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Title: What Is Bureaucracy Author: Claude Lefort Date: 1960 Language: en Topics: bureaucracy, the State, post-marxism Source: From Telos #22. http://libcom.org/library/what-bureaucracy Notes: This article originally appeared in Arguments, no. 17 (1960); reprinted in Elements dune Critique de la Bureaucratie (Paris: Droz, 1971). The “Postscript” was written in 1970. English translation by Jean L. Cohen.
Although the concept of bureaucracy has fallen into the common domain of
political sociology, theory of history, and public opinion, and has been
sanctified to the success it has today, it has nevertheless remained so
imprecise that it is still meaningful to question the identity of the
phenomena it claims to describe. At first one is astonished at the
diversity or ambiguity of the responses. But this is only a first
impression. Bureaucracy appears as a phenomenon that everyone talks
about, feels and experiences, but which resists conceptualization. Thus,
rather than immediately attempting to provide a new definition or
description, we will measure the difficulties encountered by theory,
assume that they have a meaning, and from the very beginning critically
examine what both motivates and perpetuates these difficulties.
Already in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx draws
attention to the specific nature of the social stratum in charge of the
administration of public affairs. To corporations dedicated to
particular activities and attached to particular interests, this stratum
appears to represent a universal interest. We will follow the
development of the theory of the state in Marx’s later works, then in
Lenin’s Stale and Revolution, and its application to post-revolutionary
Russian society by Trotsky, together with an examination of the role
that the bureaucracy plays as a stratum inextricably bound to the
structure of a class society. From this viewpoint, the bureaucracy is
neither a class nor a stratum. It is a result of the division of society
into classes and class struggles, since its function is to secure the
acceptance of the rules of an order (an order undoubtedly connected with
relations of production, but in need of being formulated in universal
terms and maintained by force). Bureaucracy is “normally” at the service
of a dominant class since the administration of public affairs within
the framework of a given regime always assumes the preservation of its
status. But since it is not simply a section of this class, when the
balance of social forces permits it, it can run counter to some of its
interests, thus acquiring a relative autonomy. The limits of power are
always determined by the configuration of social relations. In short,
bureaucracy is a special body in society because its function is such
that it supports the established structure and its disappearance would
mean the end of bourgeois domination. (Marx said that the Commune’s
first revolutionary measure was the suppression of the bureaucracy
through the lowering of functionaries’ salaries to that of the average
worker.) Since it is not a key to social stratification, its role in the
society is ascribed by the real historical agents-classes in struggle.
The viewpoint changes as soon as one observes the growth of the stratum
devoted to administrative tasks in the various sectors of civil society.
Thus, it is tempting to look for criteria defining a type of social
organization that recognizes the similarities between the bureaucracies
of the state, industry, party, unions, etc. Comparison encourages
research into the conditions for the emergence of bureaucracies in order
to define a type which would pull together various characteristics.
From this viewpoint, very close to Weber’s thesis, the bureaucracy
appears again as one particular mode of organization corresponding to a
more or less extended sector within society. In other words, the social
dynamic doesn’t seem to be affected by the development of bureaucracies.
The mode of production, class relations and political regimes can be
studied without reference to a phenomenon designating only a certain
type of organization.
A qualitative change in the theory of bureaucracy takes place when it is
used to refer to a new class considered to be the dominant class in one
or several countries, or even seen as destined to displace the
bourgeoisie all over the world. This is suggested by the evolution of
the Russian regime after the rise of Stalin, with the disappearance of
the old proprietors and the liquidation of the organs of workers’ power
along with a considerable extension of the Communist Party bureaucracy
and the state, which took over the direct administration of society.
Similarly, social transformations connected with the development of
monopolistic concentration in large industrial societies (notably in the
United States) also generate reflection on the development of a
bureaucratic class. This necessitates a change in the theory since,
because of its role in economic and cultural life, the bureaucracy is
now understood as a stratum able to displace the traditional
representatives of the bourgeoisie, thus monopolizing power.
Finally, we believe that a completely different conceptualization is
required if the phenomenon of bureaucratization is seen as a progressive
erosion of the old distinctions linked to private property.
Bureaucratization here refers to a process seeking to impose a
homogeneous social form on all levels of work-at the managerial as well
as the executive level-such that the general stability of employment,
hierarchy of salaries and functions promotion rules, division of
responsibilities and structure of authority, result in the creation of a
single highly differentiated ladder of socio-economic statuses. This
last thesis refers to a social dynamic in bureaucracy, and lends it a
goal of its own, the realization of which engenders an upheaval of all
of society’s traditional structures. If this is what the problem of
bureaucracy boils down to, it is important to examine each of these
theses and explore their contradictions.
As in Hegel, the Marxist account of bureaucracy is conditioned by a
theory of history. In fact, when Marx criticizes Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right, his own theory is still in gestation. Yet, the philosophical
viewpoint still takes absolute precedence, and it is remarkable that
Marx could sketch out a description of bureaucracy.
According to Marx, Hegel’s error consists in having accepted the
bureaucracy’s self-image. It claims to embody the general interest, and
Hegel decides that it does so. Marx argues that the general interest is
actually reduced to the bureaucracy’s interest which requires the
permanence of particular spheres, i.e., the corporations and the
estates, in order to appear as an imaginary universal. The bureaucracy
assigns its own goals to the state. It maintains the social division in
order to confirm and justify its own status as a particular and
privileged body in society. As real activities take place in civil
society, the bureaucracy is itself condemned to formalism since it is
completely occupied with preserving the frameworks in which its
activities are carried out and in legitimating them. This critique
reveals a series of empirical traits of bureaucracy whose relevance
remains concealed to those who cling to appearances First it is the
reign of incompetence Marx writes: “The highest point entrusts the
understanding of particulars to the lower echelons, whereas these on the
other hand credit the highest with an understanding in regard to the
universal and thus they deceive one another.” But this incompetence is
rooted in the system The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can
escape Finally it lives for the secret the hierarchy guards the
mysteries of the state and acts as a closed corporation with respect to
the outside world. Furthermore, it engenders a cult of authority which
is “the principle of its knowledge and being,” while “the deification of
authority is its mentality.”
Finally, it is exposed to a “crass materialism.” The bureaucrat makes
the goal of the state his own private goal: “a pursuit of higher
positions, the building of a career.” Marx also shows that this
materialism is accompanied by a similarly crass spiritualism: the
bureaucracy wants to do all, and, in the absence of a real function, it
is condemned to an unrelenting activity of selfjustification.[1] Marx’s
analysis applies to nineteenth century Germany, i.e., to a backward
society. Its relevance, however, is not thereby diminished. When he
elaborated his theory of the state as an instrument at the service of
the dominant class, through the study of a nation where bourgeois
development had erased particularism and destroyed the corporations (the
France of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte), Marx kept the idea already
developed against Hegel: that the state bureaucracy is essentially a
parasitic body. Thus, in dealing with Bonaparte’s regime, he writes:
“This executive power, with its enormous bureaucratic and military
organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata,
with a host of officials numbering half a million besides an army of
another half million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the
body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in
the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the feudal system,
which it helped to hasten.”[2] In Marx’s eyes. the Paris Commune’s most
revolutionary measure was to have installed cheap government and to have
suppressed the privileges and hierarchy characteristic of state
bureaucracy. In State and Revolution, Lenin only reiterates what Marx
had said on these points. The bureaucracy and the standing army
considered as two typical institutions of the state are seen as
parasites engendered by the internal contradiction which tears this
society apart, but parasites which block its vital pores.” To be sure,
he clarifies this notion of parasitism, and points out that the
recruitment of the bureaucracy from the middle and lower strata detaches
part of their members from the rest of the people and allies them to the
dominant class. Furthermore, the state bureaucracy is the “stake” in a
permanent battle between the large parties fighting over the
administrative domains. Particularly during a change of regime, these
parties tend to appropriate a substantial part of the booty for their
clients.
What is the relevance of the Marxist analysis and what difficulties does
it encounter? In the first place, taken as an empirical phenomenon, it
presents the state bureaucracy in a light which continues to clarify it
today as it did a century ago. It is a critique that resembles common
opinion but gives it its reasons. It is still the case that 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. Actually, relations
of dependence displace the objective relations outlined by the division
of labour, while internal struggles are superimposed on the formal
hierarchy and constantly tend to remodel it according to their
exigencies. Today, more than ever, the distribution of the most
important positions between the large parties appears as a division of
booty whenever there is a change in regime. These observations are worth
stressing. Such traits are well-known, but what is not explained is why
they are not investigated: Marx, and Lenin after him, gave an account.
Even if they were wrong, that should not be an excuse for not
considering it. But in recognizing its relevance, it is not sufficient
to stop at a superficial account of bureaucracy which retains only its
official image. In this regard, Marxism preserves a freshness of
approach which fares well when contrasted with the vision of certain
contemporary sociologists. As already indicated, Marx only sketched out
a description which was subsequently smothered by a theory. From this
comes the treatment of state bureaucracy as a general category without
any attempt to explain its functioning. If the bureaucracy includes all
of its members, it still remains stratified (it is, in its essence,
stratification) and all of its members do not participate in it in the
same way. What is the location of the bureaucrat’s power? Why does the
bureaucracy always grow in size? Does the very life of the bureaucratic
organism include a principle of proliferation? Clearly, state
bureaucracies are usually staffed by middle-class elements. By becoming
bureaucrats, do they remain part of their class? Do they change their
mentality? Do they become sensitive to new interests? Marxism does not
answer these questions: its conception of society as completely
regulated by the class struggle does not encourage a study of
bureaucracy for its own sake.
Today the state is the largest capitalist and the largest investor. In
addition to what it administers directly through fiscal and economic
policy, it tends to direct investments on a national scale. Although the
state is a battlefield between large political parties which include
representatives of private capital, and its policies are often the
result of countervailing social forces, tile struggle between these
groups is not the same as that which unfolds in civil society. When
joined to the requirements of public administration, the division of
interests creates a space for its own decision-making -a space which
grows and develops as thhe process whereby the state increasingly drains
larger amounts of capital and takes over an increasing number of tasks
previously left to private initiative. The defence of the established
order which guarantees the position of the rulers over those who are
ruled, creates and recreates everyday the foundations of this
sovereignty. In this perspective, the previous conception of state
bureaucracy cannot be held any longer. In particular, the concept of
parasitism seems inadequate, or at least inaccurate: why does the
bureaucratic mode of organization as such multiply parasites? The thesis
that, on the whole, bureaucracy is a parasitic phenomenon threads its
way into Marxist theory. Actually, the bureaucracy is necessary in the
context of capitalist society. In order to be effective, the critique
must be located at the same level as that of capitalistic organization.
If this is the case, does it not seem as if there is a dialectic of
domination in modern society whereby a social stratum meant to plan and
improve conditions of domination grows in proportion as industrial work
invades all sectors of social life, and that the life of the masses must
be subordinated to it? When all is said and done, does this process of
bureaucratization, so visible in the framework of the state, also obtain
within what the young Marx called civil society?
Let us provisionally skip these questions in order to deal with another
perspective which uncovers the multiplicity of bureaucracies in modern
society and draws attention to their common function and similarity.
Here Max Weber is the starting point. He lists certain traits he
considers typical of modern bureaucracies: (I) The duties of
functionaries are officially fixed by laws, rules, or administrative
dispositions; (2) The functions are hierarchical and integrated into a
system of command such that at all levels lower authorities are
controlled by higher authorities; (3) Administrative activity is spelled
out in written documents; (4) These functions require a professional
apprenticeship; (5) The work of functionaries demands complete devotion
to the office; (6) Access to the profession is at the same time access
to a particular technology, jurisprudence commercial science,
administrative science, etc.
From this analysis some conclusions can be drawn concerning the
bureaucrat. His office appears to him as the exercise of a profession to
which a determinate ensemble of knowledge is attached. Moreover, it is
neither de facto nor de jure the source of fees any more than it is the
object of a contract in terms of which the employee sells his labour
power. The particular nature of the office implies that in exchange for
certain material guarantees (the assurance of a suitable standard of
living), the functionary contracts a specific duty of fidelity to the
office; he is in the service of an objective and impersonal goal, not of
a person. This goal is inherent in the enterprise to which he is
attached-state, commune, party or capitalist enterprise. Secondly, the
bureaucrat enjoys a certain prestige with those he dominates. This
prestige is usually guaranteed by a special status which confers on him
certain rights sanctified by rules. Thirdly, the functionary is normally
appointed by a superior authority. If it is true that there are certain
bureaucracies whose members are elected, the pure type requires the
principle of appointment. Hierarchical discipline is undermined when the
functionary derives his power from the approval of electors, i.e., from
below and not from above. Fourthly, the stability of employment is
normally assured, even though a right of possession over the office is
never recognized. Fifthly, the bureaucrat normally receives a
remuneration in the form of a salary determined by the nature of
employment and, possibly, by seniority. Sixthly, parallel to the
hierarchical order of the bureaucracy a hierarchy of salaries is
established: the majority of functionaries desire that promotions be
made as mechanically as possible. Max Weber also indicates the role of
certain factors in whose absence the bureaucracy would not completely
develop. For example, its structure is not definitively established
until the natural economy has been eliminated, i.e., until capitalism
dominates society. Furthermore, the emergence of democracy allows the
substitution of an administration of anonymous functionaries, detached
from every particular social milieu and devoted to tasks of universal
significance, for the traditional administration by notables, provided
with local authority. Finally, Weber goes so far as to identify the
movement of bureaucratization with the process of capitalist
rationalization. More than the quantitative development of
administrative tasks, what appears decisive is their qualitative change,
the necessity for a large enterprise, whatever its nature, to envisage
its activities from a strictly technical viewpoint and to obtain a
predictability or a calculability of results as exact as possible.
Bureaucracy in this sense is the social form most adequate to the
capitalist organization of production and to a society based on it. The
elimination of personal relations, the subordination of all activities
to the application of a norm linked to an objective goal, makes it into
a model of economic rationality established by industrial capitalism.
Here, from a technical viewpoint, Max Weber does not hesitate to judge
modern bureaucracy as superior to all other forms of organization.
It does not follow, however, that the development of bureaucracies must
affect the nature of a political and economic regime, no matter how
necessary they might seem once certain conditions are fulfilled. On the
contrary, Weber claims that the numerical importance of this form of
organization does not in any way determine its relation to power. The
proof is that the state bureaucracy accommodates itself to diverse
regimes — as demonstrated by France, where the state bureaucracy has
remained remarkably stable. The proof lies also in the fact that during
war, the bureaucratic staff of a conquered country is used by the
foreign power, and continues to carry out its administrative tasks. In
principle, bureaucracy is indifferent to the interests and values of a
political system, i.e., it is an organ at the service of rulers located
somewhere between the rulers and those who are ruled.
These analyses do not reveal their full meaning until they are located
within a certain methodological perspective. Weber sees bureaucracy only
as a type of social organization. Actually. bureaucracies do not
necessarily realize their pure form: certain empirical conditions are
needed in order that the various characteristics be simultaneously
present. But once defined, the type makes the impure forms intelligible.
Even when Weber states that the process of bureaucratization and of
capitalist rationalization are closely tied together, this could be
misleading. Historical explanations are something different from the
determination of a social type. Thus, the method partly determines its
results. If bureaucracy is seen as essentially neutral in relation to an
economic and social system, and it appears as having no historical goal,
it is because Weber sees it from a purely formal viewpoint. as a type of
organization, and not as a specific social stratum which, in
establishing a certain set of relations between its members, generates
its own history. Consequently, Weber cannot deal with “state socialism”
without prejudice. According to him, bureaucracy can adjust more easily
to state socialism than it can to bourgeois democracy. Yet, the history
of state socialism is alien to that of bureaucracy. Strangely enough,
Weber’s conclusions on this point are similar to those of some Marxists,
although inspired by different principles. In the eyes of these
Marxists, state bureaucracy is alien to the social dialectic obtaining
at the level of relations of production. For Weber a sequence of events
can be reconstituted to make sense out of the development of state
socialism. Although favored by these events, however, bureaucratization
does not generate them. Yet, certain historical developments can be
adduced to refute this thesis even more easily than Marx’s account which
is concerned with an empirical description. In the system resulting from
the Russian revolution, which Weber calls “state socialism” (an
expression which need not be criticised here), bureaucracy is not
actually alien to power. The future state leaders come out of it: Stalin
made a career in the party bureaucracy. For a long time he sought the
highest position before obtaining it; he added to his functions of party
secretary those of the state bureaucracy before becoming the master of
power. Just because his rule had a charismatic character does not mean
that he was independent of the bureaucracy: the latter was the permanent
foundation of his power. While charisma can disappear or change its
character with the death of the dictator, the new power will
reconstitute itself on the basis of the bureaucracy. The political
battles concerning the direction of the state take place in the upper
reaches of the bureaucracy.
Extended to the limit, the state bureaucracy comes to take over final
political and economic decisions, i.e., it becomes the focus of a new
system. Had Weber accepted this, he would not have formulated his
definition of the bureaucratic type as he did. Given the nature of his
thought. he refused to regard bureaucracy has having a dynamic goal of
its own. Thus, he was unable to investigate its constitutive traits,
i.e., how it is rooted in social being and increases its power. The
enumeration of criteria can be useful, but as long as what holds them
together remains un-investigated, the phenomenon described remains
indeterminate. It matters little if one adds or subtracts a criterion:
nothing allows one to decide if, in the absence of certain selected
traits, a social complex is or is not bureaucratic. In order to decide,
it is necessary to grasp the source of bureaucratisation.
The above does not apply only to Weber, but to every attempt at a formal
definition. Thus, Alain Touraine writes: “I call bureaucracy a system or
organization where status and roles, laws and duties, conditions of
access to a position, controls and sanctions, are defined by their
location in a hierarchical line and thus by a certain delegation of
authority. These two characteristics assume a third; that the
fundamental decisions are not taken within the bureaucratic
organization. the latter being only a system of transmission and of
execution.” This definition, obviously inspired by Weber-although more
concise-can readily find many applications. It is easy to agree with
Touraine when he claims that a ministry is a bureaucratic organization.
The same cannot be said when he adds that an industrial enterprise is
only partially so. If only the first characteristic of bureaucracy is
found here, how can one claim that the enterprise is a partial
bureaucracy? Does he not mean that a system of organization functioning
according to fixed rules and in an impersonal manner already entails
bureaucratization? If, on the other hand, it is admitted that the
delegation of authority is decisive, and that workers do not participate
in decisions, does it make sense to speak of a “bureaucratization of
work”? This ambiguity grows when Michel Crozier, in elaborating on
Touraine’s definition, decides that “the Western workers in general, and
French workers in particular, have already largely entered the channels
of bureaucracy. He tells us that “delegation of authority is not
necessary for participation in a bureaucratic system.” It is
characterized primarily by the existence of hierarchy. Does this mean
that it is possible to participate in a system without possessing
authority? In such a case, however, the problem would only be displaced,
because relations within the bureaucratic system, between the authority
and the executive sector dedicated to the manufacturing tasks and
subjected to external authority, remain to be defined: the problem of
knowing what role the relations of authority play in the constitution of
the bureaucracy would remain. If it is necessary to admit, on the other
hand, that a bureaucratic system on the whole does not necessarily
locate these relations and that it is essentially characterized by the
existence of a hierarchy. it is still necessary to determine the meaning
of a bureaucratic hierarchy. The notion is vague enough to be applicable
to very different structures: nothing is more hierarchical, for example,
than the court of an hereditary monarchy. What is, then, the basis of
hierarchy in bureaucracy? What justifies a vertical classification of
functions and roles? The question is always reintroduced to evaluate the
import of this or that criterion functioning in the conception of
bureaucracy.
If Weber enumerated certain precise characteristics of bureaucracy
without wishing to privilege any one of them which could have designated
another social reality, it is because he had a strong feeling of its
specificity. What is interesting in his analysis is what he links to
this feeling, i.e., the multiplicity of bureaucratic forms of
organization in modern society. Even if he fails, he at least forces us
to confront his examples and types, and to come up with a new account.
Let us return to state bureaucracy, in order to ask what stratum of
functionaries Weber dealt with. His definition surely applies to
ministerial personnel, or at least to those functionaries whose duties
carry certain responsibilities and whose ‘office’ entails a loyalty to
the goal of the enterprise. It is a professional formation having
specialized knowledge in relation to subordinates assigned to purely
executive tasks and whose labour-time is rigorously checked. But,
strictly speaking, does this definition apply to all the functionaries
who hold ‘office’? Can one say, for instance, that according to Weber’s
framework, secondary school teachers are part of the French bureaucracy?
The professor’s personal position corresponds to Weber’s
characterization of the bureaucrat. Only on one point is the definition
inadequate: participation in a system of authority. Access to a certain
position or a level in the hierarchy does not give him power over
subordinates. Similarly, his relation to his superiors is special.
Obviously, he is subjected to administrative power.His lot depends on
decisions taken at the managerial level. Yet, he largely escapes this
power; the content of his activity is only very partially determined.
His professional activity has its own goal. It is not justified in terms
of a transformation of the object-which cannot be confused with the
objective goal immanent in the ministerial enterprise. Finally, and
above all, the secondary teacher is not in the process of making a
career out of a job. He can hope for a change from one grade of
seniority to another by the most rapid route. But, unlike bureaucrats,
he does not seek a new function which will carry with it a higher social
status, expanded responsibilities, and increased power over
subordinates. The secondary school teacher remains largely an isolated
individual. Undoubtedly, his activity is social, since it necessarily
brings him into contact with a public, but it is not socialized. The
division of labour can oblige him to specialize in a branch of teaching
and thus to relate his activity to those of other teachers, without,
however, generating a unity of production. rn short, if we try to apply
the concept of bureaucracy in the way Weber himself did (neglecting the
value judgements implied in his description), we are led to exclude
certain levels of functionaries from the framework of bureaucracy while
also reforming his system of interpretation.
Since Weber did not integrate French high school teachers into his type,
it follows that most of the characteristics, which he considers typical
and which apply to our example, acquire an import only in certain
precise cases. On the other hand, the absence of certain traits makes it
difficult to speak of bureaucracy. In the first place, we see a
connection between a certain hierarchy and a system of authority (of
command-subordination, according to Weber), such that progression in the
hierarchy corresponds to amassing a higher status, new responsibilities,
and more power. In the second place, Weber’s idea that bureaucracy
expects its members to identify with the undertaking appears at first
glance to have only an apologetic function, but proves to have some
sociological content. Such an identification assumes some professional
activity linked to a role, itself determined through relation to other
roles within the enterprise.
The bureaucracy expects a subordinate to say “the Ministry” or “the
Service” instead of “I,” and by this act of identification, this person
exists as a bureaucrat. But this act has no meaning for those whose work
renders them strictly anonymous or for those who are individualized to
the point where work as such becomes a sufficient justification of
existence. In other words, what Weber calls the identification with an
office is something other than professional consciousness. The latter
finds its end in the act of production; the former, in the occupation of
an office. This professional consciousness calls for a behaviour
conforming to the interest of the bureaucracy, in response to the
expectations of hierarchical superiors-a behaviour proper for each
member of the bureaucracy in a similar situation. Thus, the activity of
bureaucrats has two characteristics: it is technical and bureaucratic.
It can lose the first, not the second. For example, the intense
circulation of reports or of memos in offices serves only to express the
necessity of each manifesting his function to others, and the
bureaucracy functions only by virtue of a mutual recognition, constantly
renewed according to determined ceremony. The volume of paper internally
consumed by an administration allows one to measure its coefficient of
bureaucratic integration. Stripped of ~l malevolent intentions, this
shows that the bureaucracy can only act by constantly reflecting its
activity in the mirror of its constitution. Finally, because of the
place it gives to the system of command-subordination, Weber’s analysis
presupposes the existence of a geographical unity-a spatial framework
determined by bureaucratic activities. Of course, all the members of a
bureaucracy are not necessarily assembled in the same place, but their
relations, the discipline that unites them, the control of each by the
others, tends to circumscribe a specific world of offices. A second
example mentioned by Weber, that of the industrial enterprise, will
allow us to test out his ideas and to specify ours. In the first place,
we are again led to ask whether bureaucracy is only an organ of
transmission and execution. Although an industrial enterprise is never
autonomous and its functioning must take into account the interests of a
financing capital on whom it depends, or the directives of a ministry if
it is a question of a nationalized economy, the fact remains that
management has a considerable power of decision. For the totality of
decisions is not the action of an individual. Whatever the personality
of the general manager, the power of decision is necessarily distributed
among the different services and is concretized at the heart of each
service only through a more or less collective participation in the
solution of problems. To ask whether the direction is or is not distinct
from the bureaucracy, is to pose a false problem. In every organization
in which hierarchy results in delineating a function of direction -this
transcends all those subordinatedd to it. Yet, the fact remains that, if
the power that it formally holds was actually composite, i.e., if the
decisions which fall to it by virtue of officially fixed allotment had
actually been partially elaborated at various lower levels, it is still
part of the framework which it dominates.
On the other hand, as with state bureaucracy, the most important thing
concerning the bureaucracy of an enterprise is its boundaries. Who are
the bureaucrats? Who can be assimilated into the bureaucracy? Finally,
who definitely falls outside this category? Clearly, for Weber, the
definition of the capitalist enterprise as a bureaucratic organization
does not specify which sector, within the enterprise, could be
designated as bureaucratic (although he goes so far as to claim that the
capitalist enterprise offers an unequalled model of bureaucratic
organization). To maintain, with Crozier, that workers are part of a
bureaucracy as soon as they are placed with engineers and directors
under a single hierarchical ladder, would have seemed extravagant to
Weber, not because some of his criteria would have been contradicted,
but because the position of a social group cannot be established only by
considering its juridical status. The fact that some workers find their
work assimilated to that of functionaries, says nothing about the
specific nature of their work, or of their relations with other social
strata within a given enterprise. The question of establishing the real
situation of workers is not automatically answered if the enterprise is
nationalized, the stability of work is guaranteed, or the workers are
integrated with the cadres in the same hierarchical system-although
these conditions could have important effects. In the industrial
enterprise, the mass of workers is confined to purely operational tasks.
The ordering of workshops, the number and distribution of positions, the
rhythm of production, the duration and the intensity of work-all is
prescribed by an administration functioning at a distance from the place
of production and constitutes an alien and closed world with respect to
it.
On the other hand, is it possible to consider all those who work in
offices as the bureaucracy? First of all, technical services should not
be confused with services of administration and exploitation. Although
both share certain common norms of organization, it remains that the
social relations are different by virtue of the different work
performed. In short, the relations of authority and the connections with
the enterprise are not similar. In technical services the engineers and
the technicians, the draftsmen, have a relative autonomy by virtue of
their professional knowledge. Control over labour can only be effective
if the boss has a technical competence at least equal to that of his
subordinates, i.e., his control must be considered a technically
superior function. Social control could be practically non-existent
where the work requirements were of fixed duration, sufficing to
establish a normal rhythm of output. Moreover, the technicians’ autonomy
is also measured by their ability to move from one enterprise to another
by virtue of their knowledge. Generally speaking, the position of
technicians depends more on the work performed than on his place in the
social organization of the enterprise.
The functioning of administrative services is something else. Here, at
the bottom of the ladder, we find unskilled employees whose professional
competence is rudimentary or non-existent. Between them and the general
management of the enterprise, the hierarchy of positions is a power
hierarchy. The relations of dependence become determining and having a
function defines one against a higher level, whether it is that of the
departmental supervisor, a boss, or a director. Here the double nature
of employment reappears. It answers to a professional activity and
expresses an established social order in which the enterprise finds its
concrete existence. In fact, from the top to the bottom of the ladder,
relations are such that they always serve to reiterate the authoritarian
structure of administration. This does not mean, however, that those
located at the bottom of the ladder participate in the bureaucracy in
the same way as those at the middle or upper levels. In certain
respects, the employees are like workers, deprived of any authority.
They are often paid less than certain hourly labourers. Thus, their work
cannot be described as an ‘office’ and we cannot assume that they could
identify with the goals of the enterprise. Nevertheless, they are not
alien to the bureaucracy: they are the dependents. They often enter into
the enterprise only when provided with references certifying their “good
character.” They cannot advance unless they prove their aptitude to obey
commands: they live in the hope of moving to a higher status. Thus, the
situation of the employee is ambiguous. He is not integrated into the
bureaucratic system. lie only endures it. Yet, everything tends to make
him adhere to it, and he does so effectively when he accepts his
superiors’ ideal: promotion. Moreover, he is even less able to detach
himself from the bureaucratic milieu since his work is determined by the
social organization of the enterprise, and in extracting the resources
that assure his subsistence, he perceives it as being as necessary as
the organization itself.
Bureaucracy thus overflows the active core of middle and upper level
functionaries tied to administrative and exploitative tasks: it is a
hierarchy which plunges its roots even into the productive sector, where
supervisors and foremen control the work of labourers. These
functionaries hold real authority. Not only do they hold positions with
official duties defined by a certain division of labour and submit to a
certain discipline, but their function makes them participate in the
power of management and leads them to identify with the enterprise as
such. To say that they identify with it does not mean that they
necessarily have a correct idea of the enterprise’s interests nor even
that they are led to place this above their own interests. In their
eyes, the horizons of the enterprise are absolutely confused with those
of their employment. They see the social order immanent in the
enterprise as both natural and sacred, their own function as something
other than a mere source of remuneration or of professional activity,
but as the backbone of a system which needs their co-operation to
subsist and expand.
To possess a status apparently differentiating his position from that of
mere labourers, to enjoy a prestige generating others’ respect, to
obtain a remuneration and material advantages assuring a privileged
condition of existence, to belong to a milieu from which authority
flows, where subordination is the other side of a command, with
opportunities for promotion-all these are the traits of the bureaucrat.
Finally, the bureaucracy of the enterprise exemplifies the mystification
implicit in a purely formal description. The latter assumes that
bureaucratic organization is identical with the rational organization of
the enterprise, insofar as it is technically required by production
itself. For, as soon as we seek to locate the strictly bureaucratic
sector and to emphasize a specific type of conduct, we discover a
dialectic of socialization different from the dialectic of the division
of labor. This does not mean that we can determine what an adequate
social organization of the enterprise would be like at a given stage of
the division of labor, since this depends on historical conditions
resulting from technical evolution and class struggle, but rather, that
bureaucratic organization has its own ends which cannot be deduced from
the necessities imposed by the organization of production. Once it is
recognized that, in addition to the manufacturing and the technical
sectors, every large enterprise must deal with tasks pertaining to the
administration of personnel, to the sale of products and to the purchase
of primary materials and machines, to the determination of production
costs, etc., it does not follow naturally that the specialized services
function as they do in the real framework of the modern capitalist
factory. The requirements of planning, coordination, and information do
not necessarily create a determined social order. This order is
instituted by virtue of a social activity. From this viewpoint, it is
essential to grasp how the bureaucracy creates its order. The more
activities are fragmented, services diversified, specialized and
partitioned, the more numerous the structural levels and the delegations
of authority at each level, the more co-ordination and control sectors
multiply because of this dispersion. Thus, the bureaucracy prospers. The
status of a bureaucrat is measured by the number of secretaries and
employees who depend on him, by the number of telephones and machines at
his service, more generally, by the authority allocated to his domain of
organization. As soon as conditions allow, he seeks to expand his sphere
of influence and to preserve it. This tendency engenders the formation
of cliques and hidden wars between departments which is stimulated by
their separation. Each department is quick to blame others for errors or
delays in carrying out a program. But at the same time, since this
tendency responds to a common aspiration, it works itself out. The more
the bureaucrats multiply, the more complicated the system of personal
dependence becomes, the more the bureaucracy as a whole becomes a rich
and differentiated milieu. As this process intensifies, bureaucrats
derive a growing sense of their own objectivity. The bureaucracy loves
bureaucrats as much as bureaucrats love the bureaucracy.
The consequences of this situation can appear paradoxical. Weber is
right in claiming that the capitalist enterprise offers bureaucracy a
privileged framework for development, that the latter finds a motive for
its organization in the process of economic rationalization: the need
for rigorous calculability and of a predictability favoring the
emergence of a special stratum of administrators and imposing on them a
certain kind of structure. Yet, this stratum elaborates its conduct,
actively intervenes in the structuring, and, located in historically
created conditions, develops while following its own interests. Thus one
can see what is behind the mask of law and impersonality, the
proliferation of unproductive functions, the play of personal relations,
and the folly of authority.
Our third example will provide a kind of counter proof, since it
presents a bureaucracy which is apparently extremely different from what
we have just seen: the mass party. It is not surprising that Weber also
refers to this example. Weber did not fail to observe that there is a
close connection between the party and state bureaucracy since he had
witnessed the emergence of a state bureaucracy in Russia under the
Communist Party. Yet, one wonders why this did not lead him to revise
his definition of bureaucratic organization. Actually it is not
sufficient to claim that the mass party is led by a body of
“professionals” in order to associate them with state functionaries or
with managers. Most of Weber’s criteria do not apply to them. In the
first place, if one considers the organization of the party, it becomes
obvious that the bureaucracy is not only an organ for executing and
transmitting orders: the management becomes part of the Politbureau or a
general secretary emerges from the bureaucracy. It matters little that
an individual or a handful of individuals holds all real power. They
have obtained it only by rising through the hierarchy of the party and
keep it only because they are supported by a stratum of bureaucrats who
direct party activities according to their directives, justify their
decisions and apply them, while ousting all opposition. If this stratum
falls apart, the power of the leaders dissipates. In the second place,
the functions of bureaucrats are well fixed by rules, but they do not
form a whole as in the structure of a state administration or an
enterprise. There are no strict rules regulating the passage from one
position to another; there is no hierarchy of salaries. The bureaucrats
do not enjoy a special, officially defined status distinguishing them
from the rank and file. Access to the highest positions does not depend
on technical knowledge linked to a profession, and if the principle of
nominating leaders by the main organs is recognized, it coexists with a
principle of election, since these organs themselves are assemblies
composed of delegates elected by the rank and file. Finally, it is not
even necessary to be remunerated by the party in order to have an
important central function in the hierarchy. This particular
characteristic of the party bureaucracy follows from the position that
it occupies in society as a whole. Its function is not defined by the
division of labor. Rather, it is an institution based on voluntary
participation which attempts to influence power-either to participate in
it, or to capture it by rallying a mass of individuals around a program
of demands. That a group of professionals is formed in the party in the
process of coordinating its activities changes nothing in the formal
definition and ascribes to this sector characteristics apparently very
different from those found in industrial enterprises.
If so, how can one speak of the mass party as a bureaucratic
institution? This question leads us closer to what we have sought to
formulate since the beginning of our analysis: what is the social nature
of the bureaucracy? If we characterize mass parties as bureaucratic
institutions, it is not because we can define the parties by criteria
equally applicable to industrial enterprises. Things are more
complicated. In the party, we distinguish a specific sector where
functions are hierarchical by virtue of participation in power; where
decisions are taken in the absence of any control from below, where
respon-sibilities are distributed in an authoritarian way, where
organizational discipline detracts from the free examination of
decisions, where a conti-nuity of roles, actions and persons is
institutionalized, thus making the ruling minority practically
permanent. In other words, in the party bureau-cracy appears as the
antithesis of democracy. But this does not make much sense until we
understand how the bureaucratic organization is constituted. Its genesis
is all the more comprehensible when it does not immediately depend on
economic conditions. As previously mentioned, the party is based on
voluntary participation motivated by an ideological agreement on a
program. This entails no particular form of Organization. The technical
organizational requirement comes about only when the party attracts
large masses. But the coordination of the activities of small, local
sections, of assuring the best propaganda, of properly managing the
assets gathered among the militants, does not necessitate any specific
social milieu. It is as a result of choice that this milieu turns out to
be bureaucratic. Choice here need not mean that individuals deliberately
decide to create a bureaucratic organization. It only means that a
certain behavior becomes predominant, with certain requirements coming
to take absolute precedence, others fading. Since the party adherence is
a function of voluntary participation based on the shared acceptance of
some ideas, it would seem to follow that the maintenance of this
participation and agreement is essential to the life of the
organization. Since the party claims to articulate a collective will,
and presents itself as a locus of cooperation, it would seem to lose its
raison d’être if it used coercion with its members. Furthermore,
formally it could not do so since the members are not dependent on the
party for their livelihood. Yet, the party must operate within society
as a whole as a coherent force, maintaining continuity of action,
permanently binding those who participate in it, and finding a structure
which guarantees its unity, independently of the uncertain participation
of its militants.
Now, if the existence of the mass party generates this alternative,
bureaucracy comes about by giving the latter considerations absolute
primacy over the former and it does so in a way that makes its existence
increasingly more necessary and its choices irreversible. From the very
beginning, bureaucrats come into being as those whose work safeguards
the party’s existence and unity, while their activity in the party makes
them indispensable. But this activity is peculiar. This becomes clear as
soon as one compares it with the activity of ordinary militants: it is
based on the very institution. It is what is usually called an
organization activity. But the term is imprecise because it hides
essential features: that it is always a question of directing the
militants’ work in a way that reinforces the party’s existence and
power. The organization’s fundamental aspect is the multiplication of
party organs: the more cells and sections there are, the more the life
of the institution is differentiated, the more is its power
materialized, the more the leaders appointed to be in charge of
coordinating each sector. Thus, the efficiency of bureaucratic work is
measured by the leaders’ ability to preserve and extend the field of
activity that they organize. This measurement, however, can be
formulated in objective communicable terms if one considers only the
formal aspect of the bureaucrat’s activity. This is what gives rise to
the fetishism of the agenda at party meetings, festivals or
commemorations. This is why what is called activism-a feverish and vain
agitation~has become routine. The number and diversity of the ceremonies
from which the institution derives its daily justification goes hand in
hand with the proliferation of bureaucrats. If they are entirely at the
party’s service, they become professionals, although they need not be
that in order to act as such. It is only necessary that their activity
be precisely specified, that their aim be mainly party preservation and
that it be carried out according to the leaders’ instructions, which
makes it seem as a form of employment. On the whole, bureaucracy is this
milieu for which the party structure is both necessary, sacred, and
irremovable. But this milieu generates its own structure: in identifying
with the goals justifying the party’s existence, it makes the party-to
paraphrase Marx-its private property: it sees itself as necessary,
sacred and irremovable. The defense of the party is the bureaucracy’s
self-defense. But this implies a particular interpretation of the
party’s goals which results in the distortion of its original vocation.
In fact, the party cannot intervene directly in the social struggle as
it should according to its principles, nor can it be the locus of
ideological discussion without running the risk of self-transformation
or even self-destruction. Thus, the bureaucratic group feels threatened
as soon as a principle of change is introduced in the party: it is
naturally conservative. This conservatism inspires all
inter-bureaucratic relations: the cult of authority, the will to control
all activities, the value of prestige around the functions of
responsibility, etc. All these are too well known traits to require
further elaboration, In the last analysis, the bureaucracy’s behavior
has its logic. The party, in fact, is not a purely artificial organism,
born out of ideological motivations. It exists as a mass organization
within society as a whole. Not only does it seek power, but presently it
penetrates, in various degrees, all sectors of society. This penetration
assures it the allegiance of an important part of its militants who are
employed in services where the party controls recruitment, either
directly, or through a friendly union. Although it can appear as an
incomplete bureaucracy if seen as an isolated institution, the party
reveals certain material determinations of bureaucratic stability, when
considered within society as a whole.
Of course, the examples which have been chosen and purposely borrowed
from Weber present common traits. Most of all, however, they allow us to
deal with the phenomenon in a certain way. In our eyes, the bureaucracy
is a group which makes a certain mode of organization prevail, develops
under certain conditions, expands along with certain states of the
economy and technology only by virtue of a social activity. To attempt
to grasp bureaucracy without focusing on a type of specific behavior is
condemned to failure from the very beginning. Bureaucracy exists only
through bureaucrats and their common aim to form a milieu apart from
those whom they dominate, to participate in socialized power, and to
interdefine each other in a hierarchy which guarantees them either
material status or prestige.
To stress the phenomena of social behavior is not to reduce bureaucracy
to a sum of similar actions. The activity of the isolated individual is
unintelligible: it becomes meaningful only when placed in the context of
a group. In fact, the bureaucracy comes about in an immediate
socialization of activities and behavior. Here the group is not a
category of activity or of socio-economic status; it is a concrete
milieu where each draws his own identity. It is here that we can locate
the link between bureaucracy and mass institutions. It is in ministries,
unions, parties and industrial enterprises that the bureaucracy finds
its adequate form because of the structural unity, the interconnection
of the tasks, the number of jobs, the proximity of men within each
sector, the perspective offered by a growing institutional development,
the volume of capital engaged, etc. All of this defines a field of
social power. It follows that the bureaucrats’ identification with their
enterprises is a natural mediation in consciousness whereby a group
acquires its own identity. But this identification must not conceal the
fact that in reality the bureaucracy does not have its destiny strictly
defined by the technical structure of the mass institution. It also
makes its own destiny. As the agent of a particular stratification, it
multiplies positions and services, partitions various activities,
generates artificial controls and coordinations, and reduces an ever
growing mass of workers into merely mechanical functions in order to
exercise its authority at every level.
At this point, we can examine the thesis that the bureaucracy is a
class. Undoubtedly, there is a ruling class in the USSR. Those who
persist in denying it do so by reiterating quotations from Marx
according to which the abolition of private property entails the
disappearance of the ruling class, without seeing that at a deeper level
a class opposition has been reintroduced in the relations of production.
Here, the ownership of the means of production is no longer decisive.
What determines the proletariat as an exploited class is its exclusion
from the administration of production and its reduction to merely
mechanical functions. What determines the position of a ruling class
facing the proletariat is the fact that all decisions concerning
economic life (i.e., concerning the volume and distribution of
investments, wages, intensity and duration of labor, etc), are made by a
particular social stratum. What is relevant here is not to discuss the
class nature of the USSR, but to emphasize that bureaucracy cannot be
seen as a class without analyzing its dynamics within the context of
traditional capitalist society and the mass institutions where
bureaucracies develop. To merely define it there as a parasitical organ,
or as a simple economic category, is to overlook ho’,” through its
specific behavior, it creates a power base, and how it uses
circumstances to consolidate and grow. On the other hand, to recognize
its historicity and to establish the horizons of its activity is to
locate a world which it has made in its image and where it is the ruling
class. In the last analysis, the genesis of the bureaucracy in Russia is
intelligible only if it is related to the social type which, in
different forms, obtains in all modern countries.
But this observation concerning the conditions leading to the formation
of a ruling class after the Russian revolution applies only to a special
case where the bureaucracy has built its power through a specifically
social activity. If it is claimed that today this class is what it is
only because of its function in production, planning and the
nationalization which guarantees its material basis, then it becomes
difficult to claim that it results from a political bureaucracy whose
earlier versions were not concerned with the extraction of surplus value
within the context of modern industry, but with the concentration of
authority in the hands of a ruling minority, the exclusion of the masses
from decision-making and from the information pertinent to these
decisions, the hierarchization of functions and the differentiation of
wages. the rigorous division of competence’s; in short, the scientific
organization of inequality such that it becomes the principle of a new
form of class oppression. Certainly, the party bureaucracy has not
artificially created a whole new world. Yet, it would be inadequate to
simply say that it has been served by circumstance. The new type of
class domination was prepared by the destruction of the political and
economic powers of the old owners, the state’s taking over large sectors
of production,the existence of an already concentrated industry with a
modern administration, and the example of large industrial capitalist
countries with a growing fusion of capital and the state. But this
domination forced its way through only with a party which, by means of
ideology, terror, and privilege, melted elements torn from all the
classes of the old Russian society into the same mould.
It is inadequate, however, to point out the existence of a privileged
class in the USSR, or even to examine its own genesis, in order to
comprehend what bureaucracy actually is within the whole society that it
dominates. An analysis limited to exploitation within relations of
production altogether misses the nature of the bureaucratic class. Such
an analysis would locate the privileged strata. But the factory managers
and the planners are not the only members of the ruling class and all
those who are privileged are not necessarily part of these groups. As in
the industrial enterprise, a mere foreman, as opposed to an engineer,
can be considered a bureaucrat because he has authority and he
identifies with management against workers, Similarly, on a social
level, some union or political functionaries can be considered members
of the bureaucracy while some technicians, although earning higher
salaries, are not members of the ruling class and do not share their
values or lifestyle. The social nature of the bureaucracy cannot be
deduced from its economic function. In order to be understood, it must
be observed. In the absence of an observation, the question dealt with
here prevents a schematic conception of history. Undoubtedly, in the
USSR, as in Western countries, there is more than one class facing the
industrial and agricultural proletariat. The bureaucracy is not composed
either by the ensemble of the working class nor simply by some thousands
or tens of thousands of leaders supported by the political police: one
can only define it by pointing to the solidarity which unites its
members and crystalizes them in the exercise of domination.
It is possible, however, to indicate certain traits of this class both
by examining its constitution as well as by extrapolating from the
testimonies of observers, or of political leaders aware of the
difficulties that the regime must confront. Here two remarks are in
order. First of all, the bureaucracy involves a mode of social
participation different from that of the bourgeoisie. Bureaucrats do not
derive private power from a professional activity which allows them to
develop as a ruling class. They do not have a common interest which
could generate a power to manage society in their name. They are
immediately members of their class, and their personal attributes are a
function of this connection: they are what they are only by virtue of
their dependence from the state power which grounds and maintains the
social hierarchy, i.e., political power and economic power are merged
within the bureaucratic class. To participate in the appropriation of
surplus value for them is the same thing as participating in the system
of domination. What this means is that the bureaucracy is the privileged
terrain of totalitarianism, i.e., of a regime where all social
activities are measured by the same criterion of validity dictated by
state power. Here pluralism of systems of behavior and of values
immediately constitutes a menace not only to the ruling minority but to
the ruling class itself whose integration depends entirely on its
submission to the established power. Secondly, in spite of the
reinforced tendency to make a single authority prevail at all levels, as
already indicated, the bureaucracy cannot avoid conflicts which not only
contrapose groups against each other, but also contrapose bureaucracies
against each other. If the above is correct, bureaucracies exist
full-fledged within mass institutions: in parties, unions, in various
branches of production and various cultural sectors.In each of these
contexts they attempt to grow and monopolize an increasing part of
social capital in order to expand in as broad a field as possible. There
is no pre-established harmony within the bureaucracy, and the unity of
the class does not ‘naturally’ prevail: it involves a constant activity
of unification. The rivalry of bureaucratic apparatuses reinforced by
the struggle of inter-bureaucratic cliques is only managed by the
intervention of a political principle at all the levels of social life.
But the party which applies this principle is itself the broadest and
most complete bureaucracy. If class unity is inconceivable without it
since its mediation “politicizes” all of society so that the state tends
to merge with civil society, its presence and its natural tendency to
control and subordinate everything to its own power generates the
sharpest tension within the ruling class. Thus, the bureaucratic system
is unceasingly torn by internal conflicts, certainly different but not
any less dreadful than those typical of bourgeois regimes.
To maintain that the bureaucracy is the ruling class in the USSR does
not settle the question of its status in large industrialized Western
nations. From one viewpoint, the formation of a bureaucratic class seems
to be an extension of bureaucratic organizations: they blossom within
mass institutions because technological developments make human
activities increasingly more interdependent and impose a socialization
of administrative tasks parallel to that of production. From another
viewpoint, this class requires such a political integration and
subordination to state power that it cannot operate without instituting
a system of total domination. Yet, these two viewpoints are not
incompatible; they allow us to see bureaucracies as a type of social
behavior whose success or failure is not preordained but is a function
of a complex of historical conditions. Bureaucratic organizations have
an affinity for regimes where the definitive elimination of private
property assures the broadest possible development and their integration
within a new class structure.
Similarly, rooted in bourgeois society and fettered in their development
by their natural conservatism, as well as by the profits they derive
from the established mode of production, they prove incapable of doing
more than invading bourgeois society, i.e., incapable of transforming
the system of power. In other words, nothing warrants the claim that, in
the absence of a radical social upheaval which would sweep away old
regimes (as happened in Russia by workers’ and peasants’ revolution, and
in the peoples’ democracies by war), bureaucratic organizations would
naturally overcome their division and become integrated within a new
state apparatus as parts of a ruling class. Furthermore, bureaucracies
exhibit an indeterminacy which is the source of the difficulties
encountered by theory. The bureaucracy is not a class as long as it is
not the ruling class, and when it becomes so, it remains essentially
dependent on a political activity of unification.
To maintain that bureaucrats are already a class within all of society,
would mean that they are distinguishable because of their particular
interests, values, or lifestyle. Actually, they are different only in
terms of their aggregation and by how they gain their status as members
of a collectivity. Surely, this trait is important. The interrelations
of bureaucrats within each institution correspond to a specific social
model and outline a new global structure. But so long as this structure
is not realized, the bureaucracy does not constitute a separate world:
bourgeois society assimilates it. It is inadequate to point out that
high state functionaries are members of administrative councils, or that
important groups derive part of their income from the stocks that they
own, since this phenomenon of embourgeoisification is comparable to a
similar phenomenon of aristocratization of the bourgeoisie, who, during
certain epochs, rushed to buy land and nobility titles. What is
important is that the difference in the appropriation of wealth is not
linked to production relations, while in the context of society as a
whole the various bureaucracies split along traditional lines thus
remaining heterogeneous and unaware of their identity-at least in the
absence of a social crisis. Moreover, polycentrism, which is part of the
essence of bureaucracies meant to crystalize into particular
institutions prevents the development of class unity.
From another viewpoint, the bureaucracy retains a principle of
indeterminacy even when this unity is attained: it does not exist apart
from a social form of power. It is not an economic category but comes
about by participating in a system of domination. Thus, there is a great
temptation to deny that the bureaucracy is a class where it is seen to
rule or, in specific social contexts, where it multiplies within
bourgeois societies. If, on the contrary, it is claimed that it is a
ruling class in the USSR, there is a tendency to neglect or
underemphasize its basic constitution, the change in the function of the
political in bureaucratic society, the heterogeneity of organizations,
the intra-bureaucratic battles, and the differences of integration of
the various strata within the class. Most of all, this class could be
seen as a general model in the process of realization throughout, as if
bourgeois society must naturally turn into a bureaucratic society
because of capital concentration. Economic rationalization and
bureaucratization are then associated, and the latter is seen as the
adequate expression of the former, forgetting that rationalization
obtains within a regime based on exploitation and that bureaucratization
is part of a system of domination. By stressing the phenomenon of
bureaucratic parasitism, it is possible to ignore that the bureaucracy
simultaneously penetrates social life and poses itself as an end: it
responds to technical needs but also subordinates them to power
imperatives.
The study of bureaucracy, and the discussion that it calls forth, become
fruitful only if these simplifications are rejected. Then the true
questions can be asked, and advances toward their solution can be made
on the condition that the following principles are observed: (I)
Attention must be paid to the various bureaucracies instead of
immediately swallowing up this image in a concept which can then be
handled with such an ease that it deprives bureaucracy of all content;
(2) Bureaucracy must be seen as a social formation, as a system of
meaningful behavior, and not merely as a system of formal organization.
This implies a historical definition of the phenomenon as a human
enterprise with its own goals; (3) Special emphasis must be placed on
the relations of the bureaucracy with other social strata and
particularly among various bureaucratic groups within a given
institution; (4) From the social nature of the bureaucracy (its
sociality) no deduction should be made concerning a future based on a
whole series of historical conditions which are extensions of
established structures and events; (5) The question concerning the class
nature of bureaucracy must be posed. The answer must avoid a comparison
between the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy. There must be a description
of the specific participation of bureaucracy in society as a whole,
along with the connection of its political, economic, and cultural
determinations instead of relying on an a priori definition (having
alleged universal significance whereas it is actually an abstraction
from the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie) of the essential and the
accidental features of a class; (6) In studying a particular
bureaucracy, the self-image of top bureaucrats must not be uncritically
accepted. The whole bureaucratic milieu must be considered in order to
define the bureaucratic mentality and behavior, by relying on the
workers who are most directly affected by the bureaucrats and who, as a
result, cannot be easily misled: those people whom the bureaucrats
dominate.[3]
The above text deals with a theme which seems distant from present
concerns. For young readers, who are often the ones most engaged in
political struggle, this distance is even greater, since they cannot
remember the proper context. Those today who are between twenty and
thirty years old, have not experienced the overwhelming influence of the
Communist Party during Stalin’s life. The 1953 workers’ insurrection in
East Berlin, for some, the first to shake up the image of socialism as
it existed in the popular democracies, Krushchev’s de-Stalinization
begun at the Twentieth Congress, the Hungarian and Polish
uprisings-these are merely part of one’s personal pre-history, unable to
enter into lived experience, thus permitting one to assimilate them.
These young people do not remember how progressive intellectuals rallied
around the Stalinist banner, returning for the audacity of an
independent gesture a redoubled fidelity-a time when the Left was almost
entirely limited to Trotskyists, some branches growing into three or
four tiny “groupuscles,” or when the Communists labelled the Trotskyists
fascists, treating them accordingly when they had the chance, with the
result that the leftist press did not give them even the slightest
mention.
Does this mean that the 1950s can awaken only the interest of the
historian and that what we wrote twelve or twenty years ago has only
docu-mentary value? Does it mean that, in order to comprehend the
present and to attenspt to set the landmarks of change, it is necessary
to look at Czechoslovakia rather than to Hungary, to study Brezhnev’s
last speech rather than Krushchev’s Report, to challenge the Sartre who
supports La Cause du Peuple rather than the one who, in 1952, gave an
apology for Communist politics in France?
The questions posed at that time have not become obsolete and, in spite
of changes which occasionally modify the practice and mentality of
social actors, or the interpretation of ideologies, a considerable part
of the historical context remains, along with the same choices and
conflicts.
The distinction between what constitutes the present and the past, of
what belongs to new horizons and what is lost in the distance is subtler
than we are tempted to believe when considering only the generation gap
or in pointing to some major signs of change-which can effectively
designate the novelty of a conjuncture while hiding the continuity of
the traits of a socio-historical structure. The past is not really past
until it ceases to haunt us and until we have become free to rediscover
it out of curiosity. But so long as the images and the words continue to
fill our thoughts and excite our passions, at a distance from men and
events that we have not experienced, they fully participate in the
present, whether they serve to destroy, or whether we need them to
preserve the framework of our life.
Thus, perhaps Bolshevism, or its Trotskyist variant, and the history of
the Russian revolution no longer have any ‘real’ efficacy. Maybe they
only provide fighting symbols for leftist militants whose goals escape
them, or an identification to an imaginary community of revolutionaries,
in the absence of which their opposition to the regimes in power
disappears. Maybe the concept of revolution itself now passes through
unprecedented paths. Maybe the USSR Communist leaders themselves need
not only Stalin’s ghost, but the Bolshevik legend as well, in order to
successfully carry out the prosaic tasks, impossible to enumerate, of a
new ruling class. What is certain is that today, the glorification of
heroes and the repetition of old speeches, always accompany action and
mobilize faith.
After twenty years the sources of inspiration have not spoiled. At least
for a fraction of the new generations in Western societies, they are
much more alive than for their elders. And in Eastern countries, the
same references support both the opposition as well as the politics of
the masters of power. It follows that the temptation to dissipate
certain illusions by examining the great revolutionary politics of the
past, to reveal what has been hidden (most often to protect its
imitation) is even more necessary in the present than when they had such
a great importance for those of us in Socialisme ou Barbarie. I
discovered how Trotsky, who for so long we considered the guarantor of
the revolutionary attitude, combined the fetishism of the party, the
fetishism of the state’s ‘socialist bases,’ and the repression of worker
oppositions. Thus, we speak for a tiny number. The circle has expanded
and has also intensified the equivocal nature of militancy where the
will for emancipation joins the narrow subjection to tradition and the
taste for the sacred. Of course, the critique of Bolshevism and
Trotskyism has gained ground: the documents of the Workers’ Opposition
in Russia are better known, we can read Voline, Archinov and Pannekoek
while the Kronstadt revolt sometimes has the value of an archetype. But
it is too easy to believe that it is enough to substitute a ‘good’
tradition for a ‘bad’ one. Too often we are satisfied with changing the
symbols without renouncing the authority imputed to the pure image of a
founder. Even those who see how the party separates itself from the
exploited strata, thus creating the kernel of a new social formation,
end up by transferring to the class as such the sacredness hitherto
invested in an institution or in men. Thus, questions which emerged when
there were militants in the Communist Party, and which burst their
system of beliefs, are suddenly extinguished under this new certitude
that evil is intrinsic to organizations, while obstinately refusing to
look for the conditions of their genesis in the history of the
proletariat.
Thought could well free itself of certain images. What prevents it is
the relationship we entertain with the representation of the past. It is
the mythic function which we force it to play in order to assure
ourselves of a truth already given which will not betray us, in order to
finally exorcise the indetermination which is reborn ceaselessly in our
living history.
In vain one relies on the movement which separates us from our old
beliefs. Of course, we have managed to destroy some illusions. But the
soil on which these illusions grew nourishes other germs. When we taste
the bitter ecstasy of overturning our first theses, it is perhaps then
that we remain the most captive of their principles. In any case, so
many desires are invested on the political level that the progress of
knowledge displaces its own boundaries instead of suppressing them, and
each time new doors open before us, we must assume that elsewhere others
are closed.
We can easily see limits in others. We are struck by their inability
before a troublesome event to draw the inevitable conclusions that we
have long since reached. Thus, only recently there were the militant
Communist intellectuals, indignant at the Russian intervention in
Czechoslovakia. For once, they condemned USSR policies and even labdled
them imperialist. But it was to denounce a “tragic error” and to
proclaim that a socialist state cannot act like a great power, without
disavowing its principles. Their audacity was great. They rose against a
hitherto unchallengeable authority. They exposed themselves to exclusion
from their party. Yet, they never asked themselves whether it makes any
sense to speak of socialism in the case of a state that oppresses its
neighbors on economic, political, military, and cultural levels. They
defended the “democratic” demands of Czech Communists and they
criticized the governing group in the USSR, along with their servile
managers in the other countries. They did so, however, only in order to
oppose liberalism to authoritarianism, innovative methods to
conservatism, as if the conflicts were not rooted in social relations
and the political police terror was an accidental trait of the workers’
state-the effect of a bad interpretation of revolutionary strategy or,
even better, the sign of the ambitions of an intolerant clique. They
deplored an error, but were quick to limit it to the case of
Czechoslovakia. These ardent defenders of national communism, who still
applaud the entrance of Russian tanks into Budapest, shamelessly
maintain that the Hungarian insurrection was the work of reactionaries
and American agents. Besides, while condemning Moscow, has it not been
pointed out by others that opposition to the USSR carries the germs of
counter-revolution? flow could they explain that a regime of popular
democracy was able to last twenty years almost entirely withdrawn from
exchange with capitalist countries and fused into the socialist bloc
while preserving a bourgeoisie so strong as to endanger it at the
leaders’ first error? While supporting Dubcek, they were worrying about
the consequences of reforms. They based all their arguments on the
defense of soesalism, whileb they saw present everywhere under Brezhnev,
Novotny, Dubcek or Husak. The Counter-revolution was seen sprouting
everywhere so that they would not dare take a step in one direction
without immediately beating a retreat. But one should also consider the
position of certain non-party leftists: they also surrounded themselves
with strange hesitations. The Czechs’ taste for liberty raises their
suspicion. What in bourgeois society they consider the most precious
acquisition-however fragile, insufficient, and falsified in
practice-they are ready to brand as a sign of corruption in
Czechoslovakia. They themselves evoke anti-socialist forces, forgetting
that they do not believe in the reality of socialism of the peoples’
democracies. Thus, they remain caught in the representations which they
thought they had discarded. So powerful and so widespread is the idea
that the world has been divided into two camps since the Russian
revolution, that they take it up again, in spite of all they have
learned about exploitation and oppression in the USSR. They seemed to be
certain of the fact that the abolition of private property ends in the
fusion of Capital and State. But then they mechanically repeated that
all that American imperialism profits from is reactionary, and that
relations between East and West ultimately decide the revolutionary
significance of an event. Thus the whole casuistry elaborated by Sartre
and other progressive intellectuals at the time of the Hungarian
insurrection has not lost its effectiveness. Its terms are disjointed,
the interpreters are ideologically displaced, but the essence of the old
position is preserved, the captive imaginary has not really been
released.
Undoubtedly, it is difficult to discover in one’s own mind the forces
which draw it backwards. At least with time I have acquired a certain
power, and if I still conceal a part of what guides my judgments, I feel
less disarmed before old writings. It is useless to pretend a modesty
which has no place when an author must stand aside before the questions
of knowledge; the essays which I have written after I left the
Trotskyist party are, in my opinion, better equipped to explain the
phenomenon of bureaucracy than most of the analyses presently
circulating under the label of the Revolution. What is interesting about
them is that they were guided by the desire to apply to the labor
movement or to the forces which claim to be part of it, the principles
of analysis that Marxism had elaborated in the critique of bourgeois
society. To be sure, this was not the result of an intellectual
decision. It was the experience of militancy, lasting several years,
that taught me to scrutinize the strange logic whereby a group (weak,
numerically and, because of the inefficiency of its actions, relatively
free of political and economic constraints), reintroduced the rules,
practices, and inter-personal relations typical of the organizations
which they wished to fight, reweaving the same kind of social fabric,
cultivating the principles of frag-menting sectors of activity,
segregating information, making its existence an end in itself and
finally, presenting a cloudy account closed to reflection. Such an
experience indicates some of the reasons why Trotskyism, in spite of all
its critiques against Communist Parties, did not really succeed in
distinguishing itself from them. Although it formulated different
objectives in its program and it insisted on the decisive function of
mass mobilizations, the social relations that it instituted were ordered
according to a similar model. This was best shown in its inability to
confront the essential question of a sociological definition of
Stalinism, i.e., of inquiring into its social basis. At best,
Trotskyists reproduced Lenin’s account of the degeneration of social
democracy in terms of the emergence of a labor aristocracy. Ordinarily,
they stuck to the pure and simple denunciation of leading groups judged
opportunist or incompetent, and associated their prestige to the Russian
revolution, in the conviction that the isolation of the socialist state
left the revolutionary enterprise in shambles, thus favoring the
temporary advent of a bureaucratic caste. But their failure was
symbolic, for the same conceptions ultimately pervaded all the analyses
of the non- Stalinist Marxist Left. Of course, this Left distinguished
itself from the Trotskyists on many issues, beginning with their
insistence on remaining in the immediate vicinity of the Communist
Party. But this Left was Trotskyist in its ignorance, by virtue of its
double conviction that party policies were explainable in terms of
methodological errors or in terms of a deformed representation of the
revolutionary task, and that these policies were the result of
unexpected “accidents” after the October revolution, i.e., disturbances
in the ‘normal’ development of socialism.
It is not by chance that, in a polemic with Sartre, I developed an
argument which, although it was seen as “Trotskyist,” was largely
directed against Trotskyism. I discovered that progressives and
Trotskyists could not help but meet as soon as they eliminated some
social phenomena from Marx’s critique. Marx had stressed the divergence
between ideology and praxis. Moreover, he knew how to do a critique of
economic, political, religious, or philosophical ideologies as a
privileged means of unveiling contradictions operating at the level of
praxis. For the progressives and Trotskyists. this route was lost as
soon as what they were dealing with was no longer the bourgeois class or
the Western capitalist system. They limited their critique of Communist
Parties and of the social strata from which they drew their force to the
level of ideas. They attacked these ideas head-on as if they were
without depth, self-sufficient, and did not occlude social relations.
Yet, Marx distinguished historical from sociological analysis. His study
of capitalism, so rich in references to events, focused on the specific
logic of a system and on the articulation of oppositions which develop
once the division of capital and labor is carried out on a large scale.
Aware of the need to describe the capitalists’ actions, the correctives
they needed, the resistances that they awakened, and thus to outline
certain sequences of an empirical genesis, he nevertheless sought to
decipher in apparently contingent facts the signs of a necessity which
was not the conscious product of peoples’ activities, but was imposed by
their ignorance and often even at the cost of their immediate interests.
Our epigones, on the other hand, cling to the level of historical
development. When analyzing the USSR, they can only grasp the chain of
events invoking the consequences of the civil war, the revolutionary
defeats in Europe, or the capitalist blockade. It would have been
scandalous for them to admit that the course followed by the past
revolutionary regime was inevitable (a limited hypothesis having only
heuristic value) and that the social system that emerged had properties
which had to be studied in themselves. Furthermore, the powerlessness to
detach themselves from an explanation in terms of events coincided with
the powerlessness to discover, beneath the representations and
institutional forms, the social relations which support them. Convinced
that state ownership of the means of production and the institution of
the plan were the result of the revolution, they located in them the
bases of socialism without ever asking how these institutions modified
the relations established in the process of production, their real
function in the socio-economic system, and the oppositions in which they
were embedded.
No doubt, we would not have been able to base the critique of workers’
organizations (emerging from our experience in a small and militant
party) and their concomitant mode of representation (i.e., to measure
the reversal of the Marxist problematic) if we had not simultaneous]y
learned to recognize the USSR-thanks to Castoriadis’ enlightening
studies of the traits of a bureaucratic capitalism. The two analyses
bolstered each other. But with ideas, it is advisable to move beyond
historical descriptions. What is important is that knowledge of a
bureaucratic phenomenon involves reflection on the social conditions
which give rise to it. As long as these conditions remained hidden and
we naively accepted the norms of our milieu, we were unable to give free
reign to our questions. We continue to believe that an analysis of the
USSR will be fruitful only if it is connected to an analysis of the
organizations of the labor movement in Western countries and of their
mode of insertion in the capitalist system -just as an analysis of
revolutionary undertakings at the turn of the century (in particular,
Bolshevism), assumes that we examine the divorce of practice and
ideology in these organizations. However, as legitimate as it may seem,
the critical movement in our earlier essays today seems to suffer from
the obstinate prejudice of remaining in the strict framework of the
Marxist interpretation. Fidelity turns into equivocation when it looks
for pregiven answers to new questions.
Since we are only interested in fixing the stages and limits of our
analysis of bureaucracy, it should be noted that it was conducted in
such a way as to leave intact the image of the proletariat as a
revolutionary class-as the carrier of universal historical goals. When
we saw in the USSR the existence of a ruling class whose power was based
on collective ownership of the means of production, believing that the
whole economic system was ordered in such a way as to maintain the
division between a mass of mere “doers” and a minority monopolizing
managerial tasks, we assumed-without even making any explicit
hypothesis-that the new class antagonism reproduced the contradiction
denounced by Marx in his examination of bourgeois society. We
substituted the bureaucracy for the bourgeoisie, although it had come
about through a different process. At any rate, the proletariat’s
position remained unchanged. The only difference was that now it was in
a position to discover the true nature of its goals, until then
concealed under the necessity of the struggle against private property.
Only now could it recognize the basis of socialism in the workers’
administration of enterprises and collectivities. We imagined that in
contemporary bourgeois societies the process of bureaucratization, which
was becoming increasingly evident in spite of the maintenance of old
forms of ownership, created for the working class an analogous
consciousness of its goals-a consciousness that would not fail to
operate during periods of crisis when labor Organizations would be
forced to openly uphold the capitalist system. In other words, we
assumed that the world proletariat had reached a stage in which the task
that Marx assigned it could be carried out. When we attacked the
development of bureaucracy in the West as well as in the East, we
considered the trans-formations in the industrial mode of production-the
concentration of enterprises, the rationalization of tasks due to
technological change, and the class struggle, the growing intricacy of
productive and organizational functions — as affecting only the
structure of the ruling class. Finally, our analysis of the genesis of
bureaucracy in the organization of the working class and the
institutionalization of its forms of resistance, did not challenge but,
on the contrary, made even more evident, the proletariat’s vocation to
install a society freed from all domination. We believed that one needed
a trial of alienation, even in the process of emancipation, for the
critique of all alienations to be carried out.
In retrospect it seems that we lacked audacity. We were afraid to admit
that the transformation of the mode of social domination could involve a
profound modification of the antagonistic terms described by Marx and,
consequently, would call for a revision of his model. Even when
considering the economic sphere we would have had to inquire into the
changes affecting the nature of social labor.
Similarly, the process of bureaucratization results in a tendency
towards homogenization of models of action, social relations, and norms.
Formerly this tendency was limited to workers’ labor within large
industry. At present this tendency has expanded to strata of
technicians, planning agents, and beyond. Not only has it extended to
state administrations on which the productive apparatus depends,
production of services and to large scientific laboratories, but also
into domains which would seem naturally not amenable to such
assimilation-public health, education, juridical institutions, etc. At
the same time, the relation of workers to the enterprise has been
modified. This relation can no longer be encapsulated in the clauses of
the contract analyzed by Marx, but has expanded to encompass a network
of obligations covering the workers’ social life, e.g., through
institutions of social security, housing, education, and leisure.
Moreover, the evolution of technology and the rationalization of tasks
has the consequence of changing the proportion of skilled and unskilled
labor in industry, the productive tasks in the old sense of the term,
and organizational tasks. In examining these phenomena, it is futile to
maintain that the proletarianization of society spreads, according to
the schema outlined by Marx, for the mass of men separated from the
means of production do not resemble the image that he had of them.
Ultimately, those factors resulting in heterogeneity are no less
powerful than the forces of resistance. In short, it is no longer
possible to mix together in the same, simple social stratum the most
dispossessed, the most exploited and the most frustrated in their
creativity. The last are precisely those in whom the capacitiy of
knowledge and of intervention in the milieu of labor is most stimulated
by their training and the quality of their tasks. But they do not suffer
the most from exploitation, which remains the lot of the factory
workers, nor do they fail to benefit, sometimes substantially, from the
growth of revenues. As for the most dispossessed, those who presently
perform unskilled labor, they are not the most exploited in the sense
that it is not from their production that capital extracts the maximum
surplus value that it needs to reproduce itself. It does not follow from
this that the working class has been erased: the specificity of blue
collar labor remains, along with the division of manual and mental
labor, in spite of modifications-especially in the latter. Nevertheless,
one should not reestablish the classic antagonism between technicians
and professionals, on one side, and administrators and technocrats on
the other. This opposition surely exists, but it does not imply, as Marx
believed, a class which is excluded from the process of socialization
instituted by capitalism: a class condemned to discover itself as alien
to bourgeois society, a class which is not a class, witnessing in its
very existence-when it escapes the status of an economic category from
which it receives its definition from outside-its vocation for
communism.
With the expansion of bureaucracy, several contradictions converge:
between leaders and led, between the strata which receive only scraps
from economic growth and the strata which ceaselessly increase the size
of their advantages, and between a minority in control of the means of
knowledge and information, the production and diffusion of
representations, and the masses who, in spite of their formation and
their increasing importance, are deprived. In addition to these
contradictions in the labor process, there is another one, which
contraposes collectivities in all sectors of social life and culture
against rules which determine behavior in every minor detail and plugs
it into the planned circuits of giant organizations. But this opposition
spreads in several directions. It mobilizes various modes of Opposition.
One of these takes place within the system and is the result of
bureaucratic impotence to satisfy recognized needs that are even
intensified by the multi-plication of organizational apparatuses.
Another mode of opposition translates the desire for collective control
of resources while a third places the fringes of the
Population-essentially youth-in a position of deviance, makes them into
outcasts, tends to destroy symbolic references without which the
relation to reality dissolves.
In considering the ambiguous characteristics of this revolt that strikes
at the very heart of the system of domination by revealing the
mechanisms which guarantee the combined functioning of exploitation,
oppression, and ideology while at the same time shaking up all symbolic
references to socialization, we can measure the distance which separates
us from the world analyzed by Marx. In this world, the proletariat was
the outsider and at the same time the carrier of productive
forces-itself being the greatest productive force. Thus, it was
designated as the revolutionary class.
Presently, the producer is not the outsider. It obtains, rather, in the
rejection of the models and norms of industrial society. Strategies
ordered according to realizable objectives cannot be based on conflicts
between owners, means of production, and workers. Thus, it becomes
impossible to make everything converge toward a single revolutionary
focus to preserve the image of a society centered around the praxis of a
class, to maintain, in paraphrasing Marx, that bureaucracy necessarily
tends toward its own destruction by raising against itself as in a
single man the mass of the dispossessed. The locations of conflicts are
many and the revolutionary demand par excellence of collective
self-management is gaining ground.
Undoubtedly, all of this applies primarily to Western capitalist
societies, but it would be a mistake to imagine that the problems are
posed in radically different terms in the popular democracies and in the
USSR. Certain indications suggest that these problems are only masked by
repression which comes down on any and every opposition. The force of
this repression, the visible figure of power, has the effect of
crystalizing revolutionary energies as soon as authority vacillates. The
insurrections of East Berlin, Poland, Liungary. and Czechoslovakia
provide ample evidence. Thus, one can expect in the USSR-in some
unforesecable future-a crisis of the regime, whose consequences will
have an unheard of impact in Eastern Europe as well as in the Western
world. But this eventuality should not lead us to forget the complexity,
and indeed the heterogeneity, of conflicts at work in modern industrial
society-conflicts for which only the lazy imagination of the little
heirs of Leninism can delight in foreseeing the solution in a “good”
dictatorship of the proletariat.
A study of the peculiar traits of bureaucratic regimes where nothing
remains of bourgeois institutions must inquire farther than I have done
in order to discover where the critique of totalitarianism leads. It
will not do to refer to the logic of bureaucratic organizations, the new
mechanisms whereby the state tends to penetrate all the details of the
productive process, in all the representations and relations between
people in civil society and culture. Nor is it sufficient to recognize
in the party the opposite of what it pretends to be-the pivot of a
totalitarian integration. Nor can one point to a fundamental
contradiction between control and parasitism. In light of this analysis,
it is advisable to carry the critique into the home ground of Marxist
theory.
An examination of the Russian regime challenges nothing less than the
definition of social reality and, with it, the distinction between base
and superstructure. Even if one notes that social relations are
generated at the level of production, and that property relations are
only their juridical expression-as Castoriadis has shown-one still
remains too close to the Marxist problematic. What escapes us is what
distinguishes bourgoeis society from bureaucratic society. To be sure,
it is possible to point to a pertinent structural trait but it should
not be forgotten that it alone cannot characterize it. The very
definition of relations of production, reduced to the Opposition of
means of production and labor power, remains abstract as long as it does
not clarify what it deals with, as long as this relation remains purely
within economic space. Rather, it must be acknowledged that it allows
this space to come about, that it is at the source of a system of
operations (specified in terms of production, exchange and
distribution), which are in turn dependent on a specific institutional
structure, where modes of power and representation are articulated
according to various political and symbolic schemas. In a sense, Marx
allows one to think with the concept of mode of production, of a
structuring of the social field which locates various features of the
economy, of the policy and of the system of representation, as well as
their articulations. This structuring, however, assumes and does not
generate the referents of the economy, politics, or the symbolic.
Indeed, we need only consider the advent of capitalism to note the
impact of extra-economic factors. Even when it is characterized by a
particular order of economic Operations and regulated by specific
mechanisms, the logic of a social system can only be grasped by
connecting the network of relations under the triple heading of
production, power, and representation. Seen in this fashion, it is
certainly possible to distinguish between what comes from the base and
what comes from the superstructure. However, this cannot be expressed in
terms of the distinction between the economic and the political. It
obtains on two levels: it acts on the level of representation where the
function of imagination cannot be confused with that of symbols which
establish the possibility of social communication and make up the shell
of the economic-political field. Otherwise, how is it possible to
indicate the originality of the modern bureaucratic system? Plow is it
possible to escape the alternative of a bad sociology which sees in it
either a variation of industrial Society, or a variation of an
a-temporal formation such as Asiatic despotism? To move forward in the
analysis, we must ask how, with the destruction of the bourgeois regime,
are the articulations of a social field reproduced on all levels, how
power relations, and the operations of production and representations
combine according to a new model of socialization. If, unable to do so,
we preserve, e.g., the classic Marxist conception of the state, or if we
dismiss a priori the political or symbolic function, the traits of
totalitarianism will always appear accidental.
Such an analysis would have at least one practical consequence. So long
as we remain prisoner of the Marxist schema, all signs of oppression-no
matter how quick we are to denounce them-turn out to have no Importance.
Similarly, as we have noted, democratic demands do not constitute an
object for sociological interpretation, if they are seen as expressions
of the influence exercised by bourgeois regimes, or a reflection of
a-temporal humanist values. A new examination of the social system would
have to persuade us that with democracy we are in the midst of a
fundamental process of socialization-if we can read beyond the forms to
which it is attached in bourgeois regimes.
Lastly, it was by reexamining my views concerning the degeneration of
the “workers” parties and unions that I became aware of a critique too
faithful to the spirit of Marx. Without doubt it is important to observe
the structural homology between “revolutionary” organizations and of the
organization of the industrial system that they hope to destroy. Lenin’s
views in What Is to Be Done? bears witness, in an exemplary and explicit
manner, to the transfer of norms from the industrial enterprise (the
militarization of labor) to the model of the party. Yet, the problem is
not exhausted by invoking the alienation which leads the exploited to
reproduce in their own organization the constraints that they suffer in
bourgeois society-or which leads them to divest themselves of their
ability to direct their emancipation after having been dispossessed of
the ability to direct their production. Nor is the problem exhausted by
emphasizing the role of an intelligentsia quick to transform into power
the superiority that knowledge gives them. These answers are not false,
but they leave in darkness the mechanisms which determine the
repetition. The adherence to models of authority and hierarchy, the
belief in the knowledge of the leader, the tenacious fidelity to a
tradition, the attachment to symbols, the fetishism of the institution,
do not point only to the inability of the working class to discover its
own identity. These phenomena take on the investment of energy-both
individual and collective-in the service of a socialization about which
Marxists wish to know nothing, although they are actually very good at
mobilizing it. Like bourgeois regimes, the bureaucratic regime would
crumble if it did not nourish identifications which conceal servitude
and antagonisms, and which keep the large majority under the authority
of the leaders. By wanting to ignore the import of the ‘imaginary,’ one
only exposes oneself (under the good colors of revolutionary
optimism-itself mystifying and mystified) to the maintenance of an
exercise in repetition. These remarks on bureaucracy are far from
attaining their goal. My hope is that the reader, like myself, finds
here the inspiration to continue.
[1] Karl Marx, The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Cambridge
University Press, 1970), p. 47.
[2] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (International
Publishers, ~969), p. 121. Emphasis added.
[3] The analysis of burcaucracy by the Socialisme ou Barbarie group
differs from that of Trotsky and Burhoam as follows (this section
originally appeared in Arguments, no.4l]une-September, 1957]): “The
ideas of Trotsky and Burnham differ qualitatively from those of the
Socialisme ou Barbarie group. Trotsky always saw the bureaucracy as a
parasitic transitory formation typical of a particular historical
juncture-as a fungus grown on the socialist organism that a new
revolutionary wave would readily sweep away. He always rejected the idea
that it represented a social class and a new social type. The existence
of the bureaucracy did not alter the nature of productive relations: the
Russian proletariat simply had to chase it away as one does with a bad
manager, since there already were socialist relations. Socialisme ou
Barbarie denounced Trotsky’s formalism by showing the absurdity of a
socialist society where the producers are expropriated from all
managerial tasks. It substituted the idea of a bureaucratic society for
that of a bureaucracy in society, i.e., a society which produced and
reproduced itself by separating the producing masses from a social
stratum which collectively expropriated surplus value. Such a
bureaucratic society was made possible by the rigorous integration of
all bureaucratic strata by the state apparatus. Furthermore, Socialisme
ou Barbarie also pointed to the function of the official
ideology-borrowed from Marxism-Leninism-in the interests of the
bureaucracy. Finally, Socialiame ou Barbarie claimed that Trotsky’s
inability to analyze the bureaucratic phenomenon was linked to his
general notion of revolutionary struggle (the absolute pre-eminence of
the party) and of socialist society (state centralization) which
inadvertently facilitated the advent of a new society of exploitation.
Buraham’s merit, on the other hand, is to have pointed out the
separation in moslem capitalism between production and ownership, and
the formation of a new type of society. But this is where the analogy
with Socialisme on Barbarie ends since the latter rejects Burnham on the
following points: (1) Burnham considers the factory managers as the
members of the new class and the real masters of society. He fails to
see the changes in the phenomenon of management which now comes to
engulf society as a whole. He merely substitutes the managers for the
private capitalists without realizing that the process which places
power within the context of the enterprise and in the hands of managers
tends to dispossess every sector of its autonomy and subordinate
everything to the state apparatus.
Furthermore, he fails to see that the bureaucratic mode of social
domination generates new relations between its members whose power no
longer flows from their private economic activity. They are able to pose
themselves as a separate class by rigorously subordinating themselves to
a control organ which guarantees a permanent integration through the
police and ideology. Hence, Burnham’s acrobatics in trying to explain
two otherwise inexplicable phenomena: in the USSR the bureaucracy is
staffed by a stratum of political functionaries and the factory mangers,
whatever their lisiluence, do not hold power. (2) Burnham believes that
the rise of industrial managers is a result of their scientific
knowledge, against which the mass of producers are seen as ignorant.
Accordingly, the managers are indispensable and without them the factory
could not function. Against this view, Socialise ou Barbarie claims that
(a) the continuous socialization of work has exploded the managers’ old
tasks since now the working of the enterprise is guaranteed at all
levels by collective organs, and that the existence of a separate
managerial apparatus answers the social need of exploitation rather than
technological requirements,- (Is) constant conflicts tear factory
organization apart, with the social hierarchy destroying cooperation and
generating an irreducible irrationality; (c) managers confront these
basically insurmountable conflicts daily in the attempt to facilitate
cooperation and initiative among producers while keeping them in
coercion, isolation and inertia. In other words, Socialisme ou Barbarie
explains the existence of bureaucracy in terms of the class struggle and
not as a function of technological progress. (3) Against Burnham,
Socialisme ou Barbarie sees the contradictions of earlier capitalism to
have been transposed and even intensified within the bureaucratic
society. Actually, the advent of the bureaucracy is the result of a
fundamental historical tendency described by Marx as “the socialization
of society.” The bureaucracy seeks to coordinate all of the activities
that it deals with, have all individuals participate in the social
totality by formally denying all class distinctions, while radically
contradicting this tendency by its very existence, its system of
oppression, its hierarchy, and its fragmentation. It itself pays for
this contradiction with an unrelenting internal struggle. This double
movement is the reason why bureaucracy exists only in the horizon of
communism, and generates the need for its own destruction. In other
words, for Socialisme ou Barbarie bureaucracy is a total social
phenomenon which is intelligible only in the perspective of modern
history and class struggle. The theory of bureaucracy is the theory of
revolution.”