This post is about David Graeber’s book The Utopia of Rules. But that’s not what comes to mind when most people think about Graeber.
Upon his fall 2020 death, many leftists rushed to define the work and legacy of David Graeber. The socialist left tended to focus on his work with Occupy Wall Street and his book Debt. By contrast, the mainstream press focused on the more popular book Bullshit Jobs. And both sides had a word to say about his final book The Dawn of Everything, which formed a kind of grand synthesis of his historical and political views.
That’s all well and good. I’ve read each of these books and written about a couple. Graeber’s work follows a familiar pattern – insightful, but problems tend to lurk.
But I think The Utopia of Rules is where we should go if we want to find Graeber’s most compelling work. In it, he goes after bureaucracy, especially its history and its shaping by the modern world. Though it wanders into the more speculative realms of social theory, it hits a key topic from several angles. And so, that’s our topic for today.
The Utopia of Rules
I think it’s easy enough to tally up the basic thesis of The Utopia of Rules. It goes like this: People endlessly complain about bureaucracy. But, secretly, they like it. Why? It saves them from the terrifying freedom of not having it. Without a deep system of rules and technocratic rulers, we as a society would face core decisions about how to organize our political, economic, and social worlds. We would have to make these choices.
Graeber thinks people want to avoid these kinds of choices at all costs. If we ever made it there, we’d face a chance of lapsing into the tyranny of structurelessness. On the other hand, as Graeber himself would prefer, we could come together to create structures of collective consent and consensus. As, of course, many anarchists and communists prefer. What’s not to love about that?
But instead we have a world full of arbitrary rules and silly paperwork. What gives? Graeber’s essays in this book trace life in this system.
But How Did He Get There?
Graeber gets around to his thesis by the third (and final) essay. But his journey through social theory in the intro and first two essays gives us some things to consider.
In his intro, Graeber defines our world as one of ‘total bureaucratization.’ Bureaucracy, on this view, has grown into all aspects of government, economy, and society in a totally novel way. All this provides the far right with an easy way to criticize ‘liberal elites.’ By, e.g., calling them ‘globalists.’
In the first essay, Graeber argues that structural violence leads to bureaucracy. He defines ‘structural violence’ not as a metaphor or analogy, as many theorists do today. Rather, he defines it as an implied threat of literal, physical violence. Consider, for example, ID checks. These hinge on a tacit threat to bring police force to bear on the person whose ID is checked.
Finally, in the second essay, Graeber writes about technology. He points out that capitalism, since the 1970s, no longer produces technological advances at anything like its rate of the previous decades. He traces these declines – accurately, I might point out – to tax and corporate policy discouraging innovation. To lowering corporate tax rates, undermining the status of workers, and so on.
Graeber and Marxism
And then Graeber stumbles over his criticism of Marxism, which is where he usually stumbles. In The Dawn of Everything, for example, he oddly rules out social forces as drivers of society.
In The Utopia of Rules, this arises in his critique of technology. He argues that the decline of capitalist innovation contradicts Marx’s work on technology. On Graeber’s reading, Marx claimed that capitalism produces an endless series of technological advances. And so, we should have flying cars by now! As well as many other sci-fi staples.
Of course, that’s not how Marxism works. Marx claimed that capitalism produces a series of technological advancements aimed at profit. And that’s exactly what capitalism has done. Graeber conflates technology with amazing whiz-bangs and gizmos. Unfortunately, what’s profitable doesn’t line up all that well with sci-fi gizmos.
Go figure.
