Jerry Pournelle is generally credited with formulating the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

We are fond of calling this skin-suiting an institution, though we usually infer a more malignant intention behind such.  There is no need to impute a conspiracy when the natural evolution of an institution adequately explains it’s internal decay.  I can say that I have personally witnessed bureaucratic behavior in two of the more extreme forms it may ever have taken – the U.S. Department of Defense, and the organization surrounding that annual bacchanal, Burning Man.  Contrary to expectation, the more sclerotic of the two isn’t necessarily the DoD, though it is by far the larger and more destructive.  This also amply demonstrates that rigid bureaucracy is not simply the creation of a conservative mindset.  When a bunch of drugged-up hippies end up building organizational structures that aren’t all that different from those that guide the national security apparatus – there’s something deeper in human behavior at play.  Nor will this be limited to what exists in putatively capitalist systems, as Trotsky’s (and others) critiques of the Soviet Union will echo the dismay at the bureaucracies that dominated there.

First we need to establish some temporal considerations.  Marx wrote in the mid 19th century (and was dead by 1883).  The American Progressive movement had some of it’s earliest threads traced to the Civil War and thence into the Gilded Age.  Progressivism was initially as Republican as it was Democratic in terms of partisan identity, then flamed out as it’s own partisan brand.  In its initial glory, Progressivism never gave much thought to Marx or his acolytes.  Outright Communism in the U.S. wasn’t significant until after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia (which nearly coincides with Progressivism being a spent force – for a time).  Antonio Gramsci was a theorist who wrote around the time of the decline of Progressivism (which had been operating for decades) and contemporary with the Bolshevik revolution being declared a degenerated workers state by Trotsky and comrades.  Progressivism would be re-invigorated by marriage with the New Left of the 60s/70s and it is possible that Gramsci had some following within those circles, but we’re kinda stretching to make him a relevant point of reference (and in particular a more relevant one than say Foucault or the Frankfurt school).  Gramsci was a Marxist theorist and while theorists flourish in Marxist circles, all theory in Marxism tends to be pretty damn flawed – mostly because it insists on ignoring real humans and insisting instead on caricatured groups and idealized behavior.  Gramsci actually was rather heterodox in his Marxism (and did take account of real humans and their interactions), which of course would not win him fans amongst the orthodox, though his ideas did gain purchase in other intellectual circles.  By the way, if you want to read about splintering and factionalism – the history of Marxism/Communism and Socialism leaves the combined Right and Libertarian communities in the dust.

So while Gramsci may have provided a theoretical basis for “the long march through the institutions” because he argued that culture matters more than dialectical materialism, he never actually said it himself.  It was a German leftist, Rudi Dutschke, of the 60s who is credited with it and is directly alluding to the Communist Chinese Long March (an event that happened after Gramsci’s death, so all but impossible for there to be a connection there).  It seems hard to say that Dutschke had much influence on the American New Left of the same time period.  That era was already a chaotic mess in this country (as irony would have James Burnham writing The Suicide of the West* in 1964 having migrated through quite a number of Leftist factions prior to WWII).

However, we can step back some years before the turbulent 60s and have a look at the insights from Burnham in The Managerial Revolution (and The Machiavellians) for the writing on the wall about Marxian theory (from a former Trotskyite to boot) and the death of classical capitalism as an economic, and the American republic as a political, system.  Burnham’s observations are echoed by another Italian political theorist (and lapsed Communist), Bruno Rizzi, and Yvan Craipeau (an unreconstructed French Trotskyist).  The key element Burnham focuses on is the disconnection of control from ownership, and that control was now residing in a class that did not own the businesses they were directing, but were easily associated with the professional bureaucracy in government.  In my mind, even if they didn’t realize it, they’re describing fairly accurately the tenets of fascism wherein the interests of business are subordinated and coordinated with government (naturally enough through bureaucracies, the component that carries out policy).  We’re all familiar with Taylorism (scientific management) in the late 19th century, and that thread carries through both in the private and (to a lesser extent) the public managerial systems.  The New Deal (to a limited degree) and WWII (with a vastly larger impact) forged the concept of the public directing the private sphere – but in common terms and among a set of people that could operate in either.  Eisenhower most notably warned of this in his military-industrial-complex, though that same speech carried warnings about other overlaps.

It is my contention that we can find all the fault in our current environment, economically and politically, in a largely native American line of decay; in terms of our Progressive (pre- and post- New Left) tradition, Burnham (et al) and of course my other touchstone – Christopher Lasch (who covers so well the nature of the elite class and its disconnect from the rest of society).  We misdirect our diagnosis of what is wrong when we obsess on Communist infiltration and demoralization (for which Gramsci is given much credit).  There is an organic process that explains this without the operation of a malignant force.  The catch is you can’t build a mass movement without that demon – but I’m not particularly bothered by that.

 

[*] Jonah Goldberg would recycle this title, proving the guy is incapable of originality.