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The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms?
To answer these questions, anthropologist David Graeber—one of the most prominent and provocative thinkers working today—takes a journey through ancient and modern history to trace the peculiar and fascinating evolution of bureaucracy over the ages.
He starts in the ancient world, looking at how early civilizations were organized and what traces early bureaucratic systems have left in the ethnographic literature. He then jets forward to the nineteenth century, where systems we can easily recognize as modern bureaucracies come into being. In some areas of life—like with the modern postal systems of Germany and France—these bureaucracies have brought tremendous efficiencies to modern life. But Graeber argues that there is a much darker side to modern bureaucracy that is rarely ever discussed. Indeed, in our own “utopia of rules,” freedom and technological innovation are often the casualties of systems that we only faintly understand.
Provocative and timely, the book is a powerful look and history of bureaucracy over the ages and its power in shaping the world of ideas.
To answer these questions, anthropologist David Graeber—one of the most prominent and provocative thinkers working today—takes a journey through ancient and modern history to trace the peculiar and fascinating evolution of bureaucracy over the ages.
He starts in the ancient world, looking at how early civilizations were organized and what traces early bureaucratic systems have left in the ethnographic literature. He then jets forward to the nineteenth century, where systems we can easily recognize as modern bureaucracies come into being. In some areas of life—like with the modern postal systems of Germany and France—these bureaucracies have brought tremendous efficiencies to modern life. But Graeber argues that there is a much darker side to modern bureaucracy that is rarely ever discussed. Indeed, in our own “utopia of rules,” freedom and technological innovation are often the casualties of systems that we only faintly understand.
Provocative and timely, the book is a powerful look and history of bureaucracy over the ages and its power in shaping the world of ideas.
261 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
About the author
David Graeber
85 books4,205 followersDavid Rolfe Graeber was an American anthropologist and anarchist.
On June 15, 2007, Graeber accepted the offer of a lectureship in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he held the title of Reader in Social Anthropology.
Prior to that position, he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him, and his term there ended in June 2007.
Graeber had a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002) and membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World. He was an core participant in the Occupy Movement.
He passed away in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
On June 15, 2007, Graeber accepted the offer of a lectureship in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he held the title of Reader in Social Anthropology.
Prior to that position, he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him, and his term there ended in June 2007.
Graeber had a history of social and political activism, including his role in protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City (2002) and membership in the labor union Industrial Workers of the World. He was an core participant in the Occupy Movement.
He passed away in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 665 reviews
August 14, 2018
Loved it! Now, where exactly ARE:
🎲 my flying cars &
🎲 clones & androids & their electric sheep &
🎲 teleportation &
🎲 the (anti)gravity fields &
🎲 the era of time & space travel &
🎲 the era of space-travelling societies &
🎲 all the visits to other galaxies &
🎲 all the other miracles things I was promised in all the sci-fi (including the Star Track!)?
I'm not too sure I really want clones and the idea of time travel gives me migraines but the rest, I want it. Who stole it, now, raise my hand! All the people doing BS, ie: nice PPTs for other lazyabouts to stare at during some boring goddamn meetings and other design and trash and purposeless endeavours? WTF??
Although I don't care about the 'Occupy Wall Street' thing (since the idea so lame that it could have been developed only by someone who has no understanding whatsoever of the offending industry) or for the anarchy trend (just like the OWS thing it's extremely pointless and is for people who have nothing better to do with their time and who know nothing of the history - the anarchy of Russia in 1917, anyone willing to try that at home?)
Nevertheless, among the lots of other things discussed in here I have (so far!) found almost no bones to pick (other than the above-mentioned, in passing) and several STELLAR discussions on the topics of comics, mass media, books, imagination and psychology: all under the anthropologic angle. As a result, this is gonna be another of my favs by this author.
🎲 my flying cars &
🎲 clones & androids & their electric sheep &
🎲 teleportation &
🎲 the (anti)gravity fields &
🎲 the era of time & space travel &
🎲 the era of space-travelling societies &
🎲 all the visits to other galaxies &
🎲 all the other miracles things I was promised in all the sci-fi (including the Star Track!)?
I'm not too sure I really want clones and the idea of time travel gives me migraines but the rest, I want it. Who stole it, now, raise my hand! All the people doing BS, ie: nice PPTs for other lazyabouts to stare at during some boring goddamn meetings and other design and trash and purposeless endeavours? WTF??
Although I don't care about the 'Occupy Wall Street' thing (since the idea so lame that it could have been developed only by someone who has no understanding whatsoever of the offending industry) or for the anarchy trend (just like the OWS thing it's extremely pointless and is for people who have nothing better to do with their time and who know nothing of the history - the anarchy of Russia in 1917, anyone willing to try that at home?)
Nevertheless, among the lots of other things discussed in here I have (so far!) found almost no bones to pick (other than the above-mentioned, in passing) and several STELLAR discussions on the topics of comics, mass media, books, imagination and psychology: all under the anthropologic angle. As a result, this is gonna be another of my favs by this author.
February 2, 2015
I want to nominate David Graeber as national treasure. Not only was he responsible for planning the Occupy Wall Street movement and coining the slogan, "We are the 99%," but Graeber is one of those rare academic writers who writes clearly and entertainingly. Unlike many high profile intellectuals and activists, he also doesn't turn a blind eye from his current place in the system he often critiques and urges conversations about.
In THE UTOPIA OF RULES, Graeber examines the evolution, reaction against, and current status quo acceptance of the paper mountains of bureaucracy in American society.
The book is divided into three essays, each focusing on a different aspect of the systems we take part in every day. With references as wide ranging as Post Office rules and their influence on the organization of the Soviet Union, the false promises of technological advancement and fulfillment, and the lessons to be learned from fantasy game systems such as Dungeons & Dragons, this book manages to pull everything together to form clear arguments both for and against certain bureaucracy. In the end, Graeber does not claim to have a solution, but provides a necessary starting point for further discussions about the structure of our society and the future we may be heading to.
As an added bonus, the fourth section of the book is a critique of Christopher Nolan's film, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES as a subversive and possibly unconscious anti-occupy, pro-bureaucracy morality tale of sorts. Someone please give David Graeber a film review column now!
In THE UTOPIA OF RULES, Graeber examines the evolution, reaction against, and current status quo acceptance of the paper mountains of bureaucracy in American society.
The book is divided into three essays, each focusing on a different aspect of the systems we take part in every day. With references as wide ranging as Post Office rules and their influence on the organization of the Soviet Union, the false promises of technological advancement and fulfillment, and the lessons to be learned from fantasy game systems such as Dungeons & Dragons, this book manages to pull everything together to form clear arguments both for and against certain bureaucracy. In the end, Graeber does not claim to have a solution, but provides a necessary starting point for further discussions about the structure of our society and the future we may be heading to.
As an added bonus, the fourth section of the book is a critique of Christopher Nolan's film, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES as a subversive and possibly unconscious anti-occupy, pro-bureaucracy morality tale of sorts. Someone please give David Graeber a film review column now!
November 23, 2022
The first thing you need to take away from this book is that Graeber wrote an essay on The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan, and superhero movies in general. It's a very poignant and hilarious essay too.
Anyway, hello from the other side of the screen. When was the last time you weren't reduced to looking at the world around you as maps, forms, codes and graphs? Might it be possible that you're just another one of those victims of the vacuous rift created between the self and the world, between I and not-I, by rapid technological advancement that our brains haven't evolved to assimilate? Or are you a willing accomplice? Is anyone a willing accomplice? Or is this just another class struggle? Graeber hypothesizes that structural inequalities create 'lopsided structures of imagination' and he calls the subjective experience of living inside such structures 'alienation.' Alienation, what an apt word for today's world. How many times have you used it without really thinking about it or without really applying it to yourself? Why hasn't technological development led to the workless utopia that we were promised in the sixties (when I wasn't even alive, I was born three decades later and let me tell you, I'm not impressed) and has instead allowed for financialization of capital and increased mind-numbing bureaucracy?
Graeber has the answers to some of these questions. I bet he had answers to most questions but he left us too soon. One thing is clear: Graeber is certain that that we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies and it's almost an epiphany but blatantly obvious once you realise it.
I want to whack accelerationists in the face with this book.
Anyway, hello from the other side of the screen. When was the last time you weren't reduced to looking at the world around you as maps, forms, codes and graphs? Might it be possible that you're just another one of those victims of the vacuous rift created between the self and the world, between I and not-I, by rapid technological advancement that our brains haven't evolved to assimilate? Or are you a willing accomplice? Is anyone a willing accomplice? Or is this just another class struggle? Graeber hypothesizes that structural inequalities create 'lopsided structures of imagination' and he calls the subjective experience of living inside such structures 'alienation.' Alienation, what an apt word for today's world. How many times have you used it without really thinking about it or without really applying it to yourself? Why hasn't technological development led to the workless utopia that we were promised in the sixties (when I wasn't even alive, I was born three decades later and let me tell you, I'm not impressed) and has instead allowed for financialization of capital and increased mind-numbing bureaucracy?
Graeber has the answers to some of these questions. I bet he had answers to most questions but he left us too soon. One thing is clear: Graeber is certain that that we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies and it's almost an epiphany but blatantly obvious once you realise it.
I want to whack accelerationists in the face with this book.
March 13, 2015
I thought this would be a soggy cornflakes sort of book: comforting, full of history and anecdote, and a bit of superficial social theory thrown in to demonstrate the author's intellectual credentials.
It was a full English breakfast - with the black pudding! This is a densely packed series of essays that explores the theoretical underpinnings of bureaucracy; our hate-love affair with it; its role in society and history; and even its meanings as understood, symbolized, and depicted in popular culture. And it's all the more impressive for coming from a Marxist hermeneutic. A difficult theory to argue from credibly today. But David Graeber does it and with style.
It was a full English breakfast - with the black pudding! This is a densely packed series of essays that explores the theoretical underpinnings of bureaucracy; our hate-love affair with it; its role in society and history; and even its meanings as understood, symbolized, and depicted in popular culture. And it's all the more impressive for coming from a Marxist hermeneutic. A difficult theory to argue from credibly today. But David Graeber does it and with style.
September 16, 2015
I feel disappointed, and a little betrayed. Debt was my most important book of the decade; A sequel on bureaucracy could be an equally ground breaking contribution. Unfortunately, this is a wandering and disconnected series of weakly researched essays that, while making a few interesting points, buries them under digressions and inaccuracies.
Graeber start with the experience of having his stroke-ridden mother declared legally incompetent, disabled, and then dead, and the kafka-esque absurdity of the paperwork. This process is no less ritualized than any Malagasy funeral, but yet the Western academic tradition seems entirely incapable of understanding bureaucracy: it is a vacuum of symbols from which meaning cannot be extracted. The most powerful tools of thick description and grounded theory are like Antaeus against Hercules.
Directly, Graeber postulates that violence and administration are too sides of the same coin. That behind ledgers and rulebooks is always a man with a club, and any group of men willing to do violence will have administrative support. Internally, bureaucracy is a way to concentrate power among insiders, and with nod to Feminism and Critical Race Studies, bureaucratic techniques allow those with power to avoid doing any interpretative labor; the work of figuring out what other people desire and accommodating yourself to it. Subordinates spend an immense amount of effort figuring out the minds of their masters, if only to avoid being crushed. Those in power have the luxury of entirely ignoring the whims of those under them.
As a revolutionary project, Graeber seeks to revitalize the Left against the neoliberal combination of bureaucracy and extractive capitalism that he calls the 'worst of all possible ideologies' (think Tony Blair or Hillary Clinton). He gestures toward Imagination (with a capital I) as key, and the alliance between avante-garde artists and the proletariat as the base of the Left, but has little to substantiate this idea, or break free of old circular debates about the nature of sovereign power, or the relationship between play and rationality.
Unable to analyze bureaucracy directly, Graeber has to turn to the cultural encrustations that have grown around it. Some of this stuff is spot on: did you know that James Bond and Sherlock Holmes are mirror inversions of an elemental British bureaucratic hero, why all the bosses in American police procedurals are black, or the occult links between Dungeons & Dragons and the Western magical tradition and idealized Roman Law. But some of the cultural stuff misses, like his read of Star Trek or the Nolan Batman movies, and ultimately Graeber is not a natural media studies type, and this seems digressive from the point of book on bureaucracy.
And when I say 'inaccuracies', I mean that when Graeber makes specific claims about technological history, or human cognition, or the like, the footnotes lead to a justification that everybody knows this, rather than a scholarly source. There was one moment where he talked about the rise in management jargon with a phrase like "if you traced the rise of it in business speak since 1970, you would see..." and I thought "If? Aren't you a professor? Can't you get an RA to run this down in a week?" The whole book is full of moments like that, and their presence makes me less confident of Debt, which is a shame.
Some interesting thoughts, but not nearly enough to save the book. I'd prefer that he baked this one for another couple of years.
Graeber start with the experience of having his stroke-ridden mother declared legally incompetent, disabled, and then dead, and the kafka-esque absurdity of the paperwork. This process is no less ritualized than any Malagasy funeral, but yet the Western academic tradition seems entirely incapable of understanding bureaucracy: it is a vacuum of symbols from which meaning cannot be extracted. The most powerful tools of thick description and grounded theory are like Antaeus against Hercules.
Directly, Graeber postulates that violence and administration are too sides of the same coin. That behind ledgers and rulebooks is always a man with a club, and any group of men willing to do violence will have administrative support. Internally, bureaucracy is a way to concentrate power among insiders, and with nod to Feminism and Critical Race Studies, bureaucratic techniques allow those with power to avoid doing any interpretative labor; the work of figuring out what other people desire and accommodating yourself to it. Subordinates spend an immense amount of effort figuring out the minds of their masters, if only to avoid being crushed. Those in power have the luxury of entirely ignoring the whims of those under them.
As a revolutionary project, Graeber seeks to revitalize the Left against the neoliberal combination of bureaucracy and extractive capitalism that he calls the 'worst of all possible ideologies' (think Tony Blair or Hillary Clinton). He gestures toward Imagination (with a capital I) as key, and the alliance between avante-garde artists and the proletariat as the base of the Left, but has little to substantiate this idea, or break free of old circular debates about the nature of sovereign power, or the relationship between play and rationality.
Unable to analyze bureaucracy directly, Graeber has to turn to the cultural encrustations that have grown around it. Some of this stuff is spot on: did you know that James Bond and Sherlock Holmes are mirror inversions of an elemental British bureaucratic hero, why all the bosses in American police procedurals are black, or the occult links between Dungeons & Dragons and the Western magical tradition and idealized Roman Law. But some of the cultural stuff misses, like his read of Star Trek or the Nolan Batman movies, and ultimately Graeber is not a natural media studies type, and this seems digressive from the point of book on bureaucracy.
And when I say 'inaccuracies', I mean that when Graeber makes specific claims about technological history, or human cognition, or the like, the footnotes lead to a justification that everybody knows this, rather than a scholarly source. There was one moment where he talked about the rise in management jargon with a phrase like "if you traced the rise of it in business speak since 1970, you would see..." and I thought "If? Aren't you a professor? Can't you get an RA to run this down in a week?" The whole book is full of moments like that, and their presence makes me less confident of Debt, which is a shame.
Some interesting thoughts, but not nearly enough to save the book. I'd prefer that he baked this one for another couple of years.
August 27, 2021
As usual, Graeber is on the dime.
Someone might have noticed from my previous reviews that I became obsessed with bureaucracy lately. It started to ruin my, otherwise, well-organized life. I noticed that when I was working in USA, but, since these were short visits (2 months the most), I didn't pay too much attention to it. However, the trend with stupid bureaucratic rules arrived to Serbia a couple years ago and, each year, things are getting worse.
Graeber explains well the origin of these trends. Among other things, I liked the most his analysis of the differences between play and the game and their relationship to the origin of the appeal of bureaucracy.
"A game is a bounded, specific way of problem solving. Play is more cosmic and open-ended. Gods play, but man unfortunately is a gaming individual. A game has a predictable resolution, play may not. Play allows for emergence, novelty, surprise (a quote from Indian philosopher of science Shiv Visvanathan).
All true. But there is also something potentially terrifying about play for just this reason. Because this open-ended creativity is also what allows it to be randomly destructive. Cats play with mice. Pulling the wings off flies is also a form of play. Playful gods are rarely ones any sane person would desire to encounter.
Let me put forth a suggestion, then.
What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play."
Rising from the "fear of play" bureaucracy tends to organize every aspect of our lives. Since creativity arises from our ability to play, ultimately, we get opposite of what we were striving for. This kills the enthusiasm for academic work (and any creative work in general), which is summarized with the following comment of Graeber's (anonymous) academic friend:
"The point when I decided I just didn’t care about that [academic] job any more was when I stopped turning off the sound on my computer games during office hours. There’d be some student waiting outside for feedback on his assignment and I was like, ‘Wait, just let me finish killing this dwarf and I’ll get back to you.’ " (I really sympathize with this guy).
Someone might have noticed from my previous reviews that I became obsessed with bureaucracy lately. It started to ruin my, otherwise, well-organized life. I noticed that when I was working in USA, but, since these were short visits (2 months the most), I didn't pay too much attention to it. However, the trend with stupid bureaucratic rules arrived to Serbia a couple years ago and, each year, things are getting worse.
Graeber explains well the origin of these trends. Among other things, I liked the most his analysis of the differences between play and the game and their relationship to the origin of the appeal of bureaucracy.
"A game is a bounded, specific way of problem solving. Play is more cosmic and open-ended. Gods play, but man unfortunately is a gaming individual. A game has a predictable resolution, play may not. Play allows for emergence, novelty, surprise (a quote from Indian philosopher of science Shiv Visvanathan).
All true. But there is also something potentially terrifying about play for just this reason. Because this open-ended creativity is also what allows it to be randomly destructive. Cats play with mice. Pulling the wings off flies is also a form of play. Playful gods are rarely ones any sane person would desire to encounter.
Let me put forth a suggestion, then.
What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play."
Rising from the "fear of play" bureaucracy tends to organize every aspect of our lives. Since creativity arises from our ability to play, ultimately, we get opposite of what we were striving for. This kills the enthusiasm for academic work (and any creative work in general), which is summarized with the following comment of Graeber's (anonymous) academic friend:
"The point when I decided I just didn’t care about that [academic] job any more was when I stopped turning off the sound on my computer games during office hours. There’d be some student waiting outside for feedback on his assignment and I was like, ‘Wait, just let me finish killing this dwarf and I’ll get back to you.’ " (I really sympathize with this guy).
Read
August 10, 2021If you want to understand the quandaries of the current world, you have to read two writers who both departed too early: Mark Fisher and David Graeber. Fisher to totally bum you out and understand why you feel so lonely and fucked up all the time, then Graeber to tell you to put down the porn and the weed and go out there and laugh a bit at the absurdity of it all, and then maybe you might even feel motivated to do a thing.
And these essays on bureaucracy in its many forms are vintage Graeber, and excellent reading while my decidedly Graeberian-bureaucratic job (for which I just received five months' bonus for some damn reason that baffles even me, not that I'm complaining) is on work-from-home. And it led me to smile every time I stepped away from my work laptop to edit a new story, to get in a quick workout, or merely to have a coffee and watch the rain.
And these essays on bureaucracy in its many forms are vintage Graeber, and excellent reading while my decidedly Graeberian-bureaucratic job (for which I just received five months' bonus for some damn reason that baffles even me, not that I'm complaining) is on work-from-home. And it led me to smile every time I stepped away from my work laptop to edit a new story, to get in a quick workout, or merely to have a coffee and watch the rain.
June 28, 2021
Have you ever had a friend leave too soon? Well, that can feel like the case when an author departs the scene. Graeber may be the latest but certainly not the last free-thinking author to leave the party too soon, following Benjamin, Camus, Mills, Adorno, Foucault, and others. Despite the feeling of intimacy some may create in the literary space, they are not our friends in real life and some may be using the intimacy as a persuasive device. In any case, when walking into the social theory party, you are well-advised to be in company with multiple authors and make sure you can navigate your way around the conversation. As one of his last works, this was excellent, as it builds upon the conversation and adds to it in a few helpful ways. Graeber's style is a bit discursive and he loops around the argument track a few times, through a series of essays, so we will try to trace some key features of his thought.
Buried in the last essay is a theory of sovereignty, an issue that has posed a bit of a thorn in the side of political and legal theory for a couple of centuries now. In the old days, sovereignty for the victorious state was viewed as something bestowed from above by god. That became problematic in the modern era for any number of reasons as such appeals became understood as rationalizations of the victors--to see the absurdity picture any sports star thanking god for the win--and as the state for an appeal for legitimation cannot coherently bestow sovereignty upon itself. For in reality, with many states, sovereignty started with violent conquering, emancipatory, or revolutionary acts. In any of these cases, the original act conferring the new government sovereignty was outside the law, i.e. the epitome of an illegal or extra-legal act. This, in turn, led to a search for an authority outside of the state to bestow sovereignty, without a direct appeal to authority from violence. The most popular classical liberal variety had settled upon "the people" as the source of the authority. This of course begs the question of who are those people? In the case of the American state, the successful war of independence inaugurated the new nation. Had the American war of independence not succeeded, we can bet that many of the founders would have been tried and convicted by the British government. However they succeeded, so they were able to create a new set of laws and as a claim for their authority were able to say that they ruled on behalf of the people. Subsequent historical analysis has shown how restricted and limited in terms of class, race, and gender the people of the original American state really were. How this worked out in the tensions between the state and these other people served as the other main subject of this book and many other contemporary works.
The hallmark of the right-wing state, says Graeber, is an underlying premise of force (violence). The state enforces its laws by the threat of force and the use of force, in large measure by way of the police as its enforcement arm. Going further, the fascist theory and practice of government does not see anything different from revolutionary acts and ordinary violence. If we follow the thread of this interpretation, this is why right-wing formations condone and support violence by police, brown shirts, and their own mobs, e.g. the insurrection at the capitol. What's more, the right-wing practice of government carries forward the threat of violence to keep the lower classes in their place; Graeber calls this "structural violence" - noting that this departs from conventional usage. The lower classes kept in their places through structural violence can be based on racial grounds like South African apartheid or the Jim Crow south, national grounds like classical imperialism, or economic somewhat porous class-based grounds as is often the case more recently. In many cases, the threat of violence is very real and can spill over into actual violence reminding the under-class to stay in their place, as was the case in the Jim Crow south.
The modern liberal state, by contrast, in its focus on growing prosperity, was historically paired with an economy focused on GDP growth. The hundred trillion-dollar question during the modern liberal era was how this prosperity was going to be distributed. At times it went unrealized, at other times realized, and at other times manipulated. The British empire was based on small family-owned local monopolists, finance capital, and free trade paired with colonial rule and administration. In a different emphasis, the modern American economy was the furthest elaboration of the use of bureaucracy into the business sector, often with protectionist policies and the expansion of American businesses overseas. The liberal and progressive economy and society are predicted upon production or, said another way, the unleashing of creative capacities into the economy. The unfinished, unrealized American liberal project is to harness the bureaucracy for an efficient effective administration of public and private functions while trying to strike a balance between the public and private spheres. While these capacities were unleashed during America's boom years, they have largely been stifled since the 1980s.
According to Graeber's argument, if we look back on the futurist dreams of Americans and Europeans from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were dreaming of traveling to the moon, exploring the depths of the seas, and creating all sorts of computers and robots. Many of those dreams were realized by mid-century; many of these mid-century accomplishments including the internet (ARPANET) and putting a man on the moon--often spurred on through competition with the USSR or outright borrowed from the politburo--were prime examples of harnessing imagination and productivity and channeling them through public bureaucracies to accomplish other instrumental goals. If we look at the futurist dreams from the 1950s and 1960s by contrast, with so many dreams of flying cars and deep space travel and fully automated homes, few of these dreams have been realized. Graeber draws out the turning point. With the fall of the USSR, the responsibility for creation was devolved and delegated from the state to private for-profit companies--Wall Street and large entrepreneurs--who have directed innovation towards greater control and profits. Rather than flying cars, travel through the outer reaches of space, fully automated homes, and the like that were imagined in science fiction in mid-century for the future, instead, we have seen basically a very sophisticated mail order catalog (Amazon), futuristic advertising and communication (social media), and very fancy entertainment (TV and sports).
As with earlier iterations of social theory, one of the main draws of Graeber's work, its narrative power, also demarcates its limit. In this work, Graeber is engaged in a descriptive analysis. If we are looking for predictive or explanatory (causal) analysis, we need to shift modes and pair social theory with its empirical social science research partners. Where we need social analysis to go--and that's where explanatory analysis kicks in--is to start to talk about the effects of one aspect of politics (dependent variable) on the lives of the citizens on the ground (independent variable). In the subject under study here, we need further analysis that links right-wing governance (or structural violence) with its impacts on people on the ground and the effects on their lives. This is the next direction for social theory and links it back to the goals of social science. That would be the point where we can start to paint a story of how one model of government and administration produces better or worse outcomes than the past or alternative models (e.g. from decades before or in other similar countries). At that point, we can get closer to saying how one model of government and administration is better or worse than another. Alas, Graeber did not have the opportunity to engage in that analysis, as his time at the party was cut short. Hopefully, future researchers will pick up the conversation and carry the thread forward, as the social theory party must continue to keep going.
Buried in the last essay is a theory of sovereignty, an issue that has posed a bit of a thorn in the side of political and legal theory for a couple of centuries now. In the old days, sovereignty for the victorious state was viewed as something bestowed from above by god. That became problematic in the modern era for any number of reasons as such appeals became understood as rationalizations of the victors--to see the absurdity picture any sports star thanking god for the win--and as the state for an appeal for legitimation cannot coherently bestow sovereignty upon itself. For in reality, with many states, sovereignty started with violent conquering, emancipatory, or revolutionary acts. In any of these cases, the original act conferring the new government sovereignty was outside the law, i.e. the epitome of an illegal or extra-legal act. This, in turn, led to a search for an authority outside of the state to bestow sovereignty, without a direct appeal to authority from violence. The most popular classical liberal variety had settled upon "the people" as the source of the authority. This of course begs the question of who are those people? In the case of the American state, the successful war of independence inaugurated the new nation. Had the American war of independence not succeeded, we can bet that many of the founders would have been tried and convicted by the British government. However they succeeded, so they were able to create a new set of laws and as a claim for their authority were able to say that they ruled on behalf of the people. Subsequent historical analysis has shown how restricted and limited in terms of class, race, and gender the people of the original American state really were. How this worked out in the tensions between the state and these other people served as the other main subject of this book and many other contemporary works.
The hallmark of the right-wing state, says Graeber, is an underlying premise of force (violence). The state enforces its laws by the threat of force and the use of force, in large measure by way of the police as its enforcement arm. Going further, the fascist theory and practice of government does not see anything different from revolutionary acts and ordinary violence. If we follow the thread of this interpretation, this is why right-wing formations condone and support violence by police, brown shirts, and their own mobs, e.g. the insurrection at the capitol. What's more, the right-wing practice of government carries forward the threat of violence to keep the lower classes in their place; Graeber calls this "structural violence" - noting that this departs from conventional usage. The lower classes kept in their places through structural violence can be based on racial grounds like South African apartheid or the Jim Crow south, national grounds like classical imperialism, or economic somewhat porous class-based grounds as is often the case more recently. In many cases, the threat of violence is very real and can spill over into actual violence reminding the under-class to stay in their place, as was the case in the Jim Crow south.
The modern liberal state, by contrast, in its focus on growing prosperity, was historically paired with an economy focused on GDP growth. The hundred trillion-dollar question during the modern liberal era was how this prosperity was going to be distributed. At times it went unrealized, at other times realized, and at other times manipulated. The British empire was based on small family-owned local monopolists, finance capital, and free trade paired with colonial rule and administration. In a different emphasis, the modern American economy was the furthest elaboration of the use of bureaucracy into the business sector, often with protectionist policies and the expansion of American businesses overseas. The liberal and progressive economy and society are predicted upon production or, said another way, the unleashing of creative capacities into the economy. The unfinished, unrealized American liberal project is to harness the bureaucracy for an efficient effective administration of public and private functions while trying to strike a balance between the public and private spheres. While these capacities were unleashed during America's boom years, they have largely been stifled since the 1980s.
According to Graeber's argument, if we look back on the futurist dreams of Americans and Europeans from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were dreaming of traveling to the moon, exploring the depths of the seas, and creating all sorts of computers and robots. Many of those dreams were realized by mid-century; many of these mid-century accomplishments including the internet (ARPANET) and putting a man on the moon--often spurred on through competition with the USSR or outright borrowed from the politburo--were prime examples of harnessing imagination and productivity and channeling them through public bureaucracies to accomplish other instrumental goals. If we look at the futurist dreams from the 1950s and 1960s by contrast, with so many dreams of flying cars and deep space travel and fully automated homes, few of these dreams have been realized. Graeber draws out the turning point. With the fall of the USSR, the responsibility for creation was devolved and delegated from the state to private for-profit companies--Wall Street and large entrepreneurs--who have directed innovation towards greater control and profits. Rather than flying cars, travel through the outer reaches of space, fully automated homes, and the like that were imagined in science fiction in mid-century for the future, instead, we have seen basically a very sophisticated mail order catalog (Amazon), futuristic advertising and communication (social media), and very fancy entertainment (TV and sports).
As with earlier iterations of social theory, one of the main draws of Graeber's work, its narrative power, also demarcates its limit. In this work, Graeber is engaged in a descriptive analysis. If we are looking for predictive or explanatory (causal) analysis, we need to shift modes and pair social theory with its empirical social science research partners. Where we need social analysis to go--and that's where explanatory analysis kicks in--is to start to talk about the effects of one aspect of politics (dependent variable) on the lives of the citizens on the ground (independent variable). In the subject under study here, we need further analysis that links right-wing governance (or structural violence) with its impacts on people on the ground and the effects on their lives. This is the next direction for social theory and links it back to the goals of social science. That would be the point where we can start to paint a story of how one model of government and administration produces better or worse outcomes than the past or alternative models (e.g. from decades before or in other similar countries). At that point, we can get closer to saying how one model of government and administration is better or worse than another. Alas, Graeber did not have the opportunity to engage in that analysis, as his time at the party was cut short. Hopefully, future researchers will pick up the conversation and carry the thread forward, as the social theory party must continue to keep going.
March 7, 2015
Graeber is a good writer (I enjoyed Debt and Fragments) - but, having finished this book, I'm just not sure what I read.
So, bureaucracy is institutionalized violence - okay. Bureaucracy can be efficient, so workers get more things if they don't mind being alienated (defined as the 'warping and shattering of the imagination'). Bureaucracy describes the rules of the game that emerge from anarchic free-play. And "What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play" (p.193).
I think it is the inevitability of the yin-yang aspect of freedom and bureaucracy (play and game) that I found off-putting. Kind of a glib, 'well, you can't live with it, and you can't live without it', conclusion. While Graeber tries to valorize the creative and rebellious aspect of the 'Left', he seems to accept the 'Right's' response to regulate creativity away from the 'republican' concerns about its inevitable destructiveness.
"What I want to argue here is that this imperative ultimately derives from a tacit cosmology in which the play principle (and by extension, creativity) is itself seen as frightening, while game-like behavior is celebrated as transparent and predictable, and where as a result, the advance of all these rules and regulations is itself experienced as a kind of freedom" (p.196).
Really?!
One observation that I did like was: "The whole idea that one can make a strict division between means and ends, between facts and values, is a product of the bureaucratic mind-set, because bureaucracy is the first and only social institution that treats the means of doing things as entirely separate from what it is that’s being done" (p.165).
Bureaucracy is good at the 'how', but indifferent to the 'what' or 'why'. This could have been developed better.
I felt a little bit emptied by this book.
So, bureaucracy is institutionalized violence - okay. Bureaucracy can be efficient, so workers get more things if they don't mind being alienated (defined as the 'warping and shattering of the imagination'). Bureaucracy describes the rules of the game that emerge from anarchic free-play. And "What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play" (p.193).
I think it is the inevitability of the yin-yang aspect of freedom and bureaucracy (play and game) that I found off-putting. Kind of a glib, 'well, you can't live with it, and you can't live without it', conclusion. While Graeber tries to valorize the creative and rebellious aspect of the 'Left', he seems to accept the 'Right's' response to regulate creativity away from the 'republican' concerns about its inevitable destructiveness.
"What I want to argue here is that this imperative ultimately derives from a tacit cosmology in which the play principle (and by extension, creativity) is itself seen as frightening, while game-like behavior is celebrated as transparent and predictable, and where as a result, the advance of all these rules and regulations is itself experienced as a kind of freedom" (p.196).
Really?!
One observation that I did like was: "The whole idea that one can make a strict division between means and ends, between facts and values, is a product of the bureaucratic mind-set, because bureaucracy is the first and only social institution that treats the means of doing things as entirely separate from what it is that’s being done" (p.165).
Bureaucracy is good at the 'how', but indifferent to the 'what' or 'why'. This could have been developed better.
I felt a little bit emptied by this book.
October 30, 2018
I love practically everything Graeber writes. This one made me see the world differently. I wish I had read this one before a few of his other ones (like the Democracy Project and Bullshit Jobs) because this one holds the theoretical foundations under the other two. I have to think more about the theories in here and I'll probably come back to a few of these essays again, but it was such an enlightening read. He's just so lucid and radical that it's really refreshing.
October 20, 2021
Fantastic, as always. No one managed to convert and communicate such seemingly mundane topics as bureaucracy and debt to engaging writing.
Part of what makes Graeber’s work so engaging, I think, is his capacity to explore inherent contradictions within taken-for-granted systems and structures. For example, “the iron law of liberalism”, as he terms it, states that the freer a market seeks to become, the more paperwork is required to uphold its conditions. Efficiency, the ideology masking and maintaining the real intention of our current economic system, is a social order like any others, and those require institutions. The laissez-faire ("free") market is an oxymoron (see also The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time).
Graeber is a master at theorising these contradictions. Although his narrative style is engaging, it is not particularly empirically grounded, but the thing is, the familiarity of the topic makes this less of an issue. We, his intended audience, all have experience with the phenomenon of bureaucracy and can therefore relate to his observations.
Graeber often initiates his analysis with these curious and intuitive associations, which he then follows up by unpacking its hierarchies and power structures. Related to this, I particularly enjoyed his concept of structural violence and interpretative labour. Structural violence, departing from its original meaning, refers to the fact that our liberal social order rests on a foundation of monopolised state violence that keeps the classes in their place. This violence is always near at hand, but our coercion to its enforced (institutionalised) rules and conventions make it seem like it’s not. Interpretative labour is, in this context, what characterises a relationship to these bureaucratic structures for the people not familiarised and trained in navigating (and exploiting) its rules.
For a brilliant summary of the book, I recommend checking out Todd's review.
As always, rest in peace, David.
Part of what makes Graeber’s work so engaging, I think, is his capacity to explore inherent contradictions within taken-for-granted systems and structures. For example, “the iron law of liberalism”, as he terms it, states that the freer a market seeks to become, the more paperwork is required to uphold its conditions. Efficiency, the ideology masking and maintaining the real intention of our current economic system, is a social order like any others, and those require institutions. The laissez-faire ("free") market is an oxymoron (see also The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time).
Graeber is a master at theorising these contradictions. Although his narrative style is engaging, it is not particularly empirically grounded, but the thing is, the familiarity of the topic makes this less of an issue. We, his intended audience, all have experience with the phenomenon of bureaucracy and can therefore relate to his observations.
Graeber often initiates his analysis with these curious and intuitive associations, which he then follows up by unpacking its hierarchies and power structures. Related to this, I particularly enjoyed his concept of structural violence and interpretative labour. Structural violence, departing from its original meaning, refers to the fact that our liberal social order rests on a foundation of monopolised state violence that keeps the classes in their place. This violence is always near at hand, but our coercion to its enforced (institutionalised) rules and conventions make it seem like it’s not. Interpretative labour is, in this context, what characterises a relationship to these bureaucratic structures for the people not familiarised and trained in navigating (and exploiting) its rules.
For a brilliant summary of the book, I recommend checking out Todd's review.
As always, rest in peace, David.
February 23, 2022
It's so rare these days that I just want to devour a nonfiction book. David Graeber is playful, funny, lucid, clearly enjoying himself. He was made for this. Every other academic is writing like it's a punishment, plodding along joylessly, while this little imp's having the time of his life.
And as for the content: these ideas are so important. Corporate and government bureaucracy creeps deeper and deeper into our lives. Prisons and parole offices and border authorities and banks and DMVs. Bureaucracy suffocates and stifles other ways of being. It's brutal and it's boring. I can't be the only person who cries every time I call my insurance provider. Why does anyone consent to live like this?
This book is both dire and weirdly hopeful. I'm so sad Graeber's gone.
And as for the content: these ideas are so important. Corporate and government bureaucracy creeps deeper and deeper into our lives. Prisons and parole offices and border authorities and banks and DMVs. Bureaucracy suffocates and stifles other ways of being. It's brutal and it's boring. I can't be the only person who cries every time I call my insurance provider. Why does anyone consent to live like this?
This book is both dire and weirdly hopeful. I'm so sad Graeber's gone.
August 23, 2015
An exceptional book. Elegantly argued, clear, and insightful. I really cannot recommend this enough.
June 20, 2021
This book is even better during a reread. The late David Graeber was one of his kind. Not only was his writing accessible and original, he generally refused to take most mainstream assertions about politics at face value. More importantly, with Graeber, nothing was the final word. He didn't frame any discussion as a definitive answer to the topic at hand but instead asked pointed questions for future exploration. This book is no different. It features his essays on the three main questions that define power and bureaucracy. He packs a lot of insights within 200 pages and 3.5 essays.
Graeber's main thesis is that we live in what he calls the era of 'Total Bureaucratization'. In the first essay, he talks about the financialization of the modern world and the blurring of lines between the public and private/corporate sector. He then discusses how bureaucracy is always utopian i.e. what is imagined as a functioning system cannot possibly be put to practice by a human being. He also coins the term "Iron Law of Liberalism" i.e. the more deregulated the market, the more structures needed to maintain it. The most insightful observation however is his argument on 'interpretive labour' and how the oppressed always have to imagine and empathize with their oppressors, and how that affects power dynamics. Graeber is happy to accept that he borrows this idea from feminist standpoint theory. For his analysis of power, he goes with neither Marxist materialism nor Foucauldian abstraction but picks from multiple sources to produce an original conception of the idea of 'alienation'. The ultimate conclusion of his first essay though is that this whole system is predicated on violence. Good, old-fashioned boring violence underpins any further structural violence. His own experience with activism plays a part in formulating this argument.
In the second essay, he argues that we overestimate the negative impact of technology and how social forces (and violence) still underpin the direction those technologies take - only those technologies that are focused on social control and surveillance receive priority. They are essentially designed to make sure capitalism is the only imaginable alternative left. He looks at how humanity failed to produce a world that scifi had once imagined. We've been reduced to simulating the future, instead of creating it. Imagination is a recurring theme throughout the book, and Graeber is keen to demonstrate how the modern world has tried to negate, control, and limit (political) imaginations. The most salient node of discussion is when he calls out the difference between "bureaucratic technologies" and "poetic technologies".
His third essay is possibly the most fascinating of all. He begins by tracing the history of the social welfare state and demonstrates that in Europe, most of the key institutions of what later became the welfare state were not originally created by governments at all, but by people and groups engaged in a self-conscious revolutionary project. Social welfare states were essentially bribes to dull these movements. Then the discussion shifts to the idea of 'rationality' and the flaws within the mainstream discourse on it. Finally, just as he did with sci-fi in the second essay, Graeber dissects heroic fantasy to show that fantasy literature is, in his own words, largely an attempt to "imagine a world utterly purged of bureaucracy, which readers enjoy both as a form of vicarious escapism and as reassurance that ultimately, a boring, administered world is probably preferable to any imaginable alternative".
Like any anarchist worth their salt, Graeber ends his discussion with the play parable to show why people love bureaucracies after all. He demonstrates it by showing the difference between 'play' and 'game'. This part is an excellent analysis of the idea of freedom, rationality, creativity, and ultimately the way these all interact with rules and violence. The world defined by bureaucracy is not the result of random chance or an outcome of some inevitable natural state of being. It is deliberate.
The appendix of the book is also a must-read for its analysis of the superhero genre which Graeber identifies as almost utterly lacking in imagination. For him, superhero stories are conservative at their core. He does a pretty solid deconstruction of The Dark Knight rises to argue this point. He shows the difference between genuine political imagination and creativity vs. managed imagination in late-capitalism.
This book is a delightful read because Graeber is never afraid to show his anarchist roots and the worldview that defines his understanding. Through this lens, he manages to reap insights that would otherwise be missed. We may have lost him, but his work will certainly keep on giving.
Graeber's main thesis is that we live in what he calls the era of 'Total Bureaucratization'. In the first essay, he talks about the financialization of the modern world and the blurring of lines between the public and private/corporate sector. He then discusses how bureaucracy is always utopian i.e. what is imagined as a functioning system cannot possibly be put to practice by a human being. He also coins the term "Iron Law of Liberalism" i.e. the more deregulated the market, the more structures needed to maintain it. The most insightful observation however is his argument on 'interpretive labour' and how the oppressed always have to imagine and empathize with their oppressors, and how that affects power dynamics. Graeber is happy to accept that he borrows this idea from feminist standpoint theory. For his analysis of power, he goes with neither Marxist materialism nor Foucauldian abstraction but picks from multiple sources to produce an original conception of the idea of 'alienation'. The ultimate conclusion of his first essay though is that this whole system is predicated on violence. Good, old-fashioned boring violence underpins any further structural violence. His own experience with activism plays a part in formulating this argument.
In the second essay, he argues that we overestimate the negative impact of technology and how social forces (and violence) still underpin the direction those technologies take - only those technologies that are focused on social control and surveillance receive priority. They are essentially designed to make sure capitalism is the only imaginable alternative left. He looks at how humanity failed to produce a world that scifi had once imagined. We've been reduced to simulating the future, instead of creating it. Imagination is a recurring theme throughout the book, and Graeber is keen to demonstrate how the modern world has tried to negate, control, and limit (political) imaginations. The most salient node of discussion is when he calls out the difference between "bureaucratic technologies" and "poetic technologies".
His third essay is possibly the most fascinating of all. He begins by tracing the history of the social welfare state and demonstrates that in Europe, most of the key institutions of what later became the welfare state were not originally created by governments at all, but by people and groups engaged in a self-conscious revolutionary project. Social welfare states were essentially bribes to dull these movements. Then the discussion shifts to the idea of 'rationality' and the flaws within the mainstream discourse on it. Finally, just as he did with sci-fi in the second essay, Graeber dissects heroic fantasy to show that fantasy literature is, in his own words, largely an attempt to "imagine a world utterly purged of bureaucracy, which readers enjoy both as a form of vicarious escapism and as reassurance that ultimately, a boring, administered world is probably preferable to any imaginable alternative".
Like any anarchist worth their salt, Graeber ends his discussion with the play parable to show why people love bureaucracies after all. He demonstrates it by showing the difference between 'play' and 'game'. This part is an excellent analysis of the idea of freedom, rationality, creativity, and ultimately the way these all interact with rules and violence. The world defined by bureaucracy is not the result of random chance or an outcome of some inevitable natural state of being. It is deliberate.
The appendix of the book is also a must-read for its analysis of the superhero genre which Graeber identifies as almost utterly lacking in imagination. For him, superhero stories are conservative at their core. He does a pretty solid deconstruction of The Dark Knight rises to argue this point. He shows the difference between genuine political imagination and creativity vs. managed imagination in late-capitalism.
This book is a delightful read because Graeber is never afraid to show his anarchist roots and the worldview that defines his understanding. Through this lens, he manages to reap insights that would otherwise be missed. We may have lost him, but his work will certainly keep on giving.
March 5, 2015
Graeber's topic in this book is, more or less, an attempt work through some answers to the question: why are we so in love with rules? And why is it that even when we try to get rid of rules, paperwork, "red tape," and bureaucracy, we always seem to get more?
I'm going to sum this book up with a summary of a section towards the end: pp. 190-200 or so.
Graeber notes that for a long time academic departments ran themselves based on custom. I can tell you that this is true as well for a lot of small businesses that become bigger. In the early days, there develop ways things get done; and they are very flexible ways, in part because they are not written down. People do their thing, and because there's not that many people involved, they can exploit various consensual models for evolving new ways.
According to Graeber, this mode of making your way is playful. Improvisatory. Essentially, it's anarchic: Purposeful, but with no central apparatus to tell everyone what to do.
But eventually people want to write down all of the rules. (In academia, it's because the administration wants to audit everything and make everyone accountable.) Maybe the organization is perceived to be too big, or too complex; or newcomers demand a manual.
Once you do this, you have converted your department / institution / organization into a "game." Everyone plays by the rules . . . or attempts to subvert the rules . . . in order to "win" and get their will over others. We love this, right? Apparently we do. It's not "play" anymore . . . it's trying to get control of the board and conquer.
Along the way, there are valuable musings about why today's technological world isn't very much compared to the rosy picture we dreamed up in 1950s and 1960s science fiction.
There are also crucial digressions about fantasy and fantasy play . . . in some ways, the subtext here is the disgruntlement of a teenaged dungeons and dragons player (I am not making this up!).
In short, a good, provocative read.
I'm going to sum this book up with a summary of a section towards the end: pp. 190-200 or so.
Graeber notes that for a long time academic departments ran themselves based on custom. I can tell you that this is true as well for a lot of small businesses that become bigger. In the early days, there develop ways things get done; and they are very flexible ways, in part because they are not written down. People do their thing, and because there's not that many people involved, they can exploit various consensual models for evolving new ways.
According to Graeber, this mode of making your way is playful. Improvisatory. Essentially, it's anarchic: Purposeful, but with no central apparatus to tell everyone what to do.
But eventually people want to write down all of the rules. (In academia, it's because the administration wants to audit everything and make everyone accountable.) Maybe the organization is perceived to be too big, or too complex; or newcomers demand a manual.
Once you do this, you have converted your department / institution / organization into a "game." Everyone plays by the rules . . . or attempts to subvert the rules . . . in order to "win" and get their will over others. We love this, right? Apparently we do. It's not "play" anymore . . . it's trying to get control of the board and conquer.
Along the way, there are valuable musings about why today's technological world isn't very much compared to the rosy picture we dreamed up in 1950s and 1960s science fiction.
There are also crucial digressions about fantasy and fantasy play . . . in some ways, the subtext here is the disgruntlement of a teenaged dungeons and dragons player (I am not making this up!).
In short, a good, provocative read.
April 19, 2018
I was gripped and absolutely fascinated by this book. It is one of those pieces of writing that examines matters that I’ve read quite a lot about (the structural flaws of capitalism, why we can’t imagine a better world, what X popular cultural artifact tells us about society) yet from what feels like a fresh perspective. Moreover, this fresh perspective illuminates certain other things I’ve read recently and forges fresh connections between existing bits of knowledge in my head. Reading it was thus an excellent, enlightening experience. David Graeber is an anthropologist with a knack for discussing theoretical concepts in a clear and intelligible way. At no point did I feel like I was drowning in Hegel, or a similar verbal quagmire.
‘The Utopia of Rules’ contains three extended essays and a critical review of ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (which I agree was a terrible disappointment and a stunningly incoherent, reactionary film). Each of the three essays considers bureaucracy from a different angle. Graeber is at pains to point out from the start that we lack suitable language to discuss bureaucracy. The term has become associated with politicians bemoaning wastage in the public sector and blaming it for all sorts of unlikely ills. In reality, the forms of complex, opaque, rule-driven procedures that we term ‘bureaucracy’ are corporate in nature. The culture of constant evaluation, audit, and measurable outcome has infected the public sector from big business. Bureaucracy transcends the public/private divide, allowing a simulated conflict between the two to dominate political discussion. This is an awkward over-simplification of Graeber’s elegantly expressed points, of course.
I found this approach a novel and enlightening way to critique the current manifestation of capitalism, which uses bureaucracy to enforce vast inequalities. For example, it is common knowledge that in the UK that the very rich do not pay tax in the same way as the less wealthy. If you have a low income, you must fill in your complicated tax return and comply with all of HMRC’s rules. If you are rich enough, you can come to some personal agreement as to how much tax you are willing to pay. This is elided by the fiction that the rules are the same for everybody - patently they are not, but neither the government nor the rich will admit it.
In the second essay, Graeber applies his critique of bureaucracy to technological change, arguing that true innovation is stifled by a risk-averse, shareholder-return-maximising corporate culture. He is seeking to answer this question: why don’t we have flying cars yet? This involves an intriguing discussion of trends in science fiction, including something I have noticed myself. Science fiction novels written in the 21st century are very rarely set in a specific year. Part of the fun of reading 60s, 70s, and 80s sci-fi (which I spent much of my teenage years doing) was comparing the vision of 1993, or whenever it was, with the actual reality. These days writers seem much warier of assuming that new technologies, like a Mars base or antigravity device, will eventuate in the next fifty years. To generalise, contemporary sci-fi tends to depict a future so far away as to have no perceptible link with the world today (for example, Ancillary Justice and The Quantum Thief) or a near-future marked largely by catastrophe (for example, Memory of Water, Station Eleven, The Bone Clocks, etc ). There are of course exceptions (Blue Remembered Earth springs to mind), but the tendency seems strong enough to reflect wider cultural expectations of the future.
Reviewing ‘The Utopia of Rules’ book is frustrating, though, because I am not as articulate as Graeber so struggle to explain why I found book so intellectually satisfying. The whole thing bristles with neat insights, but I’ve arbitrarily picked out a few parts that especially struck me:
I don’t want to give the impression that I agree with everything in ‘The Utopia of Rules’, rather that it gave me a lot to think about, on subjects such as why there are so many crime procedurals on TV and the difference between play and a game. If you wonder about the political malaise and structural problems of capitalism in the 21st century, it might give you something interesting to think about too.
(This is my 400th review! Wow, I have kept this up longer than I expected to.)
‘The Utopia of Rules’ contains three extended essays and a critical review of ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ (which I agree was a terrible disappointment and a stunningly incoherent, reactionary film). Each of the three essays considers bureaucracy from a different angle. Graeber is at pains to point out from the start that we lack suitable language to discuss bureaucracy. The term has become associated with politicians bemoaning wastage in the public sector and blaming it for all sorts of unlikely ills. In reality, the forms of complex, opaque, rule-driven procedures that we term ‘bureaucracy’ are corporate in nature. The culture of constant evaluation, audit, and measurable outcome has infected the public sector from big business. Bureaucracy transcends the public/private divide, allowing a simulated conflict between the two to dominate political discussion. This is an awkward over-simplification of Graeber’s elegantly expressed points, of course.
I found this approach a novel and enlightening way to critique the current manifestation of capitalism, which uses bureaucracy to enforce vast inequalities. For example, it is common knowledge that in the UK that the very rich do not pay tax in the same way as the less wealthy. If you have a low income, you must fill in your complicated tax return and comply with all of HMRC’s rules. If you are rich enough, you can come to some personal agreement as to how much tax you are willing to pay. This is elided by the fiction that the rules are the same for everybody - patently they are not, but neither the government nor the rich will admit it.
In the second essay, Graeber applies his critique of bureaucracy to technological change, arguing that true innovation is stifled by a risk-averse, shareholder-return-maximising corporate culture. He is seeking to answer this question: why don’t we have flying cars yet? This involves an intriguing discussion of trends in science fiction, including something I have noticed myself. Science fiction novels written in the 21st century are very rarely set in a specific year. Part of the fun of reading 60s, 70s, and 80s sci-fi (which I spent much of my teenage years doing) was comparing the vision of 1993, or whenever it was, with the actual reality. These days writers seem much warier of assuming that new technologies, like a Mars base or antigravity device, will eventuate in the next fifty years. To generalise, contemporary sci-fi tends to depict a future so far away as to have no perceptible link with the world today (for example, Ancillary Justice and The Quantum Thief) or a near-future marked largely by catastrophe (for example, Memory of Water, Station Eleven, The Bone Clocks, etc ). There are of course exceptions (Blue Remembered Earth springs to mind), but the tendency seems strong enough to reflect wider cultural expectations of the future.
Reviewing ‘The Utopia of Rules’ book is frustrating, though, because I am not as articulate as Graeber so struggle to explain why I found book so intellectually satisfying. The whole thing bristles with neat insights, but I’ve arbitrarily picked out a few parts that especially struck me:
In other words, talking about rational efficiency becomes a way of avoiding talking about what the efficiency is actually for; that is, the ultimately irrational aims that are assumed to be the ultimate ends of human behaviour. Here is another place where markets and bureaucracies ultimately speak the same language. Both claim to be acting largely in the name of individual freedom, and individual self-realisation through consumption. [...]
The poor, however, are so consistently miserable that otherwise sympathetic observers are simply overwhelmed, and are forced, without realising it, to plot out their existence entirely. The result is that while those at the bottom of a social ladder spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and genuinely caring about, those at the top, it almost never happens the other way around. [...]
Power makes you lazy. [...] While those in situations of power and privilege often feel it is a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don’t have to worry about, don’t have to know about, and don’t have to do. Bureaucracies can democratise this sort of power, at least to an extent, but they can’t get rid of it. It becomes forms of institutionalised laziness. Revolutionary change may involve the exhilaration of throwing off imaginary shackles, of suddenly realising that impossible things are not impossible after all, but it also means most people will have to get over some of this deeply habitual laziness and start engaging in interpretive (imaginative) labour for a very long time to make those realities stick.
I don’t want to give the impression that I agree with everything in ‘The Utopia of Rules’, rather that it gave me a lot to think about, on subjects such as why there are so many crime procedurals on TV and the difference between play and a game. If you wonder about the political malaise and structural problems of capitalism in the 21st century, it might give you something interesting to think about too.
(This is my 400th review! Wow, I have kept this up longer than I expected to.)
Read
April 12, 2022An interesting book, perhaps a bit above my level. It did impart some key concepts well enough, like how bureaucracy is one of the enablers of structural violence* (i.e. someone without proper papers trying to enter a country, being imprisoned or removed by force); or how bureaucracy has stifled scientific progress; or how it appeals to us by offering the promise of non-discriminatory efficiency but rarely actually lives up to that promise.
* in my 101 level conversations with people in real life, I'm considering using this term instead of "institutionalized racism/sexism/etc." because it seems like it can be used intersectionally, and because it makes explicit how those structures are enforced.
So in the macro sense it was useful, but on the smaller scale I found myself tripping up over a number of places where the book said "A leads to B, and therefore C," where it felt like part of the argument was missing. Maybe someone more familiar with some of the works cited could easily fill in those blanks. In the shorter essay on "constituent power" I never did quite figure out what that was. Admittedly my appreciation of that one was also dampened quite a bit by the fact that I hadn't seen any of the movies Graeber was talking about.
Worth a read, though I don't feel qualified to rate it. I'm definitely interested in continuing to read Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which was dealing with its subject matter in a way that was more comprehensible for me.
* in my 101 level conversations with people in real life, I'm considering using this term instead of "institutionalized racism/sexism/etc." because it seems like it can be used intersectionally, and because it makes explicit how those structures are enforced.
So in the macro sense it was useful, but on the smaller scale I found myself tripping up over a number of places where the book said "A leads to B, and therefore C," where it felt like part of the argument was missing. Maybe someone more familiar with some of the works cited could easily fill in those blanks. In the shorter essay on "constituent power" I never did quite figure out what that was. Admittedly my appreciation of that one was also dampened quite a bit by the fact that I hadn't seen any of the movies Graeber was talking about.
Worth a read, though I don't feel qualified to rate it. I'm definitely interested in continuing to read Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which was dealing with its subject matter in a way that was more comprehensible for me.
January 5, 2024
David Graeber was always fascinating. Rather than approach subjects from a dry, academic perspective, he toyed with ideas, played game of “what if?” as in, what if there were a theory of Anarchist Anthropology? What would that discipline look like? (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology). In this book, he tackles the subject of bureaucracy, and after noting that everyone seems to hate it, but only the political Right Wing really has any critique on it, he spends the rest of the book playing with what a Leftist, or even an Anarchist critique of bureaucracy would look like. Believe it or not, both enlightenment and fun ensues.
Trying to explain Graeber’s reasoning in these insightful essays simply would not convey how interesting and enjoyable this book is. So I will just hit on a few highlights that particularly struck me. After explaining how free market capitalism is more dependent on bureaucracy than any system that came before it, he goes on to explain some of the dirty little secrets that we usually agree to overlook about this arrangement. Chief among these is how this bureaucracy is entirely dependent on a system of threatened violence. He points out that the primary job of any policeman is not dealing with violent crime, but providing the promised threat of violent retribution for any non compliance with bureaucratic regulation. He calls cops armed bureaucrats. And he points out:
”Whenever someone starts talking about the Free Market, it’s a good idea to look around for the man with a gun — he’s never far away.”
He also makes some really interesting points about the function and purpose of imagination, and how bureaucracy deliberately works against it. Illustrating this, he puts forward the expectations those of us who were children in the ‘50s and ‘60s were given about the sci-fi like future we would live in as adults. Rather than dismissing these visions of flying cars, space cities, and colonized planets as “unrealistic,” he makes the case that the pace of our advancement should have taken us to that future had the needs of bureaucracy to protect free-market capitalism not stifled our innovation and progress. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, the case he makes is fascinating.
We lost a great deal when we lost David Graeber. Like Christopher Hitchens, his was a brilliant voice that took us places and showed us things in ways that no one else could. His is a voice that will not easily be replaced. I’m glad that I still have a few more of his books to explore, and I would recommend that anyone with a burning curiosity and a desire to view the world from a non conventional angle read this book and others from this clever man who left us too soon.
Trying to explain Graeber’s reasoning in these insightful essays simply would not convey how interesting and enjoyable this book is. So I will just hit on a few highlights that particularly struck me. After explaining how free market capitalism is more dependent on bureaucracy than any system that came before it, he goes on to explain some of the dirty little secrets that we usually agree to overlook about this arrangement. Chief among these is how this bureaucracy is entirely dependent on a system of threatened violence. He points out that the primary job of any policeman is not dealing with violent crime, but providing the promised threat of violent retribution for any non compliance with bureaucratic regulation. He calls cops armed bureaucrats. And he points out:
”Whenever someone starts talking about the Free Market, it’s a good idea to look around for the man with a gun — he’s never far away.”
He also makes some really interesting points about the function and purpose of imagination, and how bureaucracy deliberately works against it. Illustrating this, he puts forward the expectations those of us who were children in the ‘50s and ‘60s were given about the sci-fi like future we would live in as adults. Rather than dismissing these visions of flying cars, space cities, and colonized planets as “unrealistic,” he makes the case that the pace of our advancement should have taken us to that future had the needs of bureaucracy to protect free-market capitalism not stifled our innovation and progress. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, the case he makes is fascinating.
We lost a great deal when we lost David Graeber. Like Christopher Hitchens, his was a brilliant voice that took us places and showed us things in ways that no one else could. His is a voice that will not easily be replaced. I’m glad that I still have a few more of his books to explore, and I would recommend that anyone with a burning curiosity and a desire to view the world from a non conventional angle read this book and others from this clever man who left us too soon.
August 13, 2023
Sometime in 2000 I came across an ad in the newspaper telling of a panel that will take place in a club in Tel-Aviv on the topic of "can there be revolution in Israel?". Naive, young, libertarian me understood this to be a debate on whether Israel is in danger of a revolution. I was wrong. It was a panel of anarchists bemoaning the fact that revolution will never occur in Israel for various nonsensical reasons.
Many years have passed since. I drifted left and now consider myself a social-democrat, and I've enjoyed my fair share of arguments with naive, young libertarians. And yet, reading Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules" brought me back to that sensation from over 15 years ago. The reason was that I simply did not expect to fall head first into a rant about the capitalist, democratic (he doesn't call it that, of course) world.
And let's be clear: a rant is exactly what this book is. While his previous excellent Debt: The First 5,000 Years was replete with evidence, this book feels more like idiosyncratic musings. No argument goes beyond anecdotal evidence, and interpretations that may be plausible but are certainly not conclusive suddenly become undisputed facts. Every once in a while there's an interesting insight. The idea of "interpretive labour", for example, is a useful tool to consider social relations. Some of the ideas about games vs. play are interesting, if not completely original, and unfortunately aren't taken in any interesting direction because the whole discussion is a bit of a digression. But they never become anything bigger than that. And for every somewhat interesting insight there is another that appears completely asinine. The entire argument that the reason the predictions of sci-fi from the 1950's have not come true is because the Powers-That-Be didn't want them to (rather than that they are impossible) is one such glaring example. (But Jules Verne's predictions came true! Graeber whines, as if contemporary authors such as H.G. Wells have not produced predictions that never came close to being realized -- primarily because that has never been an interest of most sci-fi literature).
Maybe it's my fault. I thought the use of the word "stupidity" in the title was merely an attempt to grab attention by being cheeky. But Graeber actually uses "stupidity" as a theoretical category, albeit one that is never really defined. We're just supposed to agree that bureaucracy is stupid because Graeber once accidentally signed where he was supposed to print his name and vice versa.
But it was the stellar Debt that got me to read Graeber's new book, and here is why The Utopia of Rules is not just a bad book, but an evil book - because it actually ruined Debt for me, retroactively. So here's a conclusion you don't often hear in a book review: if you enjoyed Graeber's Debt, do yourself a favour and steer clear of The Utopia of Rules.
Many years have passed since. I drifted left and now consider myself a social-democrat, and I've enjoyed my fair share of arguments with naive, young libertarians. And yet, reading Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules" brought me back to that sensation from over 15 years ago. The reason was that I simply did not expect to fall head first into a rant about the capitalist, democratic (he doesn't call it that, of course) world.
And let's be clear: a rant is exactly what this book is. While his previous excellent Debt: The First 5,000 Years was replete with evidence, this book feels more like idiosyncratic musings. No argument goes beyond anecdotal evidence, and interpretations that may be plausible but are certainly not conclusive suddenly become undisputed facts. Every once in a while there's an interesting insight. The idea of "interpretive labour", for example, is a useful tool to consider social relations. Some of the ideas about games vs. play are interesting, if not completely original, and unfortunately aren't taken in any interesting direction because the whole discussion is a bit of a digression. But they never become anything bigger than that. And for every somewhat interesting insight there is another that appears completely asinine. The entire argument that the reason the predictions of sci-fi from the 1950's have not come true is because the Powers-That-Be didn't want them to (rather than that they are impossible) is one such glaring example. (But Jules Verne's predictions came true! Graeber whines, as if contemporary authors such as H.G. Wells have not produced predictions that never came close to being realized -- primarily because that has never been an interest of most sci-fi literature).
Maybe it's my fault. I thought the use of the word "stupidity" in the title was merely an attempt to grab attention by being cheeky. But Graeber actually uses "stupidity" as a theoretical category, albeit one that is never really defined. We're just supposed to agree that bureaucracy is stupid because Graeber once accidentally signed where he was supposed to print his name and vice versa.
But it was the stellar Debt that got me to read Graeber's new book, and here is why The Utopia of Rules is not just a bad book, but an evil book - because it actually ruined Debt for me, retroactively. So here's a conclusion you don't often hear in a book review: if you enjoyed Graeber's Debt, do yourself a favour and steer clear of The Utopia of Rules.
May 15, 2015
I read this book during subway rides to and from administrator-led meetings on methods of assessment for student learning "competencies" for such abstract concepts as "Global Learning" to ensure we can show our "outcomes" are such that we can receive accreditation . I'm sure my fellow riders took me for a little off my rocker as I was nodding furiously or chuckling frequently at the descriptions of bureaucratic stupidity so completely familiar.
Some of the reviews here have complained that the essays are not cohesive, that the editing is lacking. True, at points the transitions could have used finessing, but I found the playfulness of this romp through David Graeber's thought process to be part of the allure and message of the book.
And indeed, he makes no claims to try to provide a complete history of the rise of bureaucracy nor a complete theory of it. Rather, he is calling attention to a phenomenon so pervasive we take it for granted, and this taken-for-grantedness allows the existence of the threat of violence to go unnoticed and largely untheorized. I do hope that the book inspires social theorists to take up the topic in our age of total/predatory bureaucracy. It certainly has inspired me to take up the assessment movement within colleges.
The discussion of bureaucracy is far ranging and digressive, delving into topics as diverse as the history of the Post Office in Germany to fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings or SuperHero genre movies like Batman. But it is also political--bureaucracy has become a way of making capitalism seem (to Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum) without any alternative. Our imaginations are carefully kept within script, the rules prescribed so as to appear fair and transparent and freedom-giving but in fact the opposite, allowing for control of every aspect of our lives.
One thing that I was waiting for in the book since Weber is used so extensively throughout, was a discussion of the nuances in Weber's theories of rationality and four types of social action and how Graeber sees these playing out. He does go heavily into philosophical history of the concept of rationality but then ignores Weber's 4 types which might have been helpful to the project.
Some of the reviews here have complained that the essays are not cohesive, that the editing is lacking. True, at points the transitions could have used finessing, but I found the playfulness of this romp through David Graeber's thought process to be part of the allure and message of the book.
And indeed, he makes no claims to try to provide a complete history of the rise of bureaucracy nor a complete theory of it. Rather, he is calling attention to a phenomenon so pervasive we take it for granted, and this taken-for-grantedness allows the existence of the threat of violence to go unnoticed and largely untheorized. I do hope that the book inspires social theorists to take up the topic in our age of total/predatory bureaucracy. It certainly has inspired me to take up the assessment movement within colleges.
The discussion of bureaucracy is far ranging and digressive, delving into topics as diverse as the history of the Post Office in Germany to fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings or SuperHero genre movies like Batman. But it is also political--bureaucracy has become a way of making capitalism seem (to Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum) without any alternative. Our imaginations are carefully kept within script, the rules prescribed so as to appear fair and transparent and freedom-giving but in fact the opposite, allowing for control of every aspect of our lives.
One thing that I was waiting for in the book since Weber is used so extensively throughout, was a discussion of the nuances in Weber's theories of rationality and four types of social action and how Graeber sees these playing out. He does go heavily into philosophical history of the concept of rationality but then ignores Weber's 4 types which might have been helpful to the project.
January 31, 2020
I found the ideas in this book and Graeber's writing style oddly calming. Reflecting on the absurdity that modern power structures are based on (essentially, we all do as we're told because the state has a monopoly on the power to hit people over the head with a stick) and the bureaucratic pretence that informs much of our lives is freeing and will resolve anxiety more than any self help book.
October 22, 2015
The only problem with “The Utopia of Rules” is that you end up wishing you were reading “Bureaucracy: The First 5000 Years” (to coin a title) instead. Well, it probably wouldn’t be called that, since Graeber is more concerned with bureaucracy in the modern world, and in particular the way that our society is the most bureaucratized in history, but it would still be an overview of the subject that would fully flesh out the arguments and tie all the pieces together in a way that “The Utopia of Rules”, constructed as it is largely around two previously-written essays, doesn’t. While the essays have been rewritten to a certain extent to enhance their connection to each other and to the new material in the book, the result feels less like a seamless whole than a series of variations (albeit fascinating and well-written variations) on a theme.
What Graeber is doing, or would be doing in the larger book, is constructing a theory of modern society by examining what he believes to be its most important aspect, bureaucracy. In the U.S., we are accustomed to think of ourselves as a not particularly bureaucratized society -- certainly not when compared to, say, Germany or France -- but that’s only because we have a limited view of who is a bureaucrat. While the category does include various government employees whose job is to push paper around, it also includes private-sector employees whose job is to push paper around, and if the U.S. has fewer of the former it definitely has quite a lot of the latter. As Graeber points out, corporate capitalism is the most highly bureaucratized version of capitalism, and the U.S. is its undisputed champion. To mention one example that Graeber doesn’t cover, employment systems such as those adopted by the U.S., in which employees are paid poorly, given no guarantee of employment, and treated as more or less disposable, require many more middle managers than those which treat their employees well (or at least better). The less of a stake workers feel they have in their job, the larger a disciplinary apparatus is required to keep them performing it, and in the case of American-style corporate capitalism, that means many middle managers performing evaluations of all kinds: in other words, filling out forms. But this idea of bureaucracy as a disciplinary apparatus extends beyond the corporate world to the other class of bureaucrats that we tend not to think of as bureaucrats: police officers (and also, of course, correction officers, private security guards, and all the other members of the vast American security apparatus). The most important point Graeber makes in this book, I think, is that a policeman is just a bureaucrat with a gun. The heroic American image of the police sees them as constantly engaged in the struggle against violent crime, but in reality most interactions between police and civilians involve breaking some bureaucratic rule (usually a motor vehicle violation). As Graeber says, it’s entirely possible to commit an act of violence and never see police involvement (for instance, all the evidence indicates that the vast majority of rapes are never reported), but just try driving anywhere without a license plate and see how long it takes for a cop to stop you. Fundamentally, bureaucracies are about rules; rules need to be enforced; and the word “enforced” contains the word “force” for a reason. Bureaucracy basically amounts to an encoded threat of violence, and many of Graeber’s strongest points have to do with the way he insists on the continuing importance of violence, either real or implied, in the governing of society. Sure, Foucaultian ideas about the power of, well, ideas are not entirely wrong, but nonetheless most of the power of the state still comes down to the fact that if you break its rules, it will hurt you.
The rest of the book explores various facets of bureaucracy. The middle essay, “On Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, is a theory of neoliberalism, approached via the intersection of bureaucracy and technology. Here, Graeber asks an obvious question: much of what the great science-fiction writers of the late 19th and early 20th century — Verne, Wells, etc. — conceived of as the likely technological shape of the near future ended up coming true, in one way or another, within about 50 years. (Ok, fine, the world was never invaded by Martians, and nobody built a time machine, but rocket ships for travel to the moon, to take just one example, do exist.) A priori, there’s no reason to believe that the science-fiction writers of one era are smarter than those of another: why, then, have we massively failed to achieve the futures conceived of by subsequent science fiction writers? Computers are nice, sure, but where are the robot factories, moon colonies, and flying cars that many people confidently assumed were just around the corner 50 or 60 years ago? (Even computers are still not nearly as smart as science-fiction writers confidently assumed they soon would be.) Graeber’s answer is, essentially, that they don’t fit the modern, bureaucratic state, which is only interested in technologies that perpetuate itself: in particular, the computer is the great technology of our era because it is the world’s most efficient platform for the filling out of forms (thus also tending to suppress other potential uses of it). The essay also covers the economics of Star Trek, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the bureaucratization of academia, among other topics, all of which are swept into the argument in a way that makes you wonder why you never saw the connection before.
Even more interesting is the book’s third essay, which delves into the reason why we have so much bureaucracy. Graeber makes his argument by contrasting “play” and “games”: the former is free-form, ready to go in any direction at all (think Calvinball), while the latter has well-defined rules that strictly restrict the action. Which makes play sound great, until you remember that “play” is also what a cat does with a mouse before it eats it. If there are no rules, well, there are no rules, and that’s not always a good thing. Rules are necessary, we feel, to prevent the kind of play that involves the unrestricted wielding of power without heed for others: hence the well-known phenomenon of children who, given the opportunity to play freely without restrictions, end up arguing over the rules they will play by. And if there are to be rules, they must be enforced somehow, or else they are meaningless, and thus it is that you end up not just with bureaucracy but with people actively demanding ever more bureaucracy. If we can just come up with one more rule, we think, we can finally prevent people from taking unfair advantage of whatever position they have, and thus at long last create the perfect society, Graeber’s titular utopia. Of course, one of the defining features of a bureaucracy is that its rules, though in theory meant to promote fairness, do nothing of the sort: those who know how to navigate the bureaucracy make it work in their favor, those who don’t get left behind, and the actual intent of the rules the bureaucracy is supposed to be enforcing quickly gets lost. Nonetheless, the idea of the utopia remains dear to our hearts, an idea that, Graeber argues, will never really be overcome.
And I’ve still only scratched the surface: “The Utopia of Rules” is full of fascinating insights and interesting arguments. The “Iron Law of Liberalism”, that any reform intended to free up the market to do its work invariably results in the proliferation of a new class of bureaucrat, must be mentioned at least briefly (did you know that the Russian state employs more bureaucrats now than the USSR ever did, even though it has only about half the population?). I have given far less attention to the arguments about philosophical labor in the second section of the book than they deserve. And the final essay, on the “The Dark Knight Rises”, is also well worth reading even if only tangentially related to the rest of the book. It should also be noted that Graeber is a really good writer: he uses a friendly, semi-informal style which leaves room for jokes and sarcasm and makes reasonably complex topics simple. In particular, his avoidance of the kind of academic jargon that left-wing professors deploy all too often is extremely welcome. My only real complaint, again, is that “The Utopia of Rules” could easily be twice as long as it is to make a fuller approach at evaluating its subject. Graeber is a busy guy, of course, but hopefully this project is somewhere on the back burner.
What Graeber is doing, or would be doing in the larger book, is constructing a theory of modern society by examining what he believes to be its most important aspect, bureaucracy. In the U.S., we are accustomed to think of ourselves as a not particularly bureaucratized society -- certainly not when compared to, say, Germany or France -- but that’s only because we have a limited view of who is a bureaucrat. While the category does include various government employees whose job is to push paper around, it also includes private-sector employees whose job is to push paper around, and if the U.S. has fewer of the former it definitely has quite a lot of the latter. As Graeber points out, corporate capitalism is the most highly bureaucratized version of capitalism, and the U.S. is its undisputed champion. To mention one example that Graeber doesn’t cover, employment systems such as those adopted by the U.S., in which employees are paid poorly, given no guarantee of employment, and treated as more or less disposable, require many more middle managers than those which treat their employees well (or at least better). The less of a stake workers feel they have in their job, the larger a disciplinary apparatus is required to keep them performing it, and in the case of American-style corporate capitalism, that means many middle managers performing evaluations of all kinds: in other words, filling out forms. But this idea of bureaucracy as a disciplinary apparatus extends beyond the corporate world to the other class of bureaucrats that we tend not to think of as bureaucrats: police officers (and also, of course, correction officers, private security guards, and all the other members of the vast American security apparatus). The most important point Graeber makes in this book, I think, is that a policeman is just a bureaucrat with a gun. The heroic American image of the police sees them as constantly engaged in the struggle against violent crime, but in reality most interactions between police and civilians involve breaking some bureaucratic rule (usually a motor vehicle violation). As Graeber says, it’s entirely possible to commit an act of violence and never see police involvement (for instance, all the evidence indicates that the vast majority of rapes are never reported), but just try driving anywhere without a license plate and see how long it takes for a cop to stop you. Fundamentally, bureaucracies are about rules; rules need to be enforced; and the word “enforced” contains the word “force” for a reason. Bureaucracy basically amounts to an encoded threat of violence, and many of Graeber’s strongest points have to do with the way he insists on the continuing importance of violence, either real or implied, in the governing of society. Sure, Foucaultian ideas about the power of, well, ideas are not entirely wrong, but nonetheless most of the power of the state still comes down to the fact that if you break its rules, it will hurt you.
The rest of the book explores various facets of bureaucracy. The middle essay, “On Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”, is a theory of neoliberalism, approached via the intersection of bureaucracy and technology. Here, Graeber asks an obvious question: much of what the great science-fiction writers of the late 19th and early 20th century — Verne, Wells, etc. — conceived of as the likely technological shape of the near future ended up coming true, in one way or another, within about 50 years. (Ok, fine, the world was never invaded by Martians, and nobody built a time machine, but rocket ships for travel to the moon, to take just one example, do exist.) A priori, there’s no reason to believe that the science-fiction writers of one era are smarter than those of another: why, then, have we massively failed to achieve the futures conceived of by subsequent science fiction writers? Computers are nice, sure, but where are the robot factories, moon colonies, and flying cars that many people confidently assumed were just around the corner 50 or 60 years ago? (Even computers are still not nearly as smart as science-fiction writers confidently assumed they soon would be.) Graeber’s answer is, essentially, that they don’t fit the modern, bureaucratic state, which is only interested in technologies that perpetuate itself: in particular, the computer is the great technology of our era because it is the world’s most efficient platform for the filling out of forms (thus also tending to suppress other potential uses of it). The essay also covers the economics of Star Trek, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the bureaucratization of academia, among other topics, all of which are swept into the argument in a way that makes you wonder why you never saw the connection before.
Even more interesting is the book’s third essay, which delves into the reason why we have so much bureaucracy. Graeber makes his argument by contrasting “play” and “games”: the former is free-form, ready to go in any direction at all (think Calvinball), while the latter has well-defined rules that strictly restrict the action. Which makes play sound great, until you remember that “play” is also what a cat does with a mouse before it eats it. If there are no rules, well, there are no rules, and that’s not always a good thing. Rules are necessary, we feel, to prevent the kind of play that involves the unrestricted wielding of power without heed for others: hence the well-known phenomenon of children who, given the opportunity to play freely without restrictions, end up arguing over the rules they will play by. And if there are to be rules, they must be enforced somehow, or else they are meaningless, and thus it is that you end up not just with bureaucracy but with people actively demanding ever more bureaucracy. If we can just come up with one more rule, we think, we can finally prevent people from taking unfair advantage of whatever position they have, and thus at long last create the perfect society, Graeber’s titular utopia. Of course, one of the defining features of a bureaucracy is that its rules, though in theory meant to promote fairness, do nothing of the sort: those who know how to navigate the bureaucracy make it work in their favor, those who don’t get left behind, and the actual intent of the rules the bureaucracy is supposed to be enforcing quickly gets lost. Nonetheless, the idea of the utopia remains dear to our hearts, an idea that, Graeber argues, will never really be overcome.
And I’ve still only scratched the surface: “The Utopia of Rules” is full of fascinating insights and interesting arguments. The “Iron Law of Liberalism”, that any reform intended to free up the market to do its work invariably results in the proliferation of a new class of bureaucrat, must be mentioned at least briefly (did you know that the Russian state employs more bureaucrats now than the USSR ever did, even though it has only about half the population?). I have given far less attention to the arguments about philosophical labor in the second section of the book than they deserve. And the final essay, on the “The Dark Knight Rises”, is also well worth reading even if only tangentially related to the rest of the book. It should also be noted that Graeber is a really good writer: he uses a friendly, semi-informal style which leaves room for jokes and sarcasm and makes reasonably complex topics simple. In particular, his avoidance of the kind of academic jargon that left-wing professors deploy all too often is extremely welcome. My only real complaint, again, is that “The Utopia of Rules” could easily be twice as long as it is to make a fuller approach at evaluating its subject. Graeber is a busy guy, of course, but hopefully this project is somewhere on the back burner.
December 31, 2015
We are told right on the cover that David Graeber is brilliant. The overwhelming number of stars and praise for The Utopia of Rules seems to justify it. What I read though, was a a bunch of thrown together essays written stream of consciousness style, jumbles of logic with vague points leading nowhere, and statements of caricature masquerading as fact, and several fantastical 'rebuttal' arguments with fictional critics.
What is bureaucracy? We don't know. Mr Graeber launches into the subject without providing any background or context, just expounds on all too familiar stereotypes as if they represented the actual truth. We are not treated to the origin or traditions of the great bureaucratic institutes of China or Britian, but mere anecdotal evidence of the local american DMV, which is then the basis for all other arguments. In fact, Graeber doesn't ever seem to realize the function of a bureaucracy, which is namely to provide or distribute goods or services to a large amount of people in an organized fashion. A bureaucracy is not, in fact, politics, as the author so often confuses it with, but the instrument which carries out POLICY, as any fan of 'Yes Minister' knows (not mentioned even once throughout the book despite being THE last word on bureaucratic institutions).
China in particular, used its bureaucracy and mandarins to blunt imperial power, spreading the power out through a merit based system to limit the damage a ruler could do, and was so successful it alone ket the country together after waves of conquest and war. Again, never mentioned once by a American-centric Graeber, who seems to speak only within his direct experience of academia and petty internal disputes.
The last chapter insinuates that the batman movies were written specifically as an attack on his Occupy movement, which is just so narcissistic as to sum up the rest of the book beautifully.
What is bureaucracy? We don't know. Mr Graeber launches into the subject without providing any background or context, just expounds on all too familiar stereotypes as if they represented the actual truth. We are not treated to the origin or traditions of the great bureaucratic institutes of China or Britian, but mere anecdotal evidence of the local american DMV, which is then the basis for all other arguments. In fact, Graeber doesn't ever seem to realize the function of a bureaucracy, which is namely to provide or distribute goods or services to a large amount of people in an organized fashion. A bureaucracy is not, in fact, politics, as the author so often confuses it with, but the instrument which carries out POLICY, as any fan of 'Yes Minister' knows (not mentioned even once throughout the book despite being THE last word on bureaucratic institutions).
China in particular, used its bureaucracy and mandarins to blunt imperial power, spreading the power out through a merit based system to limit the damage a ruler could do, and was so successful it alone ket the country together after waves of conquest and war. Again, never mentioned once by a American-centric Graeber, who seems to speak only within his direct experience of academia and petty internal disputes.
The last chapter insinuates that the batman movies were written specifically as an attack on his Occupy movement, which is just so narcissistic as to sum up the rest of the book beautifully.
June 7, 2015
Tremendous book. This book won me over the moment Graeber asked why he was printing his name where he was asked to sign, and sign where he was asked to print. The irrational - stupid - rules and procedures of bureaucracy of outlined and explained.
There are so many sentences that can trigger entire books in response. This is rich research. Evocative. Powerful. Provocative. A thrill and pleasure to read.
There are so many sentences that can trigger entire books in response. This is rich research. Evocative. Powerful. Provocative. A thrill and pleasure to read.
January 10, 2022
this was my first graeber & def helped me get that tweet that was like "graeber's books go down too smooth for the complexity of the ideas he introduces."
i spent the first 25% of the book pretty skeptical because there were so many sweeping assertions being leveled without real warrants or elaboration (everyone in an org knows meritocratic hiring is fake, all bureaucracy is based in state violence), even if they seemed plausible. but eventually i realized that if i suspended disbelief and took the essays as intentionally provocative — almost polemics — i appreciated them a lot more just for the directions they expanded my mind in.
his work reminds me of when i took intro to sociology my freshman fall and the professor said that the point of sociology was to "make it strange" — to interrogate society's mundane, unquestioned defaults. rather than presenting airtight cases for How Things Are. this kind of strange-making is probably the trait that graeber's work excels most at!
(side note: want to think more about how this relates to daos / on-chain organizations + contracts)
i spent the first 25% of the book pretty skeptical because there were so many sweeping assertions being leveled without real warrants or elaboration (everyone in an org knows meritocratic hiring is fake, all bureaucracy is based in state violence), even if they seemed plausible. but eventually i realized that if i suspended disbelief and took the essays as intentionally provocative — almost polemics — i appreciated them a lot more just for the directions they expanded my mind in.
his work reminds me of when i took intro to sociology my freshman fall and the professor said that the point of sociology was to "make it strange" — to interrogate society's mundane, unquestioned defaults. rather than presenting airtight cases for How Things Are. this kind of strange-making is probably the trait that graeber's work excels most at!
(side note: want to think more about how this relates to daos / on-chain organizations + contracts)
April 8, 2015
Not quite as mind-expanding as either Debt or Graeber's under-appreciated (at least on Goodreads) book on value theory, but still brimming with novel ideas, erudite in an off-beat way (topics range from Madagascar to the postal service to Dungeons & Dragons), and most of all incredibly fun to read. Two of these essays (on flying cars and Batman) I had read and re-read in The Baffler and The New Inquiry, enough times that I feel confident in saying both have 20-30% more material than the original versions, and both benefit from the expansion.
November 13, 2020
David Graeber me ha parecido un pensador interesantísimo, original, muy entretenido e iconoclasta. He disfrutado mucho de como bebe tanto de sus conocimientos antropológicos e históricos como de fuentes de la literatura y cultura popular para realizar un amplio análisis sobre los distintos efectos que la burocracia tiene sobre nuestras vidas y psiques, y sobre el desarrollo tecnológico y posibilidades políticas futuras. Ahora tengo ganas de ponerme con todo el resto de sus libros.
April 1, 2021
Necesito que TODOS lean a David Graeber (lo he dicho mil veces, lo seguiré diciendo).
No sólo es un genio relacionando cosas en apariencia sin sentido (desde el Batman de Nolan, el homo ludens de Huizinga, D&D y porqué no tenemos coches voladores) también propone soluciones.
En este caso, es una delicia leer sobre algo tan anodino en apariencia como la burocracia, pero que, como ya lo sabe Kafka y todo el mundo, termina siendo algo diábolico. Una maravilla.
No sólo es un genio relacionando cosas en apariencia sin sentido (desde el Batman de Nolan, el homo ludens de Huizinga, D&D y porqué no tenemos coches voladores) también propone soluciones.
En este caso, es una delicia leer sobre algo tan anodino en apariencia como la burocracia, pero que, como ya lo sabe Kafka y todo el mundo, termina siendo algo diábolico. Una maravilla.
January 25, 2018
I loved the author's book on Debt and greatly enjoy his authorial voice. Like him or hate him, he has a way of reconsidering social structures that stimulate new ways of thinking about subjects like money, power, play, and work. So as something of a career civil servant and David Graeber fanboy, I had tremendous anticipation to read this anthropologist's exposition of bureaucracy. But what an infuriating and disappointing book! Here we have essays of ill-considered invective, signifying very little; a work that is provocative in all the wrong ways; a completely half-baked, unresearched, and academically lazy set of ideas the author claims to have published for the purpose of inspiring others to flesh them out (at page 44, quoted at the end of this review).
We can easily sympathize with Graeber's entree to the subject matter. His tale of tragic frustration working with his mother's hospice is a typical, if no less relatable indictment of bureaucracy as inherently, inevitably Kafkaesque: the robotic adherence to an arguably well-intentioned, orderly process at an inappropriate time and place. As family members struggle to overcome the byzantine, ad hoc obstacles placed before them to obtain "power of attorney" necessary to establish proxy consent for those who themselves lack capacity to provide their own consent in writing (e.g., HIPAA forms, personal banking), we see the triumph of rationality over utility in a way that is ironically and absurdly stupid.
However, this mindlessness is the very raison d'etre of the procedures. Forms and structures often emerge as a mental shortcut to streamline complex relationships. As Graeber observes at page 52, "Paperwork... is designed to be maximally simple and self-contained. Even when forms are complex, even bafflingly complex, it’s by an endless accretion of very simple but apparently contradictory elements, like a maze composed entirely of the endless juxtaposition of two or three very simple geometrical motifs." So complexity creeps in and ultimately spoils or obscures what was originally created to make things simpler. Ah, but all could be resolved with a bit more transparency! And so, Graeber likens bureaucracy to a pointless game:
Graeber does manage, however, to poke an effective hole in the blame-shifting that corporate and Congressional spinmeisters engage in. Thus, at page 15, he argues, "there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that, were I to actually locate a bank manager and demand to know how [patient advocates could be forced to endure a time-consuming runaround to complete paperwork before loved ones with precious little lifetime remaining could receive care], he or she would immediately insist that the bank was not to blame—that it was all an effect of an arcane maze of government regulations. However, I am equally confident that, were it possible to investigate how these regulations came about, one would find that they were composed jointly by aides to legislators on some banking committee and lobbyists and attorneys employed by the banks themselves, in a process greased by generous contributions to the coffers of those same legislators’ reelection campaigns. And the same would be true of anything from credit ratings, insurance premiums, mortgage applications, to, for that matter, the process of buying an airline ticket…."
All this has universalist appeal, but rather than try to identify universal characteristics of bureaucracies, the author rambles around the topic without reaching definitive conclusions. At one point he riffs on rationalism by tracing the sociological etymology of "realistic," conflating its meaning as "pragmatic" with its literal origins in "like something real" (which he can then juxtapose with "imagined" or "imaginary" depending on whether or not he wishes the result to seem the product of reason or irrationality). So at page 87 he balances a false analogy on a pun: "Just as… something is alive because you can kill it, so property is 'real' because the state can seize or destroy it. In the same way, when one takes a 'realist' position in International Relations, one assumes that states will use whatever capacities they have at their disposal, including force of arms, to pursue their national interests." He proceeds to use a third antonym of 'real' -- metaphorical -- as a basis for rejecting attribution of motives to corporate entities, stating, "The idea that nations are humanlike entities with purposes and interests is purely metaphysical." This facile and futile wordplay undercuts potentially poignant observation. So at pages 165-6, he asserts that "bureaucracy... treats the means of doing things as entirely separate from what it is that’s being done. In this way, bureaucracy really has become almost completely contradictory—in constant friction." Yet rather than explore aspects of bureaucracy that create this paradox, Graeber complains, "our very conception of rationality is strangely incoherent. It's entirely unclear what the word is supposed to mean." Here as elsewhere throughout the book, the author's free association and sloppy vocabulary lead him astray.
The middle part of this book is uncharacteristically superficial and incoherent, beginning with the author's lament at page 108 that "when the creators of Back to the Future II dutifully placed flying cars and antigravity hoverboards in the hands of ordinary teenagers in the year 2015, it wasn’t clear if it was meant as a serious prediction, a bow to older traditions of imagined futures, or as a slightly bitter joke." This leads into a ridiculous and extensive rant where Graeber posits that humanity has enjoyed no meaningful technological innovations since the Space Race landed Neil Armstrong on the moon. I'm sure we all share an affection for hoverboards, but really have no idea what he intended to convey here relative to bureaucracy. Perhaps he would enjoy a subscription to Scientific American (or at least Wired magazine)?
Even his premise is wrong. We live in a fantastic future, virtually unimagined by the creative thinkers of our childhoods. The internet; genetic splicing; AIs, bots and neural nets; and advances in materials science, energy production, energy storage (batteries), and architecture are individually and collectively overwhelming. Even social media technologies have been phenomenally disruptive to the traditional power structures of my youth. These fundamental changes have been nano in nature rather than macroscopic or spectacularly visual and thus harder to anticipate the way that footage of moon landings and industrial machinery might have inspired fantasies of flying cars and hoverboards. Yet if Graeber finds these advances somehow unreasonably impossible to see, he's still missing more highly visible recent extrapolations: from remote controlled toy cars to quadcopter drones, or from telephones and a predilection for wearable accessories to the Apple watch (a case of backwards engineering to imitate art if ever there were one).
I'll spare you most of my examples of incoherence, one followed along the lines of angelic hierarchies postulated by medieval and renaissance theologians emerging in symbiotic rivalry with the bureaucratic societies that invoked them. *Yawn.* "That's nice, dear." Tangential ramblings aside, Graeber is at his best when being thought-provoking as opposed to merely provocative. He equates governance with violence, specifically labeling it "structural violence," one whose violence is strictly implied, manifest through socially acceptable, passive aggressive behavior. It's not wholly clear whether he intends this as a denunciation of bureaucracy however, or just a side effect of government. Either way, it's a stance which certainly seems revolutionary -- that is, until you think about what governing actually entails.
Democracy relies as much upon people's acquiescence as their active participation. Absent the former, democracy gives way to anarchy, absent the latter, to oligarchy or authoritarianism and self-annihilation. At root, this acceptance of authority amounts to deference, manifest in the willingness to accept or assist in the implementation of others' decisions: taxation; the brokerage of commercial, civil, and criminal disputes we broadly call "justice;" and general public welfare/health-and-safety measures like speed limits. All this is conceptually well and good until one gets stymied by a representative of the state (or pulled over by a cop). At this point an impromptu negotiation takes place, one in which power prevails. Those who are white, wealthy, or winsome win some, all others must be made subject to some sort of suasion.
To the extent the governed's consent balks at the point of enforcement, state power must be maintained by force or the threat of force. Control both equates to and demands the application of power. We see this deployed by the military abroad and the police and prison system domestically. Every civil mandate, regulation, or rule be it a traffic ticket, tax, fine, or injunction must ultimately be backed by the coercive capacity of the state to be executed. So, yes, governance is "structural violence." It can only be thus. Upon a moment's reflection, Graeber's statement is thus not so much an observation on bureaucracy or the state as it is a tautology about the function of the modern state. The author even admits as much at page 175, when he writes, "A sovereign state is one whose ruler claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a given territory."
You could quibble with this definition by observing that it excludes federations of states like the US and Canada, as well as the federated states and provinces themselves which must share power with the nation-state. In this way, Graeber lacks a useful description of contemporary, politico-corporate entities. Even so, it seems to me that he's offered a sufficiently complete realization that renders bureaucracy superfluous as an expression of state power, real or implied. Any organization without legitimate recourse to violence is not a state, and any state which fails to claim a monopoly over legitimate uses of violence is not sovereign. The idea of bureaucracy as structural violence cannot be extended to other large, hierarchical enterprises like corporations or nonprofit advocacy groups, whose will may only be imposed by nonviolent means like withholding perqs (part or whole cuts in salary or benefits) or threatening exile (employment/membership termination or re-assignment). Any other attempt at coercion requires recourse to the state for its legitimation or imposition.
At any rate, Graeber doesn't seem to like the enforcement aspect inherent in establishments of social order. "It’s almost as if the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm" (page 58). He simultaneously dismisses and praises bureaucracy's unthinking stupidity as "utopian," calling forth the confusion its weaker practitioners exhibit in exalting process over achievement.
Recalling that these essays emerge from the author's frustrating experience dealing with the anonymized tyranny of HIPAA imposed by his mother's hospice, Graeber understandably complains,
"[W]e have the notion that bureaucratic systems are simply neutral social technologies," Graeber writes at page 166, but
Skimming through my notes on this book, I find another seven (!) pages of quotes and possible criticism, but by now you probably get my argument. I think the author betrays the shallowness of his vision by spreading his net so conceptually wide. Would that I had heeded Graeber's own warnings about the deficiencies in his manuscript, but I got caught up by another one of his early anecdotes: the Fralib Tea factory strike circa 2010. It's as good a way of ending as any.
Bought out by Unilever, French Fralib workers rose to prevent the factory's closure and relocation to Poland. While the move to Poland indisputably promised cheaper labor and factory real estate, the root cause of the closure according to a worker interviewed by the author lay in the mechanical improvements Fralib workers had made to their Marseille plant. These innovations facilitated higher profits that led to a surplusage of middle management hires, which in turn brought Unilever into the ownership structure. Graeber's worker suspected les nouveaux bureaucrates of proposing closure to their new corporate overlords as a means of justifying their own value as smart middle managers.
As such, the author's recitation seems to imply a systemic weakness in bureaucracy predisposed to favor capital over labor. It's an intriguing idea, but one I don't think necessarily borne out by the Fralib example. For broader ideological context, here's how Roar, a labor union magazine, covered the story and how the Financial Times covered the dispute. As I look in various critical directions, I'm inclined to agree that the story of the Marseilles tea factory is one of mismanagement. However, I think the mismanagement here to be less a matter of self-serving middle tier manipulation than one of myopia, more about lost opportunity than lost marketplace competitiveness. It seems to me quite possible that management's perception of performance inefficiencies could be corrected by the workers' strike. Or perhaps Unilever's restart of the business in Poland will end up betraying the very middle managers who proposed the change, should the company find relying on the credulity or ignorance of the superfluous management layer's Polish successors preferable as a way to keep things rolling. Whether under the Unilever banner or as independent entrepreneurs, the French workers might yet keep their jobs if they can remain self-sustaining, irrespective of whether or not they can outperform more senior attempts to implement Ricardian comparative advantage. Maybe after the lawsuits have wound themselves up, the only thing this churn will demonstrate is how intra-EU negotiation serves to drive down the overall price of tea.
From this example, however, Graeber hopes to conclude (at page 44) that "A left critique of bureaucracy... is sorely lacking," yet in no sense does his anecdote seem to me to invite one. Nothing in hierarchical structure demands poor decision-making. In fact, the author goes on from this statement to disavow any intent to use his forum to provide critique, justification, or in fact to serve any other clear function, writing, "This book is not, precisely, an outline for such a critique. Neither is it in any sense an attempt to develop a general theory of bureaucracy, a history of bureaucracy, or even of the current age of total bureaucracy. It is a collection of essays...." Well, yes. That it is. No argument there.
We can easily sympathize with Graeber's entree to the subject matter. His tale of tragic frustration working with his mother's hospice is a typical, if no less relatable indictment of bureaucracy as inherently, inevitably Kafkaesque: the robotic adherence to an arguably well-intentioned, orderly process at an inappropriate time and place. As family members struggle to overcome the byzantine, ad hoc obstacles placed before them to obtain "power of attorney" necessary to establish proxy consent for those who themselves lack capacity to provide their own consent in writing (e.g., HIPAA forms, personal banking), we see the triumph of rationality over utility in a way that is ironically and absurdly stupid.
However, this mindlessness is the very raison d'etre of the procedures. Forms and structures often emerge as a mental shortcut to streamline complex relationships. As Graeber observes at page 52, "Paperwork... is designed to be maximally simple and self-contained. Even when forms are complex, even bafflingly complex, it’s by an endless accretion of very simple but apparently contradictory elements, like a maze composed entirely of the endless juxtaposition of two or three very simple geometrical motifs." So complexity creeps in and ultimately spoils or obscures what was originally created to make things simpler. Ah, but all could be resolved with a bit more transparency! And so, Graeber likens bureaucracy to a pointless game:
Games allow us our only real experience of a situation where all this ambiguity is swept away. Everyone knows exactly what the rules are. And not only that, people actually do follow them. And by following them, it is even possible to win! This—along with the fact that unlike in real life, one has submitted oneself to the rules completely voluntarily—is the source of the pleasure. Games, then, are a kind of utopia of rules. (pages 191-2)This description has a couple of problems. First, it inaccurately assumes a meritocracy emerging from the transparency and consistent application of a universally agreed upon set of rules within a closed system, something not true of all games, just those without elements of chance. Second, it strikes me that a player's ability to win probably derives less directly from mastery of the rules than of the system borne from them. The actual printed rules of a game (or bureaucratic system) can be so voluminous as to need a book's worth of print to be communicated -- think Civilization or Axis and Allies or the Federal Acquisition Regulations that govern federal contracting -- or straightforward but complex in combination, iteration, and application -- think Go or John Conway's Life or the first two sections of Article III of the Constitution, which establish the American judicial system. Form dictates performance whether long-winded or concise, but simply saying so is no guarantee of fairness, balance, or fun.
Graeber does manage, however, to poke an effective hole in the blame-shifting that corporate and Congressional spinmeisters engage in. Thus, at page 15, he argues, "there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that, were I to actually locate a bank manager and demand to know how [patient advocates could be forced to endure a time-consuming runaround to complete paperwork before loved ones with precious little lifetime remaining could receive care], he or she would immediately insist that the bank was not to blame—that it was all an effect of an arcane maze of government regulations. However, I am equally confident that, were it possible to investigate how these regulations came about, one would find that they were composed jointly by aides to legislators on some banking committee and lobbyists and attorneys employed by the banks themselves, in a process greased by generous contributions to the coffers of those same legislators’ reelection campaigns. And the same would be true of anything from credit ratings, insurance premiums, mortgage applications, to, for that matter, the process of buying an airline ticket…."
All this has universalist appeal, but rather than try to identify universal characteristics of bureaucracies, the author rambles around the topic without reaching definitive conclusions. At one point he riffs on rationalism by tracing the sociological etymology of "realistic," conflating its meaning as "pragmatic" with its literal origins in "like something real" (which he can then juxtapose with "imagined" or "imaginary" depending on whether or not he wishes the result to seem the product of reason or irrationality). So at page 87 he balances a false analogy on a pun: "Just as… something is alive because you can kill it, so property is 'real' because the state can seize or destroy it. In the same way, when one takes a 'realist' position in International Relations, one assumes that states will use whatever capacities they have at their disposal, including force of arms, to pursue their national interests." He proceeds to use a third antonym of 'real' -- metaphorical -- as a basis for rejecting attribution of motives to corporate entities, stating, "The idea that nations are humanlike entities with purposes and interests is purely metaphysical." This facile and futile wordplay undercuts potentially poignant observation. So at pages 165-6, he asserts that "bureaucracy... treats the means of doing things as entirely separate from what it is that’s being done. In this way, bureaucracy really has become almost completely contradictory—in constant friction." Yet rather than explore aspects of bureaucracy that create this paradox, Graeber complains, "our very conception of rationality is strangely incoherent. It's entirely unclear what the word is supposed to mean." Here as elsewhere throughout the book, the author's free association and sloppy vocabulary lead him astray.
The middle part of this book is uncharacteristically superficial and incoherent, beginning with the author's lament at page 108 that "when the creators of Back to the Future II dutifully placed flying cars and antigravity hoverboards in the hands of ordinary teenagers in the year 2015, it wasn’t clear if it was meant as a serious prediction, a bow to older traditions of imagined futures, or as a slightly bitter joke." This leads into a ridiculous and extensive rant where Graeber posits that humanity has enjoyed no meaningful technological innovations since the Space Race landed Neil Armstrong on the moon. I'm sure we all share an affection for hoverboards, but really have no idea what he intended to convey here relative to bureaucracy. Perhaps he would enjoy a subscription to Scientific American (or at least Wired magazine)?
Even his premise is wrong. We live in a fantastic future, virtually unimagined by the creative thinkers of our childhoods. The internet; genetic splicing; AIs, bots and neural nets; and advances in materials science, energy production, energy storage (batteries), and architecture are individually and collectively overwhelming. Even social media technologies have been phenomenally disruptive to the traditional power structures of my youth. These fundamental changes have been nano in nature rather than macroscopic or spectacularly visual and thus harder to anticipate the way that footage of moon landings and industrial machinery might have inspired fantasies of flying cars and hoverboards. Yet if Graeber finds these advances somehow unreasonably impossible to see, he's still missing more highly visible recent extrapolations: from remote controlled toy cars to quadcopter drones, or from telephones and a predilection for wearable accessories to the Apple watch (a case of backwards engineering to imitate art if ever there were one).
I'll spare you most of my examples of incoherence, one followed along the lines of angelic hierarchies postulated by medieval and renaissance theologians emerging in symbiotic rivalry with the bureaucratic societies that invoked them. *Yawn.* "That's nice, dear." Tangential ramblings aside, Graeber is at his best when being thought-provoking as opposed to merely provocative. He equates governance with violence, specifically labeling it "structural violence," one whose violence is strictly implied, manifest through socially acceptable, passive aggressive behavior. It's not wholly clear whether he intends this as a denunciation of bureaucracy however, or just a side effect of government. Either way, it's a stance which certainly seems revolutionary -- that is, until you think about what governing actually entails.
Democracy relies as much upon people's acquiescence as their active participation. Absent the former, democracy gives way to anarchy, absent the latter, to oligarchy or authoritarianism and self-annihilation. At root, this acceptance of authority amounts to deference, manifest in the willingness to accept or assist in the implementation of others' decisions: taxation; the brokerage of commercial, civil, and criminal disputes we broadly call "justice;" and general public welfare/health-and-safety measures like speed limits. All this is conceptually well and good until one gets stymied by a representative of the state (or pulled over by a cop). At this point an impromptu negotiation takes place, one in which power prevails. Those who are white, wealthy, or winsome win some, all others must be made subject to some sort of suasion.
To the extent the governed's consent balks at the point of enforcement, state power must be maintained by force or the threat of force. Control both equates to and demands the application of power. We see this deployed by the military abroad and the police and prison system domestically. Every civil mandate, regulation, or rule be it a traffic ticket, tax, fine, or injunction must ultimately be backed by the coercive capacity of the state to be executed. So, yes, governance is "structural violence." It can only be thus. Upon a moment's reflection, Graeber's statement is thus not so much an observation on bureaucracy or the state as it is a tautology about the function of the modern state. The author even admits as much at page 175, when he writes, "A sovereign state is one whose ruler claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a given territory."
You could quibble with this definition by observing that it excludes federations of states like the US and Canada, as well as the federated states and provinces themselves which must share power with the nation-state. In this way, Graeber lacks a useful description of contemporary, politico-corporate entities. Even so, it seems to me that he's offered a sufficiently complete realization that renders bureaucracy superfluous as an expression of state power, real or implied. Any organization without legitimate recourse to violence is not a state, and any state which fails to claim a monopoly over legitimate uses of violence is not sovereign. The idea of bureaucracy as structural violence cannot be extended to other large, hierarchical enterprises like corporations or nonprofit advocacy groups, whose will may only be imposed by nonviolent means like withholding perqs (part or whole cuts in salary or benefits) or threatening exile (employment/membership termination or re-assignment). Any other attempt at coercion requires recourse to the state for its legitimation or imposition.
At any rate, Graeber doesn't seem to like the enforcement aspect inherent in establishments of social order. "It’s almost as if the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm" (page 58). He simultaneously dismisses and praises bureaucracy's unthinking stupidity as "utopian," calling forth the confusion its weaker practitioners exhibit in exalting process over achievement.
Recalling that these essays emerge from the author's frustrating experience dealing with the anonymized tyranny of HIPAA imposed by his mother's hospice, Graeber understandably complains,
Bureaucracies public and private appear—for whatever historical reasons—to be organized in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected. It’s in this sense that I’ve said one can fairly say that bureaucracies are utopian forms of organization. After all, is this not what we always say of utopians: that they have a naïve faith in the perfectibility of human nature and refuse to deal with humans as they actually are? (page 48)Yet again, I must disagree. For me, the bureaucrat's rigid insistence in fulfilling all steps of a formalized practice stems from the asociality of large, hierarchical organizations: absence of personal contact reduces trust, which amplifies the redundancy required to avoid frustrating misunderstandings. Ironically, the greater the redundancy of messaging required, the more readily distortions can be introduced creating a negative feedback loop that proliferates ambiguity, inconsistency, and confusion.
"[W]e have the notion that bureaucratic systems are simply neutral social technologies," Graeber writes at page 166, but
the only real way to rid oneself of an established bureaucracy, according to Weber, is to simply kill them all, as Alaric the Goth did in Imperial Rome, or Genghis Khan in certain parts of the Middle East. Leave any significant number of functionaries alive, and within a few years, they will inevitably end up managing one’s kingdom. (page 155)Funny, but in fact this applies to any existing expertise. Bureaucrats are neither magi nor initiates in arcana, but people with some level of practical, operational experience. Whether considered a "technology" of social organization and hierarchical mobilization or else as a means or side effect of executing policy, anyone could surely choose to reinvent the wheel, but why would they? Graeber claims at page 26 that bureaucracies are inherently "utopian, in the sense that they propose an abstract ideal that real human beings can never live up to," but it's impossible to see how the alternative (voluntary, universal, spontaneous cooperation?) would be any less fantastical.
Skimming through my notes on this book, I find another seven (!) pages of quotes and possible criticism, but by now you probably get my argument. I think the author betrays the shallowness of his vision by spreading his net so conceptually wide. Would that I had heeded Graeber's own warnings about the deficiencies in his manuscript, but I got caught up by another one of his early anecdotes: the Fralib Tea factory strike circa 2010. It's as good a way of ending as any.
Bought out by Unilever, French Fralib workers rose to prevent the factory's closure and relocation to Poland. While the move to Poland indisputably promised cheaper labor and factory real estate, the root cause of the closure according to a worker interviewed by the author lay in the mechanical improvements Fralib workers had made to their Marseille plant. These innovations facilitated higher profits that led to a surplusage of middle management hires, which in turn brought Unilever into the ownership structure. Graeber's worker suspected les nouveaux bureaucrates of proposing closure to their new corporate overlords as a means of justifying their own value as smart middle managers.
As such, the author's recitation seems to imply a systemic weakness in bureaucracy predisposed to favor capital over labor. It's an intriguing idea, but one I don't think necessarily borne out by the Fralib example. For broader ideological context, here's how Roar, a labor union magazine, covered the story and how the Financial Times covered the dispute. As I look in various critical directions, I'm inclined to agree that the story of the Marseilles tea factory is one of mismanagement. However, I think the mismanagement here to be less a matter of self-serving middle tier manipulation than one of myopia, more about lost opportunity than lost marketplace competitiveness. It seems to me quite possible that management's perception of performance inefficiencies could be corrected by the workers' strike. Or perhaps Unilever's restart of the business in Poland will end up betraying the very middle managers who proposed the change, should the company find relying on the credulity or ignorance of the superfluous management layer's Polish successors preferable as a way to keep things rolling. Whether under the Unilever banner or as independent entrepreneurs, the French workers might yet keep their jobs if they can remain self-sustaining, irrespective of whether or not they can outperform more senior attempts to implement Ricardian comparative advantage. Maybe after the lawsuits have wound themselves up, the only thing this churn will demonstrate is how intra-EU negotiation serves to drive down the overall price of tea.
From this example, however, Graeber hopes to conclude (at page 44) that "A left critique of bureaucracy... is sorely lacking," yet in no sense does his anecdote seem to me to invite one. Nothing in hierarchical structure demands poor decision-making. In fact, the author goes on from this statement to disavow any intent to use his forum to provide critique, justification, or in fact to serve any other clear function, writing, "This book is not, precisely, an outline for such a critique. Neither is it in any sense an attempt to develop a general theory of bureaucracy, a history of bureaucracy, or even of the current age of total bureaucracy. It is a collection of essays...." Well, yes. That it is. No argument there.
August 18, 2023
Reason cannot tell us what we should want. It can only tell us how best to get it.
Came late to this collection of three (+ bonuses) playful but prescient essays by the late great anthropologist, anarchist, and beautiful human of letters, David Graeber.
Since buying Debt: The First 5,000 Years on a whim in 2018 and devouring it and its hundreds of endnotes twice, I have been hooked. One of my top four reasons for taking a job in the City of London in 2019 and moving over from the US was to have more opportunities to go to Graeber's various speaking engagements around town. I loved to see how excited he was to share anecdotes, evidence, recent discoveries, and his professional and personal fascination with human culture and history. It's rare to find such an authentic person--anywhere, really, but particularly in top tier academia, and his talks felt like coming home from the wars.
Of course, he was labelled, censored, algo'd, fired, and made a pariah by many of those who should have been colleagues but chose instead to protect the popular consensus and conventional group-thinking, along with their salaries and tenured positions. But his work was so damned brilliant and elegantly simple that much of it found the light of day anyway. Bravo, David and all who worked with him. We are poorer as a species without him sharing the planet, poking the eyes of the sociopaths who claim dominion over us.
The 40-page introduction is one of the bonuses--an essay that ties the others around the central theme of bureaucracy as limited boon and ultimate bane for humanity. David begins by remarking that we don't talk about bureaucracies much anymore, despite the fact that the daily lives of everyone in the developed world are marked with absurd levels of bureaucracy. It's become near-invisible in its ubiquity (the water in which we swim), a core feature of our late-stage capitalist-ic system, if we're still calling it that.
Noting that some form of bureaucracy, a rule/guideline/standards-making body with the threat of violence behind it, is required for any sustained form of market, Graeber points out that deregulation and all other movements to "liberalize" the economy with the stated intent of reducing government interference actually ends up producing even more bureaucracy. This is Graeber's Iron Law of Liberalism. These initiatives are marketed to us, predominantly by the left, with buzzwords like "public-private partnership", "market principles", and "efficiency". It takes armies of clerks, registrars, inspectors, police, lawyers, judges, HR reps (or “business partners”), etc. to maintain nominally free markets and Graeber points out that the MARKET has, in the mind of the mainstream liberal, come to represent the government. In reality, there is very little space between the two. The market is after all shaped by a government that provides the legal framework and enforcement mechanisms and has in turn adopted all the trappings of the corporate bureaucracy, right down to the ubiquitous use of PowerPoint. Regulators including central banks by and large work on behalf of the corporations they are supposed to regulate, having long since shifted from any meaningful consumer protection or fraud prevention to the more efficient operation of the MARKET and enhanced shareholder return.
Dead zones of the imagination begins with David sharing a personal horror story about navigating stupidity in the form of trenchant bureaucracy as he tried to look after his dying mother's affairs. He then launches into a review of the literature on bureaucracies, with an interesting section on Weber and Foucault in America, before focusing on the lessons we can all take from feminist literature, which shows us why bureaucracy works (the structural violence), and the solution: act as if we are already free.
Of flying cars and the declining rate of profit is a lot of fun. Graeber notes that we are mostly terribly disappointed with the lack of progress in technology--where are the flying cars, already?? Why is almost all tech development over the last several decades focused on putting together already existing tech or building simulations rather than something like the ground-breaking stuff that came out in the late '50s (e.g. lasers, microwave ovens, the pill)? Graeber's thesis:
There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control.
There follows a brilliant exploration of alternative theses and examination of evidence, which points to neoliberalism as the primary culprit (the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones). Short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking favored by corporate bureaucrats does its best to kill any line of investigation that could have revolutionary implications. The answer is not some new bureaucracy, but something else that engenders equality and lets imaginations once again become a material force in human history (e.g. laundry robots for all can only become a reality when there are no super-rich or desperately poor people willing to do someone else's housework).
The utopia of rules, or why we really love bureaucracy after all
As suggested by the title, David explores why bureaucracy holds some appeal, even for those under its dominion. Appealing now to fantasy literature, where generally only the evil people maintain systems of administration, D&D, and other games (the utopia of rules), this is really interesting--highly recommended to any and all readers (pp. 183-189). Graeber concludes that perhaps what lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of free-form, imaginative play, fear of freedom.
The appendix contains perhaps the most entertaining and brilliant essay of the collection: On Batman and the problem of constituent power , wherein Graeber explores sovereignty, law, and propaganda via a cutting review of Chris Nolan's big stinker, The Dark Knight Rises.
Came late to this collection of three (+ bonuses) playful but prescient essays by the late great anthropologist, anarchist, and beautiful human of letters, David Graeber.
Since buying Debt: The First 5,000 Years on a whim in 2018 and devouring it and its hundreds of endnotes twice, I have been hooked. One of my top four reasons for taking a job in the City of London in 2019 and moving over from the US was to have more opportunities to go to Graeber's various speaking engagements around town. I loved to see how excited he was to share anecdotes, evidence, recent discoveries, and his professional and personal fascination with human culture and history. It's rare to find such an authentic person--anywhere, really, but particularly in top tier academia, and his talks felt like coming home from the wars.
Of course, he was labelled, censored, algo'd, fired, and made a pariah by many of those who should have been colleagues but chose instead to protect the popular consensus and conventional group-thinking, along with their salaries and tenured positions. But his work was so damned brilliant and elegantly simple that much of it found the light of day anyway. Bravo, David and all who worked with him. We are poorer as a species without him sharing the planet, poking the eyes of the sociopaths who claim dominion over us.
The 40-page introduction is one of the bonuses--an essay that ties the others around the central theme of bureaucracy as limited boon and ultimate bane for humanity. David begins by remarking that we don't talk about bureaucracies much anymore, despite the fact that the daily lives of everyone in the developed world are marked with absurd levels of bureaucracy. It's become near-invisible in its ubiquity (the water in which we swim), a core feature of our late-stage capitalist-ic system, if we're still calling it that.
Noting that some form of bureaucracy, a rule/guideline/standards-making body with the threat of violence behind it, is required for any sustained form of market, Graeber points out that deregulation and all other movements to "liberalize" the economy with the stated intent of reducing government interference actually ends up producing even more bureaucracy. This is Graeber's Iron Law of Liberalism. These initiatives are marketed to us, predominantly by the left, with buzzwords like "public-private partnership", "market principles", and "efficiency". It takes armies of clerks, registrars, inspectors, police, lawyers, judges, HR reps (or “business partners”), etc. to maintain nominally free markets and Graeber points out that the MARKET has, in the mind of the mainstream liberal, come to represent the government. In reality, there is very little space between the two. The market is after all shaped by a government that provides the legal framework and enforcement mechanisms and has in turn adopted all the trappings of the corporate bureaucracy, right down to the ubiquitous use of PowerPoint. Regulators including central banks by and large work on behalf of the corporations they are supposed to regulate, having long since shifted from any meaningful consumer protection or fraud prevention to the more efficient operation of the MARKET and enhanced shareholder return.
Dead zones of the imagination begins with David sharing a personal horror story about navigating stupidity in the form of trenchant bureaucracy as he tried to look after his dying mother's affairs. He then launches into a review of the literature on bureaucracies, with an interesting section on Weber and Foucault in America, before focusing on the lessons we can all take from feminist literature, which shows us why bureaucracy works (the structural violence), and the solution: act as if we are already free.
Of flying cars and the declining rate of profit is a lot of fun. Graeber notes that we are mostly terribly disappointed with the lack of progress in technology--where are the flying cars, already?? Why is almost all tech development over the last several decades focused on putting together already existing tech or building simulations rather than something like the ground-breaking stuff that came out in the late '50s (e.g. lasers, microwave ovens, the pill)? Graeber's thesis:
There appears to have been a profound shift, beginning in the 1970s, from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control.
There follows a brilliant exploration of alternative theses and examination of evidence, which points to neoliberalism as the primary culprit (the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones). Short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking favored by corporate bureaucrats does its best to kill any line of investigation that could have revolutionary implications. The answer is not some new bureaucracy, but something else that engenders equality and lets imaginations once again become a material force in human history (e.g. laundry robots for all can only become a reality when there are no super-rich or desperately poor people willing to do someone else's housework).
The utopia of rules, or why we really love bureaucracy after all
As suggested by the title, David explores why bureaucracy holds some appeal, even for those under its dominion. Appealing now to fantasy literature, where generally only the evil people maintain systems of administration, D&D, and other games (the utopia of rules), this is really interesting--highly recommended to any and all readers (pp. 183-189). Graeber concludes that perhaps what lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of free-form, imaginative play, fear of freedom.
The appendix contains perhaps the most entertaining and brilliant essay of the collection: On Batman and the problem of constituent power , wherein Graeber explores sovereignty, law, and propaganda via a cutting review of Chris Nolan's big stinker, The Dark Knight Rises.
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