(redjar / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Salon contributor Elias Isquith asked former university academic, author and activist David Graeber what made him want to write a book about bureaucracy.

Isquith and Graeber were talking about Graeber’s new book, “The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.” Graeber responded:

I’d actually written a couple of these essays beforehand, but I realized that bureaucracy was sort of a theme that kept popping up in all sorts of different things that I was working on … Also there wasn’t a very interesting existing literature on it. Part of it comes from my academic work and my political work — both constantly bumping into themes of bureaucracy, and not having a book like that that I could read. (You often write books you would have liked to have been able to read.)

The more time went on, the more I realized [bureaucracy] was also politically important. The fact that the discourse of the way we talk about bureaucracy, the political issue of bureaucracy, used to be a big left-wing issue back in the ’60s, and now it’s sort of been abandoned to the right — I think the political consequences of that have been disastrous.

To Isquith’s question of “How so?” Graeber added:

Because, in a way, the left began against bureaucratization of life. It’s about freedom. The mainstream left, which is barely left at all at this point in traditional terms … has really embraced a combination of market and bureaucracy, an equal synthesis of the worst aspects of capitalism and the worst aspects of bureaucracy.

Nobody really likes it. It’s this kind of constant compromise in principles, which creates this [policy] mish-mash that basically nobody would come up with or promote as a program in itself. The very fact that people vote for these guys — Blair, Obama, etc. — at all just shows the enduring power of the appeal of leftist ideas. And because it’s a horrible program, the right-wing grabs all the popular rebellion votes.

Read more here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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