KARL MARX

PARIS
103
principle a universal one, the bureaucrats had in practice ended by turning
it into their own private affair, by creating a group interest separate from
society. Thus bureaucracy, being a particular, closed society within the
state, appropriated the consciousness, will and power of the state. In
the battle against the medieval corporations the bureaucracy was necessarily
victorious as each corporation needed it to combat other corporations,
whereas the bureaucracy was self-sufficient. Bureaucracy, which
came into existence to solve problems and then engendered them in order
to provide itself with a permanent raison d'etre, became an end rather
than a means and thus achieved nothing. It was this process that accounted
for all the characteristics of bureaucracy: the formalism, the hierarchy,
the mystique, the identification of its own ends with those of the state.
Marx summed up these characteristics in a passage whose insight and
incisiveness merit lengthy quotation:
Bureaucracy counts in its own eyes as the final aim of the state
The aims of the state are transformed into the aims of the bureaux and
the aims of the bureaux into the aims of the state. Bureaucracy is a
circle from which no one can escape. Its hierarchy is a hierarchy of
knowledge. The apex entrusts the lower echelon with insight into the
individual while the lower echelon leaves insight into the universal to
the apex, and so each deceives the other.
Bureaucracy constitutes an imaginary state alongside the real state
and is the spiritualism of the state. Thus every object has a dual meaning
- a real one and a bureaucratic one, just as knowledge is dual - real
and bureaucratic (and it is the same with the will). But the real thing is
treated according to its bureaucratic essence, its other-worldly spiritual
essence. Bureaucracy holds in its possession the essence of the state -
the spiritual essence of society; the state is its private property. The
general ethos of bureaucracy is secrecy, mystery, safeguarded within by
hierarchy and without by its nature as a closed corporation. Thus public
political spirit and also political mentality appear to bureaucracy as a
betrayal of its secret. The principle of its knowledge is therefore authority,
and its mentality is the idolatry of authority. But within bureaucracy
the spiritualism turns into a crass materialism, the materialism of
passive obedience, faith in authority, the mechanism of fixed and formal
behaviour, fixed principles, attitudes, traditions. As far as the individual
bureaucrat is concerned, the aim of the state becomes his private aim,
in the form of competition for higher posts - careerism. He considers
the real life as a material one, for the spirit of this life has its own
separate existence in bureaucracy. 24
Marx's fundamental criticism of Hegel was the same as that contained
m the preceding sections: the attributes of humanity as a whole had been