Bureaucracy

 


 

[1840]  Alexis de Tocqueville,  De la Démocratie en Amérique, vol. II, Flammarion, Paris, 1981

-  "Chez la plupart des peuples européens, lorsqu'un homme commence à sentir ses forces et à étendre ses désirs, la première idée qui se présente à lui est d'obtenir un emploi public." (p. 307)

 

[1895]  Gustave Le Bon,  Psychologie des foules, Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1998

-  "Cette réduction progressive des libertés se manifeste pour tous les pays sous une forme spéciale : la création d'innombrables mesures législatives, toutes généralement d'ordre restrictif, conduit nécessairement à augmenter le nombre, le pouvoir et l'influence des fonctionnaires chargés de les appliquer. Leur puissance est d'autant plus grande que, dans les incessants changements des gouvernements, la caste administrative échappant à ces changements, possède seule l'irresponsabilité, l'impersonnalité et la perpétuité. Or, de tous les despotismes, il n'en est pas de plus lourds que ceux qui se présentent sous cette triple forme." (p. 122)

 

[1911]  Roberto Michels,  La sociologia del partito politico nella democrazia moderna [Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie], seconda edizione riveduta e accresciuta, 1925, il Mulino, Bologna, 1966

-  "L'organizzazione dello Stato ha bisogno di una burocrazia vasta e molto articolata." "... l'istinto di conservazione costringe lo Stato moderno a recepire e legare a sé il numero più grande possibile di interessi."
 "Da parte dello Stato si ha una enorme offerta di impieghi, da parte dei cittadini una domanda ancora maggiore. La ragione di quest'ultima è l'insicurezza nella quale si trovano i membri degli strati sociali intermedi (piccoli industriali, artigiani, piccoli commercianti, contadini, ecc.) a causa della formazione del grande capitalismo espropriatore e della resistenza organizzata della classe operaia, movimenti entrambi che, pur senza intenzione, convergono contro le classi medie. Tutta questa gente, che si vede gravemente minacciata nella sua esistenza economica ... ritiene particolarmente adatta la mangiatoia dello Stato."
 "Lo Stato ... messo in difficoltà da questa offerta in continua crescita, si vede costretto ad aprire ancora di più le cateratte dei suoi canali burocratici per sistemare alcune migliaia di nuovi postulanti, onde trasformarli da nemici pericolosi in protettori zelanti e difensori." (pp. 234-235)

-  "Quanto più la burocrazia è perfetta, tanto più è rigida e illiberale." (p. 239)

 

[1936-1937]  André Gide,  Retour de l'URSS, suivi de, Retouches à mon retour de l'URSS, Gallimard, Paris, 1978

-  "La bureaucratie, considérablement renforcée depuis la fin de la Nep, s'immisce dans les sovkhozes et les kolkhozes. La Pravda du 16 septembre 1936 évalue, après enquête, à plus de 14%, dans le personnel des stations de machines agricoles par exemple, le nombre des employés inutiles. De cette bureaucratie, créé d'abord comme instrument de gérance, puis de domination, Staline devient lui-même l'esclave, prétendent certains. Rien de plus difficile à déloger d'une sinécure que des fainéants sans valeur personnelle. En 1929 déjà Ordjonikidze s'effarait de cette 'quantité colossale de propres-à-rien' qui ne veulent rien savoir du véritable socialisme et ne travaillent qu'à empêcher sa réussite. 'Les gens dont on ne sait que faire et dont nul n'a besoin, on les place dans les commission de contrôle', disait-il. Mais plus ces gens sont incapables, plus Staline peur compter sur leur dévouement conformiste; car ils ne doivent leur situation avantagée qu'à la faveur. Ce sont, il va sans dire, de chauds approbateurs du régime. En servant la fortune de Staline, ils protègent la leur." (p. 129)

 

[1939]  Bruno Rizzi,  Il Collettivismo Burocratico [La Bureaucratisation du Monde], Sugarco Edizioni, Milano, 1977

-  "... dalle Rivoluzione d'Ottobre e dal suo rinculo, è uscita una nuova classe dirigente: la burocrazia. La borghesia è liquidata e non ha più possibilità di ritorno. Il possesso dello stato dà alla burocrazia la proprietà dei mezzi di produzione che è collettiva e non più privata, appartiene in toto alla nuova classe dirigente." (pp. 40-41)
-  "Lo stato sovietico anziché socializzarsi si burocratizza, ossia, invece di scomparire lentamente nella società senza classi, si gonfia in modo spaventoso. Già 15 milioni di individui si sono appiccicati al tronco statale e ne succhiano la linfa." (p. 41)
-  "La nuova classe dominante ha asservito in blocco il proletariato. Ai lavoratori non resta più neanche la libera offerta della loro 'forza lavoro' ai diversi imprenditori: la burocrazia è monopolizzatrice, ha perfezionato il sistema di sfruttamento." (p. 41)

-  "Poco per volta i lavoratori di Francia, d'Inghilterra e d'America non si troveranno più normali cittadini, ma 'sudditi' di un regime burocratico che 'nazionalizzerà' la proprietà e prenderà tante altre misure ad impronta 'socialista'. Non si chiamerà fascismo o nazismo o stalinismo, avrà certamente un altro nome, ma il fondo sarà sempre lo stesso: proprietà collettiva nelle mani dello stato, burocrazia come classe dirigente, organizzazione collettiva e pianificata della produzione, sfruttamento che passa dal dominio dell'uomo a quello della classe." (p. 44)
-  "... lo stato burocratico devolve in varie guise il plus-valore ai suoi funzionari che formano la classe privilegiata, insediata direttamente nello stato." (p. 71)

-  "Si tratta di una classe in blocco [la burocrazia] che ne sfrutta un'altra e che poi per vie interne a mezzo del suo stato passa alla distribuzione tra i suoi membri. Il plus-valore è inghiottito dai nuovi privilegi attraverso la macchina statale che non è più un apparecchio di oppressione politica soltanto, ma anche di amministrazione economica della nazione. In un solo organo è stata riunita la macchina per lo sfruttamento e per il mantenimento dei privilegi sociali: l'apparecchio sembra perfetto." (p. 73)

 

[1941]  Erich Fromm,  Escape from Freedom [published in 1942 in England as : Fear of Freedom], Routledge, London, 1960

-  "It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism. What mattered was that hundred of thousands of petty bourgeois, who in the normal course of development had little chance to gain money or power, as members of the Nazi bureaucracy now got a large slice of the wealth and prestige they forced the upper class to share with them." (p. 190)

 

[1943-1944]  George Orwell,  Animal Farm, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966

-  "Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer - except of course, for the pigs and the dogs. Perhaps this was partly because there were so many pigs and so many dogs. It was not that these creatures did not work, after their fashion. There was, as Squealer was never tired of explaining, endless work in the supervision and organization of the farm. Much of this work was of a kind that the other animals were too ignorant to understand. For example, Squealer told them that the pigs had to expend enormous labours every day upon mysterious things called 'files', 'reports', 'minutes', and 'memoranda'. These were large sheets of paper which had to be closely covered with writing, and as soon as they were so covered, they were burnt in the furnace. This was of the highest importance for the welfare of the farm, Squealer said." (p. 110)

 

[1945]  Bertrand de Jouvenel,  On Power : its nature and the history of its growth (Du pouvoir : histoire naturelle de sa croissance), Liberty Press, Indianapolis, 1993

-  "Putting the mass of the people to productive work makes possible at any given moment of technical advance the existence of a given number of non-producers. These non-producers will either be dispersed in a number of packets or concentrated in one immense body, according as the profits of productive work accrue to the social or to the political authorities. The requirement of Power, its tendency and its raison d'être, is to concentrate them in its own service." (p. 176)

 

[1945]  Arthur Koestler,  The Yogi and the Commissar, Jonathan Cape, London, 1964

-  "... from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, the workers of Central and Western Europe had rapidly developed their own organizations, parties, trade unions, produced their own leaders and, above all, their own bureaucracy - men with iron wills and wooden heads. In an age of accelerated developments, the organized Fourth Estate had become stagnant much quicker than the Third in its time, and without even ascending to power." (p. 77)

 

[1957]  Milovan Djilas, The New Class, An analysis of the communist system, Thames and Hudson, London, 1958

-  "Even the most cursory observation reveals how ... contemporary Soviet bureaucracy is not without a connecting link with the Czarist system in which the officials were, as Engels noted, 'a distinct class'." (p. 173)

 

[1990]  Alvin Toffler,  Powershift. Knowledge, wealth, and violence at the edge of the 21st century, Bantam books, London, 1991

-  "The fact is that, no matter how many parties run against one another in elections, and no matter who gets the most votes, a single party always wins. It is the Invisible Party of bureaucracy." (p. 257)

 

[1992]  Basil Davidson,  The Black Man's Burden. Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, James Curry, Oxford, 1994

-  [In post-colonial Africa] "Bureaucracy ruled together with clientelism, and gradually became much the same thing. With all this the actual political content of these nation-states narrowed into groups and persons with command over, or at least access to, income yielding resources - against all those other groups and persons, a numerical majority, who could be milked of such resources. And this in turn meant, as things worked out, a deepening opposition between the interests of the cities and the interests of the rural areas. Effective political power sat in the cities, whether as the seat of clientelist leaders or as clients of those leaders, and this trend became ever stronger as the cities grew ever larger. In these circumstances, authoritarian state power went together with expanding bureaucracies : that is, with hugely increasing quantities of persons who in one way or another looked to the state for patronage; and the ideal became not so much to occupy a job as to occupy a wage."
-  "In the little equatorial republic of Congo, Congo-Brazaville, the size of the state-paid bureaucracy grew continuously. The case was typical. All such persons more or less clustered idly in the capital city or one of its satellites, together with armed forces far larger than required to meet any conceivable threat to the state. And all of these, directly or indirectly, lived off 'foreign aid' and the surplus extracted from an increasingly impoverished rural community." (p. 209)

-  "Between 1960 (at its independence from France) and 1972 its [Congo-Brazaville] bureaucracy grew by 636 per cent or from 3,000 to 21,000 persons, after which it continued to grow at an even faster rate, totalling by 1987 some 73,000 persons." "By the end of the 1960s this relatively immense and useless civil and military service was eating up around three-fourths of the national budget, and its members enjoyed a far higher standard of living than most Congolese." (p. 235)

 

[1995]  Kenichi Ohmae,  The End of the Nation State. The rise of regional economis, HarperCollins, London, 1996

-  "Although Japan has only 170,000 full-time and 4,300,000 part-time farmers, whose income from farming, on average, now represents less than 20 percent of their total household income, there are some 420,000 clerks in the various farmers cooperatives, who handle all the paperwork related to agricultural products, fertilizers, pesticides, and the like. And, of course, there are the 90,000 bureaucrats in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, of whom as many as 11,000 spend their time classifying different grades of rice. So, in debates over land use and in trade negotiations ... it is abundantly clear where the ministry's interest - as well as that of its allies - lies. However, the interest of the Japanese people, and even of Japanese farmers, lies somewhere else." (pp. 49-50)

 

[1999]  Martin van Creveld,  The Rise and Decline of the State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

-  "The term 'bureaucracy' itself was coined in 1765 by Vincent de Gourmay, a French philosophe who specialized in economic and administrative matters. The context in which he did so was pejorative; to him it was a new form of government added to the three that had been laid down by Aristotle, i.e., monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Significantly for the future he saw a need to reduce the number of pen-pushers in favor of laissez-faire, a term he also invented." (p. 137)

-  "In both Europe and the United States ... the expansion of state-directed welfare led to an equally great growth of the bureaucracy." (p. 361)
-  "The number of government employees also grew by leaps and bounds: e.g., from 11 to 23 percent of the West European workforce between 1950 and 1980, and from 9.7 to 15.2 percent of the civilian workforce in the United States during the same period."  "To support all these bureaucrats, the share of government spending as part of GNP grew to proportion which, except in periods of total war, were without precedent in history. To focus on a few countries only, between 1950 and 1973 it rose from 27.6 to 38.8 per cent in France; 30.4 to 42.0 percent in (West) Germany; 26.8 to 45.0 percent in Britain; and 34.2 to 41.5 percent in the Netherlands." (p. 361)
-  "In study after study produced from the 1960s on, state bureaucracies have been presented as endlessly demanding (the bureaucratic solution to any problem is more bureaucracy), self-serving, prone to lie in order to cover the blunders that they commit, arbitrary, capricious, impersonal, petty, inefficient, resistant to change, and heartless." (p. 408)

-  "To heap insult on injury, even in countries whose calls for rugged individualism, self-reliance, and privatization have been the most strident, the number of bureaucrats has not diminished: in the United States under Ronald Reagan, for example, it still managed to increase by 1 percent. Nor has the share of GNP which they command declined. For example, in Britain it stood at 45.5 percent in 1993 versus 44 in 1978. For the European Economic Community as a whole the corresponding figures were 52 and 50 percent." (p. 410)

 

[1999]  Louis Bériot,  Abus de Bien Public. Enquête sur les milliards gaspillés par l'Etat. Les chiffres, les preuves, les responsables, Plon, Paris, 1999

-  "Ici, nous allons parler des femmes et des hommes qui se sont approprié la Nation au nom du service public. Ils sont un peu plus de 5 millions; sans compter, on les oublie toujours, les 1,3 million de salariés des entreprises publiques : sans compter, non plus, on se garde bien d'en parler, les salariés des «faux-nez », c'est-à-dire des associations subventionnées par l'Etat, les collectivités et la sécurité sociale - pas loin de 500 000 personnes, sans compter encore les employés des organismes paritaires (sécurité sociale, caisses de retraites, etc.). Total : plus de 7 millions de personnes, dont le dénominateur commun est d'avoir peu ou prou la garantie de l'emploi, des avantages nombreux par rapport aux salariés du privé et aux travailleurs indépendants." (p. 17)

-  "En 1914, il y avait [en France] 1 fonctionnaire pour 103 habitants, il y en a aujourd'hui [1999] 1 pour moins de 10." (p. 37)

-  "... il est difficile de comprendre pourquoi :
- Quand le nombre d'agriculteurs est divisé par deux entre 1960 et 1995, le nombre de fonctionnaires, lui, est multiplié par plus de deux ...
- Quand le taux d'activité de la flotte de commerce est divisé par trois, il faut augmenter de 25% les fonctionnaires de la mer.
- Quand les effectifs de l'industrie diminuent de 20%, ceux des agents du ministère croissent de 25%.
- Quand meurent les anciens combattants, les fonctionnaires continuent de s'en occuper, sinon pourquoi restent-ils toujours si nombreux ?
- Quand le nombre de contribuables imposables augmente légèrement, ... les effectifs du ministère des Finances augmentent de 30 000 agents.
- Quand le nombre des élèves scolarisés de deux à vingt-deux ans s'accroît en vingt ans (1976-1996) de 120 000, les effectifs de l'Education nationale augmentent de 120 000." (p. 38)