krebscycle

And so a timid, bureaucratic spirit suffuses every aspect of cultural life. It comes festooned in a language of creativity, initiative, and entrepreneurialism. But the language is meaningless. Graeber

David Graeber wrote the first old school left wing essay I have seen in years and it makes the flabby, stale quality of much of what passes for left-wing analysis all the more apparent. Graeber asks what happened to the optimism, the technical ferment, the rapid changes and extensions of prosperity that people in the first world used to assume were inevitable:

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?

In the early 1970s, even right wing “free market” enthusiasts like Milton Friedman thought that increasing prosperity would allow the government to just give every person a guaranteed income instead of operating an expensive and humiliating welfare system. Technical innovation, automation, spread of education and commerce, all this was going to create a world without limits for all of us. In that time people talked about “post scarcity”, worried about the problems of an “affluent society”, assumed humans would soon be traveling around planets, perhaps even around stars, and expected technology to produce wonder after wonder. In a mere 40 years we jumped to a world where “we can’t afford” is the justification for throwing sick people out of hospitals into the street, for homeless vets on streetcorners, for slashing wages, making education unaffordable. We can’t afford Isaiah  17:

Learn to do good; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.

Hell, we can’t even afford common sense steps to keep from destroying the climate of the only planet we live on. Americans, who once prided themselves for ambition and overcoming obstacles: the worlds tallest buildings, fastest rockets and cars, grandest cities, and highest standards of livings are now more than half convinced that we can’t afford to operate a miserly 1930s social security pension system to keep penniless old people from starvation. And Graeber puts the spotlight on  the power point wielding paper wizards who dominate this new, feeble, timid, “austerity” America:

Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of bureaucrats—quite the opposite—but the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union did not lead to the domination of the market, but, in fact, cemented the dominance of conservative managerial elites, corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.

If we do not notice that we live in a bureaucratic society, that is because bureaucratic norms and practices have become so all-pervasive that we cannot see them, or, worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.

The corporate media wants to sell a story that the top ranks of this managerial class are “job creators” and “entrepreneurs” and pretends that big corporations belong to some private market sphere that is and should be independent of government. During the fight between the machinists union and Boeing, the business press was practically in tears that the government bureaucrats in DC were interfering with the corporate paper wizards in Chicago who run Boeing – as if a company run by professional bureaucrats, with 50% of its income coming from government contracts and a large part of the rest depending on US government helping it sell, was actually an Ayn Rand superman bravely turning enterprise into cash despite the interference of little people.  But the “left” has hardly been any better.  You’d think that the Glass/Steagal act was proposed by the First Internationale if you read many American Leftists (one of so many points of agreement with the Right).  During the height of the financial crisis, Doug Henwood, a Guru of The Nation Left, wrote a stem-winding call for action –  to adopt the Canadian banking system in which a very small number of heavily regulated banks impose a conservative bureaucratic economic regime: “concentrated ownership structures, of banks as well as corporations (something that’s true of Canada), are far more compatible with social democracy than dispersed ones. Concentration can lead to greater stability and a lessened role for competition.”

Amazing that the working class masses did not respond to this stirring call, no?

bureaucratic norms and practices have become so all-pervasive that we cannot see them, or, worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.

Ahem.

I disagree with much of Graeber’s analysis, in particular, I think he’s bought into marxism way too much, but this point about bureaucracy is dead on and is similar to Vinod Kholsa’s argument that we have developed a system of “Incumbency Capitalism” in which the government acts to protect the privileged position of managers of dominant companies and powerful interests. And there’s a bigger point of greater importance in Graeber’s essay as well: the underlying point that change for the better requires us to be able to imagine a better world, that the continued stultifying rule of the incumbents depends on “choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world.” The word “inevitable"  in there strikes me as wrong, but a sense of a possible, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a prerequisite to positive political action. Of course, Barack Obama says that too. The primary message of our "left” is that any such sense of a redemptive future is naive dreaming for the chumps.  This is the left of comfortable middle class cynics, sneering at the gullibility of those who don’t understand the full power of “neoliberal” elites. The second message of the left is that if we had any hope at all it would be that top leaders in the government would embrace the left’s stockpile of past-sell-date tedious bureaucratic policies from the 1930s.  That is, the “left” is mostly occupied with helping the right choke off any sense that people have power to change the world for the better. Graeber deserves a lot of credit for refusing to go along with the sad party line.

See also: The dispossessed in late middle age (added 8/10/2012)