I greatly enjoyed reading Michael Zajakowski Uhll’s essay, “Cogs in the Great Machinery,” about bureaucracy, which drew on his own personal experiences as a worker in New York City’s municipal government. Much of his commentary about the progressive and socialist aspects of local bureaucracy and civil service resonated with my own experiences as an engineer in various public utilities.
First, I want to confirm how nice it is to work in a stable public bureaucracy, and particularly in utilities. Similar to municipal governance, there is a rigorous work-life balance, as well as an overall sense that you are working for the public good, rather than private profit. This may be especially true for utilities, where you are directly working on maintaining the foundational infrastructure for the basic needs of society, and operating at the boundary of nature and civilization: producing drinkable water, governing the distribution of electricity, regulating waste, etc. And being in a stable, long-term workforce drawn from across racial and social lines confirms the commentary about how the public sector can be an important pillar of working-class organizing and struggle.
Second, I’d like to expand and nuance certain aspects of Uhll’s analysis of bureaucracy and the state in general. In particular, I’d like to reflect on how socialists can think about state institutions in a more radical and strategic fashion.
On the question of the division of labor: the idea that specialization and the inter-dependence of a bureaucratic workforce has progressive qualities makes sense, insofar as it echoes Marx’s arguments about how workplace discipline can build collective comradery. However, it is also important to synthesize this idea with the legacy of socialist attempts to overcome the division of labor and the divide between mental and manual work. Both the USSR and China, during the heights of their revolutionary periods, identified specialization as a core means of alienation and capitalist social relations, and attempted in different ways to overcome this. This is also the basis on which Marx talked about alienation, and his utopian vision of what communism could look like: fishing in the morning, philosophizing in the evening, and so on. We should consider how this logic can apply to bureaucratic and public labor, as well as productive labor.
This is not to say that we should uphold an ultra-leftist program for the immediate destruction of the division of labor. The point is that we should be cautious about accepting the established specializations, boundaries, and regulations that constrain and discipline how bureaucrats and state workers go about their business. It is precisely in challenging and blurring the established rules of the state, that socialists can politicize and radicalize the bureaucracy, and unleash the full potential of whatever access to the levers of state power that we might have. Indeed, I would argue that it is precisely when bureaucrats settle into a comfortable, depoliticized routine of reproducing the established rules of the state, that the worst aspects of bureaucracy emerge, in both socialist and capitalist states. The key point that I will make is that a socialist vision of bureaucracy–both for struggles in the present, as well as how bureaucracies can function in the future–should revolve around how to develop the capacities of the wider working class to struggle.
One interesting case study of this historically–and one that is of particular interest to me as an electrical engineer in the power sector–is that of the U.S. Rural Electrification Administration (REA) of the 1930s. The REA was a federal entity tasked with facilitating the electrification of the U.S. countryside via the formation of localized, democratic, and non-profit cooperatives. Building the REA meant building a bureaucracy that would extend down into the most fringe corners of U.S. society, who had been abandoned to darkness by the powerful private electric utilities. But rather than create an individualized, consumer-like relationship between rural households and some state-owned enterprise, the purpose of the REA was to build and nurture locally-owned and operated organizations that would eventually become almost entirely autonomous. The task of REA bureaucrats, then, was not to do the work of the electric cooperatives indefinitely and from afar, but to train and spread their skills and knowledge around electrical infrastructure into localized bureaucracies. (Side-note: this is a simplification of the nature of the REA. The cooperative model was arguably a compromise that was more amenable to corporate interests than big state-run utilities like the Tennessee Valley Authority. But more on that some other time).
This localized dimension of the REA is itself noteworthy. But it gets even more interesting when you look at how REA workers went about their job, and the fact that many of these workers were of the Left. These radical workers–bureaucrats?–viewed rural electrification not as a technocratic project, so much as a grassroots social movement. Rural communities had to be contacted, persuaded, and mobilized to actually do the work of forming cooperatives. Thus, REA workers engaged in basic organizing tasks could be confused for a modern DSA campaign: roaming around the countryside, knocking on doors, coordinating town hall meetings, holding informational sessions, and running technical classes. There was also an overtly political dimension to this work; REA workers were explicitly in opposition to investor-owned utilities and right-wing business interests in general, and regularly agitated against private utilities. And in the years following the initial burst of rural electrification projects, the REA served as a coordinating hub for organizing against efforts by private utilities to buy out and privatize cooperative infrastructure.
The ultimate lesson here is that the real potential of a leftist political force within the state bureaucracy isn’t just to carry out the dictates of progressive policy, but to act as a force to help organize and politicize the wider working class, by pushing the boundaries of the job and challenging status quo ideas about what the state can and should be.
Practically speaking, where can the Left in the U.S. today think seriously about the theoretical and practical matters of making radical use of the machinery of the state? Uhll’s piece suggests that the municipal bureaucracy of New York City has potential; and I would add that public utilities in heavily unionized parts of the U.S., like New York and California, would be ripe for more inquiry and outreach. The most obvious sector, however, would be local elected offices held or targeted by the DSA. There are dozens of local DSA-endorsed city councilors across the US, many of whom are cadre DSA members and whose staff are also cadre DSA members–these are ideal laboratories for pushing the boundaries of traditional politics and statecraft, beyond the realm of simple legislation, and into reconfiguring their offices and day-to-day work toward concretely supporting union campaigns, tenant associations, and other avenues of reversing the disorganization of the working class. Traditional liberal-capitalist politics is about dealing with individual citizens, to vertically hear their complaints and desires, and to pass down benefits and laws; socialist politics should be about catalyzing horizontal networking and organizing of workers, and their collective combat against capital.
Two final notes, on how we can further develop our ideas of statecraft and bureaucracy. First, I think that the works of Nicos Poulantzas can be especially useful, particularly his argument that the state is not purely a capitalist entity, but rather reflects the balance of class forces in the wider society, and that different appendages can be more or less malleable toward working-class interests, and even radical socialist politics. We need to be very cautious here, given that Poulantzas’ work seems most readily captured by reformist currents; nonetheless, the applicability of his nuanced take on the state should be clear. Uhll’s analysis of the New York City government, and in particular the struggles of city workers and the Social Service Employees Union, lends credence to the idea that the bureaucratic machinery of the state is a viable terrain of struggle. Second, we in the US should pay especially close attention to socialist movements in Latin America who have gained some level of state power during the last few decades, how they navigated the intricacies of hostile capitalist states, and what informed their successes and failures. The terrain of struggle in Latin America is arguably the most similar to the conditions we face in the U.S., as are the ways that Left movements there have had to grapple with the contradictions between militant social movements and state power.
-R.K. Upadhya
