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Not being old enough to have experienced feudalism, whenever I think of arbitrary, dictatorial power this haunting film comes to mind as how life would be without the constraints placed on individual ambition by the contemporary bureaucratic, and nominally democratic, regime. Salo’ is loosly based off de Sade’s infamous book, and I was hoping that this paper, focused on power and bureaucracy, could continue along this smutty trajectory. We seem though, to have gone from a mode of power summed up in that Pasolini quote “the only true, great, absolute anarchy is that of power” to a mode of power that a popular Italian phrase, used conversationally when discussing the elusive, cunning power of Machiavellian political manouvering that Italy is famous for: “they piss on our heads and tell us its raining”. Pasolini’s death, 35 years later – and still an open investigation – is just such an example of this subtle yet all the more terrifying mode of power: the faceless men hatching complex plots behind an arcane state bureaucracy. Beyond pizza, wine and the mafia, per Braudel we have Italy to thank for state-enforced monopoly capitalism, and what Baudrillard back in ’83 called the Italian simulacra of democracy, which like pizza and wine, is no more limited to Italy than MacDonald’s is to California. With either mode of power, its victims/subjects still bear the brunt of structural violence. Privatising profits and collectivizing debts is the well-established formula of monopoly state crony capitalism, or to use another Italian phrase to describe the sexual orientation of those in power that roughly translates as “gay but with other people’s asses”.

These popular Italian phrases that conflate political power with non-consensual sexual activity, and I wish I could spend the time here recounting horrifying but irresistibly fascinating stories straight out of American Psycho or Wolf of Wall street. Sadly, for the grey world of corporate work in the CBD, this wanton high life is probably as rare as it is for academia, (or maybe I haven’t been invited to secret all-night parties?). Most have been or still go to amazingly debauched parties, but probably few ever went into the office determined to get that paper finished and were greeted with rented Velcro-clad midgets and a supervisor furiously masturbating whilst high on Quaaludes. This persistent image of thought surrounding the corporate world – the libertine trader or Patrick Bateman-style white collar psychopath – is a fantasy similar to Salo’s portrayal of absolute power. It is often taken uncritically by those on the left, or as aspirational fantasy by those corporate and finance workers themselves that grants temporary escape from the grey bureaucratic reality of their day jobs. Like Scarface or The Godfather have become the films that wannabe gangsters watch and imitate, rather than depicting the everyday drudgery and chronic fear of organised crime, so seems to persist the Patrick Bateman fantasy. Yes Baudrillard strikes again. Nick Land cogently asserts that Baudrillard is the philosopher of the end of the monetary gold standard. That is, while ostensibly Baudrillard was the theorist of the much lamented or celebrated postmodern reign of cultural relativity, from a ‘sober’ political economic perspective – and Baudrillard was a sober thinker – it was the end of any standard of value not amenable to political manipulation. I am not arguing that psychopathic financiers or CEOs do not exist, but rather that while glorious psychopaths make for great novels and film, the statistically-relevant quotidian day in corporate office life is much more prosaic and dominated by stultifying bureaucratic processes and structures.

As unsexy as bureaucracy is, it is all-pervasive and merits further research. David Graeber notes in his recent book how just as bureaucracy was coming to dominate all aspects of our lives, since the 1970s there have been relatively few studies on bureaucracy of the calibre of Weber and Foucault. I’m not stating this as absolute fact, and neither does Graeber, but I agree with his speculation as to why this is the case when I began looking into bureaucracy: it is mind-numbingly boring and sexually unremarkable. I have found the critical literature on the topic provides useful tools for a better structural and theoretical understanding of bureaucracy, but is often too quick to posit a big other and describe overly dramatic tendencies and dynamics within bureaucratic institutions. It’s why we love theory after all, as a means of destabilising and retooling the mundanity of the given. I hope to be able to combine a theoretical and insider’s view of those high-rise buildings in the CBD, often the focus of much anger from left and libertarian corners alike for the present state of affairs we find ourselves in.

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You would barely recognize the difference today between a university administration, a government department or a big four bank, due to the shared management terminology, methodologies and frameworks, better known as the bureaucratic discourse. This is the first of my grounding premises, total bureaucracy is not limited to government or private enterprise, but is intrinsic to the contemporary regime, as crony capitalism loves bureaucracy. Some might call it neoliberalism, I hate this term, because it gives too much credit to the powers that be and is, like most milieus, difficult to find a definition of, as they say, ‘the question is academic’. Graeber goes so far as to posit what he calls the ‘Iron Law of Liberalism and total bureaucracy”. Just as monopoly capitalism since the ‘70s, despite its small government rhetoric, actually creates even more bureaucracy, private enterprises are not run for the most part by market forces. Bureaucracy creates the illusion of rational, data-driven management, the illusion of competition and the illusion of continuous improvement, when in reality it is a grey hole, a dampening fog of maximum entropy, an inhibitor of both runaway innovation and unbridled free competition. Graeber writes how Marx was correct in his understanding that the mechanization arms race of profit-seeking firms would lead to the eventual self-destruction of capitalism, but Marx could not have predicted the rise of total bureaucracy, which holds back this process. Today instead we have this collusion of the state and large corporations that a heterodox lineage of critical institutional economists – first Veblen, then Bichler and Nitzan – have identified as a starting point for examining the political economy of state power and capital, seen as fundamentally one and the same. Business for these institutionalists operates not by market competition but by the sabotage of competitors, be these competitors other states or other corporations.

My second premise is that of the primacy of finance capital, to which commodity production is entirely subordinate and fungible, that is the primacy of differential accumulation through sabotage. Competition through techno-scientific innovation is merely incidental. A complex relationship exists between business and labour, work is primarily a means of control, and total bureaucracy is largely self-serving, where administration becomes its own purpose, and labour, hailed as intrinsically moral, is more about keeping people occupied. The labour market is not tied to market demand, save for large booms or busts in financial markets. Even then, a downsizing due to investor-deemed underperformance is rarely dictated by the transparent matching of market demand to the workforce required to meet this demand. I am sticking to white-collar work and the service sector here, but I have not forgotten about Foxconn.

Again Graeber notes how initially the move towards outsourcing required enormous capital expenditure, could this capex have been invested in automation and led to a virtual end to mindless factory work, instead of merely hiding the messy business of production in foreign countries? Could it be that fear of the disruption to the traditional family and work ethics that technological innovation would cause, led to concerted effort to control the funding, and therefore the direction of scientific innovation? This is a thesis Graeber advances, amongst others, and research into how research funding has changed since the 1970s would be an interesting research project itself, but for the purposes of this paper this causality is only a speculative inference. Most will agree on how difficult academic research jobs and grants are to come by, STEM field or not. Several researchers I’ve spoken to in STEM fields have described how the life of a researcher is 50% actual research, and 50% grant writing. This flies in the face of all the marketing rhetoric about innovation and the funding STEM research. The mantra politicians at both ends of the spectrum repeat is ‘innovation, education, jobs’, but the first two are not compatible with repetitive work, be it manual or clerical. Without calling into question the sacrosanct morality of work, real innovation, not the kind that produces the iPhone 8, but the kind that makes human Foxconn employees history, will remain pure marketing window dressing.

The fear of arbitrary power and the allure of impersonal objectivity that bureaucracy provides the illusion of can be seen in the widespread use of statistical methods to all areas of society and the dominance of the normal distribution. If the face of mass production in the first half of the 20th century is the assembly line and Henry Ford, the man most credited for popularizing statistics-driven management – known in business studies today as quality management – is William Deming.  The quote that could sum up his work, and is often wrongly attributed to him is “What you can’t measure what you can’t manage”. To further confirm Graeber’s assertion that bureaucracy is not unique to either private or public organisations, Deming, a statistics professor and engineer, first developed his statistics-driven manufacturing methods as part of the US military-industrial war effort and was called to Japan by MacArthur to help with the rebuilding efforts. Deming began teaching his quality management techniques to both scientists and business managers and is largely credited as being a key contributor to the Japanese postwar economic boom. Like Ford, he was a utopian thinker who believed that ‘objective’, scientific tools of statistical analysis could be applied with success to management. Deming’s ‘philosophy’ is horrifying, because it never questions the purpose of work, and he saw work and personal fulfillment through creative endeavors as one and the same thing.

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Leaving aside Deming’s epi-philosophy, his quality management work is incredibly useful in actual manufacturing. I first came across it in mechanical engineering classes in college and I associate QM with the importance of reliability and quality uniformity in the production of critical components (think medical or aeronautical systems). Statistical techniques are not at issue here, it is their uncritical use in bureaucratic administration. The second time I encountered Deming’s QM was during an MBA subject on the subject, where it didn’t seem to matter whether the processes being examined were industrial production, customer services or event management outcomes. Of course, while the statistical and mathematical techniques are neutral, the choice of what data to collect, what normative assumptions about human behavior to make, and most importantly, the implied ends and the postulated theories that the results of the data analysis will either validate or falsify is a completely arbitrary choice. It is power by masking ends as means, and control as just the pragmatic optimization of those means, rather than by spectacular dictatorial brutality.

I still don’t want too give much credit to those born-to-rule, inbred managers who rely on an army of technical experts in fields from accounting, to computer science, engineering or mathematics. Regardless of the country, you can smell the ignorance and hubris of nepotism a mile away, elite Grammar schools may provide the cultural capital to awe the masses, but beneath the façade lies little else worthy of the respect commanded by a position of leadership. I’m not making a claim that all the elite are dumb or that they should ever be underestimated, as the events in Greece are demonstrating, but rather to dispel that aura of innate superiority the elite’s received English, calm mannerisms and tailored suits project. Beneath it all lies ignorance and utter reliance on the technical and professional classes. This tension between professional knowledge and managerial control distinguishes types of knowledge and outlines a tension at the heart of the political economy of information.

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This was brilliantly researched by Romano Alquati in his 1961 study of cybernetic control of labour at Olivetti. Weber celebrated bureaucracy as the application of reason to human affairs and noted how effective it is, so much so that he saw it, with its impersonal rules, hierarchical organisation and focus on roles and segregation of duties over individual personalities as a defining characteristic of modernity. The impassive professional, the civil servant, whose focus is completely on the efficient execution of means over ends, is a still dominant figure in the corporate world today. Remember Lenin’s impression of the German Post office, and his vision of the rule of the proletariat by means of a rule-bound, efficient and impartial bureaucracy.

However we still have not escaped arbitrary power, only its mode of operation has changed. We do have impersonal rule by reason, and yet impartiality and transparency remain elusive, and as Baudrillard makes clear, we have arbitrary value, politically determined but masked by technocratic discourse. The autonomous reason that has emerged and shapes society is largely in the form of burgeoning legal systems, and on an organizational level, this is in the form of policies, procedures, processes and guidelines, over and above the already complex legislation. This form of codified knowledge, when it extends beyond its purview, which nominally would be to provide the conditions of possibility for the progression of collective intelligence, I see as the entropic degradation of reason. It is the moment that, as Kathy Ferguson writes in her feminist critique of bureaucracy, means become ends.

If bureaucracy is the dominion by reason, then the capacity for large administrations to learn, evolve and maintain an organizational memory becomes key to avoid bureaucratic stultification and entropy. It is not surprising that private and public institutions succumb to entropic feedback loops and lack the capacity for real innovation or historical progress, if the ultimate purpose of the state/business dyad is power supremacy.

From a political economy standpoint, what merits re-visiting in light of the premises I put forward previously are four assumptions:

  1. firstly the distinction between state and business in the total bureaucratic regime
  2. The identification of the state with its social welfare functions. there is little of benevolence in this apparatus of funny money and organized violence
  3. the lack of distinction between markets and contemporary capitalism,
  4. and the purpose of work and its relationship to capital.

Finally, from a conceptual level, the relationship of information to knowledge and the concept of instrumental rationality also requires re-visiting. If one views the human as anthropotechnical complex, and the technocratic regime not as a perversion of excessive instrumental reason, but as merely a contingent – and highly successful – strategy for hiding the arbitrary exertion of power, then a critique of instrumental reason is misdirected at the epiphenomena of the contemporary mode of power.

There are two common approaches to countering this arbitrary power: either to go further into impersonal governance, or to re-politicise techne’. The former is the crypto-libertarian approach which I will focus on. This approach rejects the false neutrality of fiat currency and dreams of a perfect technocracy, cryptographically impregnable to manipulation. As Zizek has noted, the naïve purist ends up becoming a critique of the present regime, precisely by taking literally the free market and the ideal of an impartial technocracy. As has been widely noted, Colonel Kurtz was not insane; on the contrary, he was far too good a professional soldier, taking his work directives to their ultimate conclusions rather than maintaining the cynical distance that one ‘should’ maintain in regards to the inanity that is work, be it military, blue or white collar labour.

Let’s now take an open-minded look at the crypto-libertarian critique and the political philosophy that grounds bitcoin, and the strange commonalities that this lineage shares with the left. Firstly, there is a devastating hatred of the finance-power that crony capitalism exerts through fiat currency and the cult of eternal debt. Crypto-libertarians back a return to a form of currency impregnable to manipulation, backed by either gold, or the cryptographic proof-of-work of bitcoin, in an ironic return of that quaint 19th century concept, the labour theory of value, albeit in the case of bitcoin, machine labour. While this stance may be considered naïve, one can hardly fault their critique of finance-power, and conversely, the left’s idea of a democratically-controlled money supply also largely remains an ideal resultant from a set of normative commitments rather than the result of better economic research. This statement is not to be taken as a critique as I am utterly opposed to the dreary realism of ‘there is no alternative’, but rather as a call to examine in greater depth this other strange political lineage.

Secondly, an equally-strong aversion to trusted 3rd parties which act as trust arbiters between individuals: banks and the state fall under this category. While these institutions would have been hailed a century ago as foundational to any utopian rule by impartiality and reason, today they are so thoroughly corrupt that it is hard not to be empathetic to this anti-government stance. We must also recognize the seminal importance of the distributed ledger of bitcoin, which was created primarily to fix the double-spending problem of electronic payment transactions without the need for a trusted third party such as a bank. Public today institutions are corrupted by powerful interests, and the worst stance the left could possibly take is the defense of the state merely out of an instinctual love for the word ‘public’ as an adjective. To take this stance is to fall into the narrative of the ‘small government’ marketeers, as well as to take an unproductive, reactive position dictated more out of a sense of antagonism towards libertarians than a reasoned response to the problem of trusted third parties and arbitrary power.

Finally however, where there is a large and fundamental difference is the conception of human nature. The fundamental problem remains the issue of arbitrary power, which bureaucracy with its structures, rules and roles, was meant to solve, and crypto-libertarians approach this problem with an engineer’s mindset, which is fundamentally a game theory view of human behavior. In this mindset, one assumes rational self-interest as fundamentally unavoidable, and builds from there. This is in contrast to the view of human behaviour as mutable and historically contingent. While I don’t agree with libertarian viewpoint, the problem of arbitrary power has not yet been solved, and as a technologist I appreciate the engineering genius which attempts to solve this problem in bitcoin.

To recap the main points of this presentation, we must remember the utopian genesis of bureaucracy as an attempt to find a solution to the problem of arbitrary power and remember that this problem persists. And we also must bear in mind the problem of bureaucracy, which unsexy as it is, must be taken into account in any theory of progress, labour and technology.

  1. Remembering the positive aspects of bureaucracy, democracy, impersonal rules, as well as the negative aspects: stultification, entropic autonomous reason.
  2. The to need to consider the entropic wild card of bureaucracy in theories on the relationship of markets, capital, labour and innovation.
  3. To counter arbitrary power in technocracy signals the necessity of leaving behind the means/ends distinction and the irrelevant concept of ‘instrumental’ rationality. Ends are always infected by the cunning logic of means, and means are never neutral.
  4. In line with autonomist thought, to counter bureaucratic excess and unleash real innovation, a key starting point is the rejection of work.
  5. Desperate times call for strange alliances, the left shares more in common with the crypto-libertarians than the anti-democratic pseudo-politics of centre-right and centre-left ‘moderate’ parties.