of what police do is
administrative enforcement — making sure you follow the rules
(threatening to gas you or hit you with a stick if you don’t). Get
mugged and chances are, the police will take the report over the phone.
Drive down the street without license plates and you’ll be surrounded by
armed officers of the law who are prepared to deal you potentially
lethal violence to ensure that you’re not diverging from the rules.
This just-below-the-surface violence is the crux of Graeber’s argument.
He mocks the academic left who insist that violence is symbolic these
days, suggesting that any grad student sitting in a university library
reading Foucault and thinking about the symbolic nature of violence
should consider the fact that if he’d attempted to enter that same
library without a student ID, he’d have been swarmed by armed cops.
Bureaucracy is a utopian project: like all utopians, capitalist
bureaucrats (whether in private- or public-sector) believe that humans
can be perfected by modifying their behavior according to some ideal,
and blame anyone who can’t live up to that ideal for failing to do so.
If you can’t hack the paperwork to file your taxes, complete your
welfare rules, figure out your 401(k) or register to vote, you’re
obviously some kind of fuckup.
Bureaucracy begets bureaucracy. Every effort to do away with bureaucracy ends up with more bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy lies. The point of coming up with rules is to ensure that
they’re evenly applied. But everyone knows that rules aren’t evenly
applied. When we replace informal, arbitrary systems with formal sets of
rules, the arbitrariness moves up a level — moves up to “who has to
follow the rules and who doesn’t.” Sell a joint, go to jail. Launder
billions for the Sinaloa cartel, defer some of your bonus for a few weeks.
“Everybody knows” would be a good alternative title for this book. Like the Leonard Cohen song,
reading this book (especially the introduction, which is the sort of
thing that someone should turn into a 20-minute info-video) makes you
recognize that there’s a huge, awful, lying center to the world as we
inhabit it. As Graeber says, bureaucracies are supposed to be
meritocracies where people are hired and promoted based on talent, not
because of birth or personal connections. But we all know that’s
bullshit — and we also all know that the only way to rise in the
Bureaucratic Utopia is to pretend that it isn’t bullshit.
Graeber wants us to demand the impossible. To stop making capitalism. To
wake up in the morning and just walk away from the lie. To refuse the
intimidation of latent violence. To reclaim the critique of rules and
privilege that was the Left’s to take to the streets in 1968.
In these three essays, a brilliant introduction, and a fabulous
afterword (about the relationship of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies
to Occupy and capitalism), Graber manages to tease out something
wordless and important, about how we might imagine a world where we
don’t need violence to keep us in check and stop letting the people who
say we do run the show.
