Compass-Finding-Our-Voice-Final1

Finding Our Voice - Making the 21st Century State
6 The limits of the bureaucratic state
Jeremy Gilbert and Zoe Williams
Here is the deepest difficulty in the whole development of our democracy: that we seem reduced to a choice
between speculator and bureaucrat, and while we do not like the speculator, the bureaucrat is not exactly
inviting either. In such a situation, energy is sapped, hope weakens, and of course the present compromise
between the speculators and the bureaucrats remains unchallenged.1 Raymond Williams
By the early 1960s it was already commonplace to observe that both state and corporate institutions were
becoming increasingly bureaucratic, in both the capitalist and the socialist worlds. To many casual and
professional observers this seemed to bear out the assumptions of social theorists such as Max Weber, who
had believed that the growing reach and power of bureaucracy was simply the inevitable destiny of modern
societies. From the project for workers’ self-management in Yugoslavia, to the social and cultural movements of
the 1960s and 1970s, to the upsurge of shopfloor militancy during the same period, to the New Right’s assault
on big government, radicals of many stripes set their faces against this stifling tendency of modern culture.
Here is something to reflect on. In the middle decades of the 20th century, dystopian visions of the future always
revolved around the threat of an all-encompassing state, administering, observing and regimenting every aspect
of human existence. Think Metropolis, 1984, A Clockwork Orange. But by 1980 this had changed. From Blade
Runner to Mad Max to the pages of 2000 AD, the future we were afraid of became not one in which the state
had become too powerful, but one in which it had disappeared altogether. In their different ways, all of these
fictions depicted a lawless world in which order is only maintained by way of arbitrary brutality, while civilisation
has either broken down completely or been entirely colonised by commercial corporations.
But this is not exactly what happened either. We live in an era now when the function of bureaucracy has
certainly changed, but it has neither disappeared nor invaded every aspect of life. Instead, it seems that
bureaucracy today has a very specific set of functions, which all amount to ensuring that we behave within a
specific set of parameters, which nonetheless allow for a great deal more personal freedom in certain regards
than did the arrangements typical of prior epochs.
Consider, for example, the effect of bureaucratic institutions and their expectations on a secondary-school
teacher. Within living memory, a teacher who was publicly identified as gay could be sacked and even
imprisoned for it. Today, the state is more likely to intervene to protect them from homophobic bullying than to
practice it. It is debatable whether a classroom teacher today has more or less latitude when it comes to
determining the content of their teaching than they would have done 50 years ago. But what is clear is that no
matter what that content may consist of, they will be closely monitored according to an arbitrary set of arithmetic
performance indicators in ways which would have been unimaginable in a previous epoch.
This type of monitoring has a sort of double-effect. It encourages certain kinds of innovation, originality and
creativity on the part of workers in many different spheres, including their ‘private’ lives, but it also constantly
frustrates that creativity by policing it according to a set of arbitrary, normative, competitive criteria. It offers a
version of the freedom which the radicals of the 1960s longed for, but a version of it which ultimately – to use
Raymond Williams’ terms – uses the bureaucrats to subject all of the activities of those workers to a set of
criteria, which are actually determined by the speculators. Because ultimately, in the public and private sectors
today the bottom line is the bottom line. If an idea, skill or piece of knowledge is not marketable, then it is
worthless. And bureaucracy has taken upon itself the job of determining such worth in situations, such as
classrooms, where the market really cannot. People hate this. Which is one reason why the left should not be
afraid to attack it.
The significant success of the right was to create a plausible enemy out of ‘big government’, and thereby make
the shrinking of the state an end in itself. It did this by portraying overweening bureaucratic structures as the
natural endpoint of the state, a faceless, unresponsive apparatus, strictly imposing elaborately pointless
requirements.
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