In this short article, I want to think about the nature of bureaucracy and the contribution bureaucratic organisation plays in the current accelerated deportation regime and ‘hostile environment’. It will start at the top and move downwards through the organisation, using quotes from wider analyses of bureaucratic forms to reinforce my argument. I am not trying to explain the use of disciplinary state functions as an aspect of contemporary capitalism as such, though my argument is not entirely disconnected from such a critical goal.

To start at the top is to start with the imaginary dimensions of what it means to be a member of a society. As Paths and Bridges has discussed before, all societies exclude others as part of the work of defining themselves and all regimes of domination instantiate the human tendency to use others as a scapegoat to absolve itself, so that its members project their disappointment, frustration and self-hatred toward what is different (which is not to say that leaders and power holders don’t also hate the others and participate in this projection). In this sense, the expanded immigration and expulsion regime initiated under Theresa May’s tenure as Home Secretary (complete with the vans roaming the streets telling migrants to go home) and continued under her Premiership, is about exploiting the worst instincts of human beings, instincts that are not readily sated. As grist to its base and other voters who had moved toward UKIP, the Tory government under David Cameron made promise after promise to reduce migration (‘to the tens of thousands’), promises utterly out of keeping with the historical reality of the post-colonial world and the nature of contemporary capitalism. It was in fact a rejection of reality. There is a straight line from this to Brexit and the Windrush scandal.

As the insatiable appetite for a whiter and more racist England was set loose – and as charlatans and opportunists of many political stripes made capital from it – a callous, brutal target based deportation regime was set in motion. Above the bureaucratic order is a daemon. Once a daemon referred to an occult power shadowing individuals drawing them into its machinations in a process that was a reification of the human tendency to project our own desires and fears outward, displacing them onto the world. Here we have the institution of racism as a daemon, fused with the conquering chrematistic logic of capitalist modernity, a devouring monster that stokes more racism and more deportations. Many Leave voters saw Brexit as about ramping up this racism to the level of mass deportations – ‘sending them all home’.

In such circumstances, we can see how May’s instruction to Civil Servants to set targets for deportations created an insatiable monster. When translated to a power order this devouring monster can make and break careers. Ulf Martin explains the reality of the atmosphere inside of bureaucracy:

“In theory, bureaucratic rules are “rational” and set up by disinterested persons / sections and are executed as written. In reality, everybody involved is interested in making a career, not to work too much etc. Bureaucratic institutions are pervaded with power struggles: managers of lower levels of the hierarchy try to rise and hence make informal arrangements, perform mobbing, withhold information etc. The subordinates either try to do the same or resist or try to keep out of the game. In any case, the activities are motivated by goals that are “irrational” from a “higher” perspective and are not a conceptual part of the bureaucratic schemes.”1

Here we see the beginnings of a situation where the ostensible values, domestic civil rights and even international law is continually broken by those supposedly bound by it (as was continually the case in the Windrush scandal and is likely to be post-Brexit). My point here is not to exculpate the political classes for this monster of their making but to note that any bureaucratic system of hierarchy will – in fact necessarily has to – get around formal rules (and if necessary laws) to deliver its targets; and that that any system of professional advancement based on such targets will lead to abuses that are against letter of the system but fully consonant with the spirit (imaginary) of the ends or goals sought.

It’s worth noting that while Marx’s almost perfect pithy explicandum of bureaucracy from 1844 still retains a great deal of validity, the apex of the bureaucratic order is always happy to turn a blind eye – or even issue plausibly deniable instructions on the quiet – if the benefit appears to outweighs the cost:

“The highest point entrusts the understanding of details to the lower echelons, whereas these, on the other hand, credit the highest point with an understanding of the universal, and thus they deceive one another.”2

Moving down the system to the lower echelons, we find not just the jockeying for position and mobbing we see in the Senior Civil Service and higher management grades but also a specific process of socialisation that requires those tasked to execute the actual day to day work to identify with the goals and ends sought; and ultimately with the broader ideology that has created the need for such ends. While jobs with a disciplinary function (especially those involving socially approved discrimination against marginalised groups) are likely to attract more authoritarian and prejudiced personalities than others, the pure struggle to live a psychically integrative life requires – as we all see and probably feel on an everyday level – a certain degree, inevitably, of identification with the organisation one serves.

“The functioning of the administrative departments presents a very different picture. Here, at the bottom of the scale, we find clerks without real qualifications, employees whose professional training is rudimentary or non-existent. Between these employees and the managing director of the firm, the hierarchy of jobs is a hierarchy of power. The relations of dependence become determinant and to have a function is to define oneself, at each level, with regard to a superior, whether he is a branch supervisor, a departmental supervisor or a manager. In this context, the double nature of work thus reappears: it both corresponds to a professional activity and constitutes itself as the expression of an established social order, an order within which the firm exists. Indeed, from the top to the bottom of the scale, the relations are such that they serve always to reinforce the authoritarian structure of the administration. But that does not mean that the individuals situated at the bottom of the scale participate in the bureaucracy in the same way as the middle or upper strata. In certain respects, clerks are like the workers who carry out orders, deprived of any authority. They often earn less than certain categories of workers who are paid by the hour. Their work could not be described as ‘responsible’ and it cannot be assumed that they find in their work a basis for identifying with the aims of the firm. Nevertheless, they are not unconnected to the bureaucracy: they are its dependents…Now as soon as we try to circumscribe the properly bureaucratic sector and are led to highlight a specific type of activity, we uncover a dialectic of socialization which is of a different order than the dialectic of the division of labour”3

So, while, as Lefort notes, in general clerks (in modern British parlance, administrative and operational delivery grades) may not identify with the goals of any organisation they serve in, when the work is the forcible and coercive work of the Home Office (rather than say, the production of paperwork or statistics), the notion of a dialectic of socialisation weighs even heavier. This is bureaucratic order in its purest sense, in which one cannot be a thinking individual or moral agent because to be so one could not do the work of the organisation. When Marx linked bureaucracy and alienation he saw them as spiritually synonymous for this very reason.

In keeping with our psychoanalytic starting point, we depart from Marx here only because he suggests a tautology, if the irrational logic of the system pervades its charges, and society is a human creation – where does society draw this perversion from? His answer, the mode of production, only issues in further tautology. Our answer, the infant situation which hates the others because it represents the society that socialised it, thus making it renounce the pleasure principle has more weight. It also suggests a way out of this mournful situation, via the acceptance of a reality principle that doesn’t hate others, doesn’t embrace divisions based on artificial differences or demand people be punished for their otherness by bureaucratic systems. So, it is socialisation itself that must be our starting point, inevitable as much as it is unwanted. The dialectic of socialisation is something different, that does indeed stamp the wider social values (rather than the tendency toward the adoption of such values based on unconscious motives) onto the individual. So, as noted above, to survive or accept with apparent equanimity the horror of ruining anonymous individuals lives such an organisation must render its charges truly ideological (at least while carrying out their professional activity), often forcing them to split (in the Kleinian sense) into good and bad, lawful and unlawful, worthy and unworthy (white and black?), those that they deal with. It must numb those flux of human responses that cut against the hatred of others – such as love, compassion and justice – and render unthinkable inconvenient truths and inferences that might lead them to question their tasks.

Taking in these elements, the social imaginary, political power, bureaucratic hierarchy and individual alienation – a bureaucratic department becomes a racist megamachine in Lewis Mumford’s sense. This is the reason why, from top to bottom, the logic of bureaucratic power can only serve authoritarian ends.

by Joseph Aylmer

Notes

1. Ulf Martin, Pseudorational Control and the Magma of Reality (2016). Seminar at the Department of Political Science, York University.
2. Karl Marx, Contribution to the critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844)
3. Claude Lefort, What is Bureaucracy?, in The Political Forms of Modern Society (1986)