Yes, you have been arrested, but that should not prevent you from going to work. Nor should anything prevent you from going about your daily life as usual.
~Franz Kafka[1]
Bureaucracy has become the water in which we swim.
~David Graeber[2]
Yavor Tarinski || What is much needed today is the reignition of a critique of bureaucracy from a direct democratic perspective. Unfortunately, such criticism has gone in decline for decades. The last mass frontal attack on bureaucratic relations and institutions was, arguably, during the May ’68 rebellion in France. It was then that student and worker collectives recognized State and capitalism not as separate entities, but as different expression of bureaucracy. This connection was underlined by much of the slogans of May ’68, such as “Humanity will only be happy when the last capitalist has been strangled with the guts of the last bureaucrat”.[3]
One of the main reasons behind bureaucracy’s persistence throughout the years is that it promises, through its cold and soulless nature, impartiality by treating everyone the same. Its ideological narrative suggests that it sustains neutrality in public affairs by applying uniform rules regardless of the specifities of each case. The basic promise of every bureaucratic system is that it creates an environment where arbitrariness is replaced by equality before the law.
However, this narrative offers an incomplete understanding, as rules and norms within bureaucracies are never uniformly designed, i.e. they are usually created by dominant interests that have the monopoly on decision-making. This leads to “impartiality” being nothing but a facade for systems where people in unequal positions are supposed to be treated “equally”. And the problem does not end here, since as history has shown us time and again, there is a dialectic relation between power, wealth, and being “above the law”, which further undermines the foundational argument in support of bureaucratization.
Nowadays, under bureaucracy people tend to understand a cumbersome state administration. This perception has been advanced by the Right in its effort to promote private ownership as the opposite of government ownership. And unfortunately, large sections of the Left, in response to the capitalist assault on the public sphere, have adopted this false dichotomy as well, thus being unable to articulate coherent criticism of bureaucracy. Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis has countered these fallacious arguments by explaining how bureaucratic tropes play crucial role in the development of capitalism:
the emergence of the bureaucracy corresponds to a final phase in the concentration of capital, and that the bureaucracy is the personification of capital during this phase, in much the same way as the bourgeoisie was its personification during the previous phase.[4]
Instead of the State withering away, as neoliberals would like us to believe, it is rather being reconceptualized and stripped to its very core – i.e. as a force of repression being capable of enforcing the supremacy of private property (so crucial for the capitalist project).
In this sense, its control is subtly spreading, while the dominant narrative claims the opposite, as more resources and relationships are being commodified to serve the purpose of unlimited growth. A process that is almost invisible, and in this line of though we can agree with Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that “no one particularly notices the expansion of the state sector and bureaucratization any longer: it seems a simple, “natural” fact of life.”[5]
Bureaucratic expansionism
Bureaucracy is more than amalgamation of State employees. It is rather the institutionalization of inequality on large scale. While arbitrary power can be exercised within small groups through sheer force, controlling larger groupings, like whole communities or entire societies, require complex networks of rules and mechanisms that enforce the principles of domination and exploitation (i.e. the domination of the few over the many) in every aspect of life. Bureaucracy is authority obtaining life of its own and is always expansionist, thus being ideal for enforcing domination over large multitudes. It never gets enough space, as its very existence depends on omitting other sources of power (i.e. direct-democratic institutions).
And it covers this expansion under the veil of “natural occurrence” – not something enforced by the ruling classes but an “evolution of rationalism”. Nowadays this process has reached a level where the gradual process of the bureaucratization of everything (the enforcement of uniform rules, regardless of local contexts, that assert the supremacy of commodification and the profit-motive) has gone as far as to claim that it strives at “abolishing bureaucracy”. This brings to mind the following passage from Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle:
The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class.[6]
Bureaucracy’s main engine of expansion and most authoritarian trait is its innate mistrust of people. At its very core lays the conviction that people are always looking for ways to bypass rules and cheat on the social whole for individual gains. It draws on Hobbesian type of thinking that justifies the suspicion towards actions that haven’t been sanctioned by a higher authority.
But it rests on a deeply fallacious logic, since it is not a general mistrust toward all kinds of norms and regulations that the majority of people exhibit, but a very specific kind of laws and rules – those made by the few (thus designed to serve the few). In this sense bureaucracy serves as the guardian of privileged elites that have concentrated power, rather than protectors of collectively-determined regulations. If anything, bureaucratic mechanisms tend to actively oppose the popular involvement in law-making.
Bureaucracy abstractivizes itself as it expands, becoming more difficult to be recognized. It’s rules and laws gradually become the regulator of everything – the standard norm. Bureaucracy is also at the core of the expansive capitalist marketization. Capitalism implies the replacement of collective management of commons, practiced by communities throughout the world for ages, with the top-down bureaucratic control that ensures the supremacy of private property and the profit-motive. This process has been universalized by imperialism and capitalist globalization. As Fredric Jameson underlines:
Everything is now organized and planned; nature has been triumphantly blotted out, along with peasants, petit-bourgeois commerce, handicraft, feudal aristocracies and imperial bureaucracies. Ours is a more homogeneously modernized condition; we no longer are encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of the “West”).[7]
Bureaucracy normalizes the hierarchical restructuring of society. It always strives at dismantling existing and preventing from reappearing forms of collective decision-making that can challenge the bureaucratic net of interwoven dominations. And it does so in a very subversive and long-lasting manner – by striving at embedding every member of society into its structures. This does not mean that it aims at making everyone a state employee, but rather that it produces different roles that encompass and function along the lifeless norms set by the bureaucracy. For example, freelancers, self-employed individuals, company owners, etc. all serve as cogs in the dominant bureaucratic machine. Henri Lefebvre describes this this process in the following way:
bureaucracy bureaucratizes the population more efficiently than a dictatorship, integrates people by turning them into bureaucrats (thus training them for the bureaucratic administration of their own daily lives) and rationalizes ‘private life’ according to its own standards.” [8]
The anthropological type that is formed in one such environment is characterized, along other things, by indifference. Being embedded into the top-down bureaucratic architecture, one is taught to be concerned primarily with they own lot and the business they have been assigned with by the higher echelons of the social pyramid. Political scientist and researcher Béatrice Hibou suggest that nowadays the production of indifference is one of the modes and methods of domination.[9]
Dulling the imagination
One of the particular effects that the bureaucratization of everyday life has is the dulling of imagination. Bureaucracy, by its very nature, seeks to predict and sanction in advance every possible outcome that can derive from human relation. Spontaneity is seen as something to be conquered by the “rational predictability” of bureaucratic management.
In one such environment there is no place for creativity. Bureaucratic societies are always characterized by the stratification of societies into classes of order-givers and order-takers, where one is supposed to act according to their assigned task and role. Because of this Graeber describes them as “ways of organizing stupidity”:
Bureaucracies, I’ve suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity—of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence. This is why even if a bureaucracy is created for entirely benevolent reasons, it will still produce absurdities.[10]
In such a bureaucratic environment there is increasingly less space for initiative on behalf of each individual. And even less so of communal creativity and self-action, as grassroots decision-making institutions are seen as direct threat to the dominant order. Bureaucracy nurtures, and itself feeds upon, a behavioral culture based on atomization, conformism, resignation, and passivity. People are constantly reminded that for every issue there is specific department or profession to be taken care of. In this sense, rather than developing diverse skills, the bureaucratic anthropological type learns to always wait on someone else for things that are out of their “expertise”. And the “proof” of someone’s skill at something is a diploma or other formalized paper, given by one of countless institutions that participate in the fragmentation of everyday life.
This culture creates a chain of people with increasingly narrower scope of “expertise”. This condition has been skillfully described by philosopher Claude Lefort in the following manner:
bureaucracy is a circle out of which no one can escape, that subordinates rely on their superiors to take the initiative and to resolve difficulties, while the superiors expect their subordinates to solve particular problems which elude the level of generality where they have been conceived. This solidarity in incompetence goes quite far in tying the employee, situated on the bottom of the ladder, to the system of which he is a part. As a result, it is impossible for him to denounce this system without simultaneously denouncing the vanity of his own function, from which he derives his own material existence. Similarly, bureaucrats seek the highest positions and work itself is subordinated to the gaining or maintenance of personal status, such that the bureaucracy appears as an immense network of personal relations.[11]
In our digital era many tend to think of bureaucracy as a thing that belongs to the past and that is about to be erased by the advance of technology. This way of thinking derives from the fallacious equalization of bureaucratic management with paperwork. But the top-down formalism of bureaucracy does not depend on the medium – whether through paper or pop-up windowses that ask for our agreement – it continues the fragmentation of everyday life in service of capitalism.
If anything, digital bureaucracy is more cumbersome, complicated, and even if it can eliminate paperwork, it replaces it with a lot of administrative/bureaucratic actions on the part of the user. The cogs of modern bureaucratic digitality spread more densely in the control of the citizen. In accordance to the rules of the capitalist grow-or-die doctrine, where “efficiency” is seen as one of the highest values, State apparatuses and corporate enterprises cut on human personnel and use instead AI to assess applications etc.
With every day that passes the logic of bureaucracy cuts deeper and deeper into the fabric of society, as a result of which our ability to image alternative modes of co-existence becomes duller. One of the points at which our resistance to the bureaucratic order takes place is the field of decision-making. The basis of bureaucracy is the complex hierarchical stratification of society into order-givers and order-takers, and it is when social movements open spaces where this division is abolished, that the perspective for a coherent alternative begin to emerge. It is such struggles that must be given priority if we want to avoid the unfolding social and ecological collapse.
[1] Franz Kafka. The Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14-15.
[2] David Graeber. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2015), 6.
[3] Occupation Committee of the People’s Free Sorbonne University. Slogans to Be Spread Now by Every Means. May 16, 1968 (Marxists Internet Archive), https://www.marxists.org/history/france/may-1968/slogans.htm.
[4] Paul Cardan. From Bolshevism to the Bureaucracy (London: Solidarity, 1963), 4.
[5] Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 10.
[6] Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle (Canberra: Treason Press, 2002), 29.
[7] Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 209.
[8] Henri Lefebvre. Everyday life in the Modern World (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 159.
[9] Béatrice Hibou, interview by Miriam Perier, “We Are All Bureaucrats, and Sometimes Our Own!” Sciences Po, September 22, 2015, accessed June 23, 2025, https://www.sciencespo.fr/en/news/we-are-all-bureaucrats-and-sometimes-our-own-2/.
[10] David Graeber. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2015), 50.
[11] Lefort, Claude. “What Is Bureaucracy?” Libcom.org. Accessed June 23, 2025, https://libcom.org/library/what-bureaucracy.
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