http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/22470-bureaucracy-autocracy-and-neoliberal-canada
[Long. Multiple links in on-line article. Unless you have lived
through this and been paying attention, you cannot imagine the seismic
shift in how the Canadian federal government operates over the past 10
years. I have been here, and I thought I was paying attention, and I am
still surprised frequently.]
Bureaucracy, Autocracy and Neoliberal Canada
Thursday, 20 March 2014 00:00 By Fred Guerin, Truthout | Op-Ed
We must not only intervene, resist and oppose neoliberal governments and
corporate capitalist hegemony; we must finally put an end to these
death-dealing institutions.
One cannot reflect upon the notion of human adaptability without
experiencing both a sense of awe and a feeling of increasing uneasiness.
We are awed when science tells us that one of the most powerful
evolutionary intellectual capacities we possess is the ability to adapt
to challenging and unforeseen situations and environments. We adjust to
extremities of weather, the loss of loved ones, constantly changing
technologies and shifting social, economic and political circumstances -
not always quickly or faultlessly, but inevitably, given time. In the
same moment of reflection, we can experience apprehension when we sense
that we have become habituated to things that are contrary to our
individual or communal interests: systemic injustices, intolerant,
racist or sexist attitudes. This is where adaptation becomes
acquiescence and even a kind of accommodation.
Here in Canada, the Harper government's advocacy of oil sands
development and its elaborate strategy to promote the Keystone XL
pipeline fills some Canadians with a sense of unease about how we appear
to be adapting to and even promoting things which run counter to the
environmental health of the planet. The relentless exploitation of
bituminous sands and the impact this has had on precious water
resources, not to mention the ecology of the Athabasca River itself,
should shock, anger and disgust all of us, not just as Canadians, but as
sentient and reflective moral beings. It doesn't. In fact, it seems that
for the past seven years, many Canadians have quietly acquiesced to
neoliberal government initiatives, radical policies and environmental
perspectives that will be detrimental to us as country, not to mention
as a species. To be sure, we have not all gone quietly into that dark
night, but the accommodating apathy that exists in significant enough
numbers should press us to raise the question of why there is not more
resistance to what is happening.
We often hear political pundits speaking of how certain kinds of
politics create "a culture" of apathy, fear, suspicion, bullying or
insensitivity of one sort or another. But we do not often stop to think
what is involved in the creation of such a "culture." The Roman thinker
and orator Cicero used the agricultural metaphor of "cultivation" to put
across the idea that education in the arts, sciences and philosophy can
encourage excellence and create a culture of individuals who want to
realize themselves creatively to the fullest extent possible. However,
to attempt to normalize a culture of fear and acquiescence does not
require philosophical or moral edification of any conventional sort.
What it does require is the elimination of possibility and human
creativity through the artifice of necessity. Fabricated forms of
necessity can manifest as disproportionate interest in national security
or contrived economic crises calling for deregulation and destructive
austerity measures - or both. Because these are false necessities they
must be elaborated through powerfully seductive propaganda and obscured
through institutional bureaucracies.
Therefore, to expose how modes of power and propaganda function in
Canada (or, indeed, anywhere else), we must make explicit two
presuppositions that, by their very nature, are so pervasive they are
sometimes difficult to perceive immediately. The first presupposition is
that it is not merely overt or coercive hegemonic power that drives the
engine of indoctrination and creates acquiescence and conformity. It is
a very peculiar kind of institutional and localized "power-knowledge"
that develops and especially prospers when it is coupled with
neoliberal, autocratic governments. The second presupposition is that
apathy and acquiescence are a consequence of very gradual political and
corporate indoctrination that consolidates power not only by inducing
fear and uncertainty but also by rewarding unbridled greed, opportunism
and self-interest.
If these two presuppositions prove on balance to be reasonable ones,
then perhaps in recognizing them as such, activists can better grapple
with how we might resist the neoliberal agenda in very specific,
practical and fundamental ways.
Embodied Bureaucratic Power-Knowledge
French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) reflected upon the
connection between power and knowledge - including the idea that
power-knowledge circulates throughout our institutional arrangements and
bureaucratic systems and is internalized and embodied in the practices
of individuals who operate at a piecemeal or micro level.1 To understand
this kind of power-knowledge, we need to first go back to a time before
Foucault and look at the German sociologist Max Weber's description of
how bureaucracies function in institutions.
The recognized goal of any bureaucracy is to maximize efficiency. This
is accomplished by creating closed systems that adopt micro technologies
of control, and elaborate procedures of internal discipline that help
reinforce certain attitudes and perspectives. The kind of rationality
that is able to accommodate these technologies, procedures and
efficiency goals can be described as instrumental or "means-ends"
rationality - "to get to B, we must first do A." While this kind of
rationality is certainly important and useful when we are dealing with
objects or things such as fixing cars or building a birdhouse, it is
rather more limited when applied to the human sphere of moral and
political action and reflection. In other words, it is not the kind of
creative or contemplative rationality that attempts to discover the
common good or new ways of understanding the world and communicating
with others. Nor is it the sort of critical rationality that endeavours
to interpret and uncover hidden truths, or discover why things are done.
Creative and critical rationality are oriented by truth or moral
considerations and guided by what happens in the real world - the world
of facts on the ground. By contrast, bureaucratic rationality can
operate without the latter, being solely concerned with one thing: how
to efficiently achieve a result. Because of this, bureaucracies often
are experienced as unresponsive to human difficulties or needs. They can
appear irrational, out of sync with the real world, overly formal or
lacking a moral center. Of course, from their own internal technocratic
point of view, many bureaucrats see themselves as resourceful and
"rational" public or civil servants who carry out clear and unambiguous
objectives in an efficient manner. However, this self-understanding is
what Weber would describe as a kind of "rationalization," which amounts
to a refusal to grasp that one really exists in an "iron cage" of
bureaucratic necessity - "specialists without spirit, sensualists
without heart" to quote from Weber's Protestant Ethic.2
Foucault's later reflections on the subjugation and control of
individuals through the concept of "bio-power" can take us a step
farther and help us to grasp that in such bureaucratic institutional
arrangements, it is not so much who has power or how much power someone
wields (in the larger scheme of decision-making most bureaucratic
functionaries have no significant coercive power), but how
indoctrinating power itself circulates through relations with others. It
is not so much about what is commanded or said by the local manager or
director, but what is not said - and not permitted to be said or even
contemplated by the myriad nameless persons who keep the institutional
machine aligned according to a framework of very specific procedures and
priorities. To function properly, the persons involved need not be
directly coerced by an external hegemonic or central authority. Neither
do they need to be motivated by any explicit adherence to universal
moral imperatives or grand ideological doctrines.
Instead, their understanding of what they must do and what is
appropriate - what is permitted and what is to be avoided or censored -
is gradually "embodied" and absorbed - not by way of explicit command
but through the very doing of things with others whom they work
alongside. Indoctrination through local forms of institutional
power-knowledge is not achieved by any one person. Rather, it is
persuasive power that is dispersed in diffuse and discreet ways through
technical manuals, policy documents, email, memos and the regimented
routines of everyday disciplined practices. It is not so much a
hierarchy of power that is being described here but something like an
expanding or spreading network of power-knowledge and self-empowering
mutually reinforcing indoctrination. In other words, what is being
created is a certain kind of docile culture where the learning curve is
not oriented toward creativity, diversity, flexibility or justice but
rather routinized thinking, compartmentalization, uniformity and rigidity.
Why is this sort of embodied bureaucratic power-knowledge important? It
is important because bureaucratic systems are ideal instruments of
indoctrination and optimal mediums for autocratic neoliberal
governmental regimes where the common or public good, social justice or
human happiness can be subsumed under putatively "necessary" economic,
corporate or militaristic ambitions. These latter ambitions must be
undertaken in an efficient and covert manner without questioning their
truth or moral status. Bureaucracies can provide this. Institutional
bureaucracies can establish and promote a neoliberal autocratic agenda
in piecemeal fashion, remaining largely unnoticed by the general public.
In authentic democratic contexts, bureaucracies may indeed play a
functional role in efficiently carrying out agreed-upon services and
even aid in the furtherance of general or common good. However, under
increasingly autocratic governmental regimes, they can just as
efficiently do the reverse - that is, they can turn the virtue of common
good into a perceived vice. The extreme example of a bureaucracy
operating under an autocratic or totalitarian regime is shockingly
illustrated in the very efficient factories of death that were the Nazi
concentration camps. But even in our own day we can see examples of how
emerging autocratic governments can use bureaucratic systems such as
Canada's Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, the US Department of
Homeland Security, NSA, GCHQ or CSEC to great advantage. When such
governments seize upon natural or man-made disasters, imminent economic
recession, global competitiveness, the threat of terrorism or impending
war, to authorize autocratic forms of governance, they require these
sorts of bureaucracies to carry out their agendas.3
Bureaucratic power-knowledge is not only the most efficient means
through which autocratic government agendas can be disseminated; it is
also, by its very nature, a perfect mechanism of concealment. What
happens at the bureaucratic institutional level under autocratic
governments usually is accessible only to insiders. Efficiency and
orthodoxy require that officials operate at a protected remove from
public scrutiny. The relationship between bureaucracy and autocracy is,
in fact, a mutually reinforcing one. Bureaucracies serve to conceal
autocratic government agendas, and autocratic perspectives are widely
disseminated in rigid bureaucratic institutions.
In modern neoliberal contexts where the formality (although not the
substance) of democracy still exists, the relationship between
bureaucracy and government is more indirect than in classical
totalitarian regimes. In other words, bureaucracies can appear to
operate in a quasi-autonomous way. However, because neoliberal
governments typically exist in lockstep with corporate capitalist
priorities, public prerogatives often tend to be superseded by private
corporate interests.4
This abrogation of public interest may not be immediately evident
because the hegemony of corporate capitalism is not total and there is
still operative a nominal democratic tradition - however, weak. As a
result, institutions, agencies, commissions and regulators, even under a
modern corporate capitalist economy will be permitted to embody their
own particular "truth-orientation" and internal practical
self-justification, which will not need to be continuously authorized,
legitimated or overtly disciplined by an external authority. At the same
time, although they can operate at a remove from central power, local
and embodied modes of institutional and bureaucratic power always exist
in the shadow of an ever-watchful eye (or Panopticon, to use a
Benthamite metaphor).
In the autocratic context, these inner-party officials ensure that what
is said or done in distant institutional domains remains within orthodox
boundaries. In this way, even if bureaucratic power-knowledge flourishes
and circulates in local institutional arrangements through work routines
and practices, legal memos and procedural policies, it never operates in
an entirely stand-alone fashion. Moreover, the values and culture of an
institution will tend, over time, to reflect the ideological priorities
of neoliberal governments. That they are subject to such ideological
indoctrination undoubtedly would be denied by bureaucratic
functionaries, because to accept that they are defined or "controlled"
by a central power would be to admit that they are mere unthinking
robots rather than autonomous practitioners and preservers of orthodoxy
and practical truth in their own local realm. However, in the same
moment of denial, these individuals also may intuitively know and
understand that they are at the mercy of a central indoctrinating power
whose goals and priorities must be internalized at a practical everyday
level.
One is reminded here of the Orwellian notion of doublethink, or holding
together (without any measure of cognitive dissonance), two
contradictory thoughts. The capacity for doublethink would be considered
a virtue in the most rigid and extreme bureaucracies. But there are
other pathological traits that also can be found in the bureaucrat who
rises to the top under the direction of an autocratic government.
Ideally, such a person will be one who either already is oriented toward
or can eventually adapt to any given set of institutional priorities,
whether these latter serve the public interest or not. Obedience,
docility, amorality and careerism will be duly rewarded. Those who can
regularly suspend any desire they have to think from the perspective of
another, or on behalf of a more universal or common good will be
promoted and encouraged to view such thinking as detrimental to both the
interests of the institution and their own self-interest.
Of course, it goes without saying that this sort of careerist work
culture will be rather more challenging for those individuals who still
have intact a sense of social justice or public good. In autocratic
governmental contexts, the few who refuse to conform to the local "truth
regime" or express unorthodox views at odds with a prevailing practice
usually are singled out for censure, avoided or kept out of a privileged
knowledge loop. If somehow they manage to keep their position, they
likely end up as barely tolerated outsiders. They might explicitly know
that they are part of an inhumane or intolerant system, but very few
would be willing to entirely opt out as Edward Snowden or Daniel
Ellsberg did. Instead, they tend to continue to resist despite the
pressure put on them to conform, hoping that the arc of the
institutional universe eventually will "bend toward tolerance" if not
toward justice. In some cases, those who try to work around rigid
bureaucratic rules might even be considered necessary, if only to keep
alive the conceit of organizational flexibility.
This is a very powerful kind of power. It is the sort of power that
creates a durable, servile and amoral culture. Under autocratic forms of
governance, it is a seductive power that can invert the moral order and
reward psychopathological personalities. In other words, it can turn
virtues like empathy and justice into vices and vices such as greed,
inflexibility and rank opportunism into virtues. Additionally, it is a
form of local indoctrinating power that is hidden from open view,
internalized and practically embodied, not in a singular evident
structure, but throughout the fabric of persons and the day to day
practices they are involved in. It is a notion of bureaucratic
indoctrinating power-knowledge that continuously reproduces itself and
is legitimated through the formation of a certain kind of disciplined,
docile subject that flourishes because it knows how and when to operate
in such a way that its own self-interests are met, and institutional
norms and attitudes are perpetuated.
Stephen Harper and Harperite Autocracy
Once this institutional bureaucratic reality is exposed, it becomes much
more evident how autocrats such as Stephen Harper have been able to
maintain a facade of moderate "conservatism" while pursuing the most
radically destructive environmental, social, economic and carceral
policy agenda since the founding of Confederation.
What the Harper government, unlike any previous Canadian government, has
recognized (much like the fictional character O'Brien in George Orwell's
novel 1984) is that a government that really does not believe in
"government," the public good or the democratic rights of citizens, can
seize the indoctrinating potential that such local institutional power
has and endlessly sustain and reproduce their ideology in very specific
procedures, practices and occupational relations. Even if they
themselves do not stay in office forever, the impact of their far-right
policies would be entrenched procedurally and embodied socially for
generations. This can be accomplished at a legislative and policy level,
through the threat of police force and by way of propaganda.
At a macro procedural level, the Harper government has realized a form
of hegemonic power by aggressively pushing ahead with orders in council
and omnibus bills that undermine traditional forms of democratic
participation and debate in the House of Commons. These bills (often
400-plus pages) conceal all manner of unrelated social and economic
initiatives and propose regressive adjustments to labour, criminal
justice and environmental legislation. They are often "fast-tracked"
with imposed limits on debate. The intention of this kind of accelerated
approval process is to put unrelenting pressure on parliamentarians to
simply acquiesce and hit the "I Accept" button.
Examples of radical and controversial policy and legal changes concealed
in Orders in Council, government initiatives, internal practices and
procedures, and various omnibus bills are legion: the abolishment of the
long-form census; trade deals negotiated in secret; the gradual
diminishment of the relevance of the civil service; the criminalization
of dissent and victimless drug use; gradually more restrictive
immigration policies; the devaluation of legal judgment in the push
toward mandatory minimum sentences; growing intrusive surveillance of
private lives; unnecessary military spending and expansive unparalleled
support for arms manufacture and the sale of weapons; the micro-control
of the PMO and the media, the uncritical, sycophantic (and often
embarrassing) embrace of Israel, the decimation of scientific research
and evidence-based decision-making in environmental, social and economic
policy. All of these radical and far-reaching measures have been
dispersed and codified over seven years in seemingly innocuous orders in
council, omnibus bills, hidden in piecemeal administrative adjustments,
buried in policy manuals and normalized in institutional micro-practices.
What this legislative approach illustrates is a profound contempt for
the democratic process. It signals to citizens that the Harper
conservatives are above any conventional form of political
accountability to Parliament itself. This is even more apparent in the
decision to subvert constitutional mechanisms such as prorogation, and
use them to cynically shut down opposition parties and immunize
themselves from criticism and non-confidence motions. When it becomes
commonplace to arbitrarily seize the power of prorogation, we are living
in a state ruled by decree. Ruling by decree is, in effect, allowing the
rule of the person (or party) to trump the rule of law. It is to suspend
the law in such a way that the distinction between democracy and
autocracy is erased while arbitrariness and exceptionalism become the
governing "principles."
Secondly, during the G20 summit, the Harper government authorized and
encouraged police to violate fundamental constitutional rights, and
indeed the rule of law itself, to instil in the public a lasting
impression that any kind of individual or group resistance against the
corporate elite economic agenda would not be tolerated. The consequence
of such a repressive and relentless exercise of police power has been,
in effect, to normalize a brutalizing, "zero-tolerance" approach toward
anything approaching dissent or resistance and, with it, a suspicious
and distrustful attitude toward citizens at large. As the governmental
regime becomes increasingly more autocratic, it becomes more and more
imperative to convert citizens, civil society and other groups into
"suspects." Once again, it is important to see the direct and powerful
messaging effect here. When governments normalize an arbitrary police
power that transcends the rule of law, wherever democratic protest
threatens to disrupt the agenda of the powerful, they are explicitly
telling us that we no longer live in a democracy.
Thirdly, from a more subtle propagandistic and doctrinaire perspective,
the government secures its hold on power because Harper himself is quite
intelligent enough to know that the strategy of gradual imposition of
policies and laws designed to redefine Canada along radical
anti-democratic, neoliberal lines cannot be spoken of openly, as such,
by government officials or the mainstream press. Propaganda is the
instrument that neoliberal governments use as a way of framing issues
and adjusting reality so that it accords with their narrow perspectives
on the market, criminal law, the reduction of social and health
services, the deregulation of environmental safety, privatizing goods
and services etc.
For example, when issues surrounding the economy, the environment, or
the criminal justice system are discussed by government officials, they
are always articulated in a form of rhetoric that is not intended to
inform citizens, but to manage their perceptions. They do this by
leaving out much of the detail and employing a populist, euphemistic
language: "open government and transparency"; being "tough on crime";
"encouraging a strong resource-based economy" that "creates jobs";
negotiating new and improved free trade deals that benefit everyone;
defending the integrity of Canadian borders and so on. The goal of such
propaganda is to exploit the implicitly moral and universally approved
language of "common or public good" while doing everything possible to
ensure that the latter is never realized - simply because pursuing the
common or public good can adversely affect the power, profit and
privilege of a select few. What is the truth beneath or behind the
propaganda?
The disturbing reality, amply evidenced by the facts on the ground, is
that the current conservative government is the least open and
transparent, is "tough on crime" (now "The Safe Streets and Communities
Act"), is filling the jails with people who should not be there; is
accelerating the pace of devastating climate change, is destroying the
country's most beautiful landscapes for profit and is promising to sign
trade deals that will compromise sovereignty, labour rights and
environmental protections while giving corporations the unprecedented
power to protect investors, curtail communicative freedom and rewrite
domestic law.
All of these measures require bureaucratic enablers. The nameless,
countless administrators, academics, careerists and bureaucrats who
willingly keep the Harper machine running are enablers in the sense that
they are the perfect medium of power-knowledge through which the
"banality of evil," to borrow the words of the political philosopher
Hannah Arendt, is dispersed and integrated into everyday practices,
career ambitions and bureaucratic procedures. The "evil" Arendt
describes is not conspicuous evil but manifests as a deepening desire to
think from the perspective of immediate self-interest, and to resist
thinking from the perspective of another. The possibility of
spontaneity, of democracy or of a moral public sphere where diverse
perspectives are encouraged presupposes that we are still capable of
thinking from the perspective of others outside of ourselves.
What happens when we lose this capacity - when we become incapable of
thinking outside of our own insulated self-interest? In an important
sense, we lose touch with our moral being and our political agency. For
powerful and autocratic neoliberals, it is of primary importance to
eradicate communal solidarity and diminish any sense of a common
morality or expectation that the role of government is to advance the
public good. If they are successful, the result is an impoverished
population that is much more docile, solitary, withdrawn and vulnerable
to the sort of propaganda that appeals to primitive fears or the threat
of the "other" who wants to "take what we have." The promotion of
destructive neoliberal policies at the macro and micro level implicitly
and explicitly rewards those who are able to forego thinking from the
perspective of others, or in the interests of the public at large.
Instead, it cultivates in them a primitive desire to think and act only
according to their own institutional and individual interest. When this
occurs, citizens no longer think or act as citizens but inevitably
revert to a more primal and brutish Hobbesian "state of nature" where
human life is described as a "war of all against all."
Countering the Neoliberal End-Game
The goal of macro-procedural, hegemonic parliamentary power, coercive
police power, institutional power-knowledge and media propaganda is,
finally, to eradicate the "political" itself. By the political I do not
refer to the hollowed-out "politics" of strategic maneuvring and vacuous
political debate, which can continue forever without substantially
changing anything. In its most authentic form the political is the space
where individuals can make meaningful choices and act in concert, where
‘the possibility of possibility' can be realized, where community is
inaugurated, where something new can be brought forward and where
dialogue, diversity and difference - the ideals that formed the
groundwork of our Constitution and Charter of Rights - are still
acknowledged and actively pursued.
Here, then, is the stark truth of what must be done: we must not only
intervene, resist and oppose neoliberal governments and corporate
capitalist hegemony;we must finally put an end to both of them. The
planet and all of its inhabitants simply cannot survive if the latter
remain intact in any form - we must put this nihilistic death-philosophy
itself to death. We must "by opposing, end it" for its intention is only
to destroy life. Can we do it?
This essay described the culture of fear and acquiescence that follows
from the elimination of human creativity and possibility and the
imposition by autocratic governments of artificial forms of economic or
militaristic necessity which are entrenched, extended and protected by
propaganda and bureaucracy. Despite this often discouraging state of
affairs, it is still very possible to create a different sort of culture
based on the courage to speak and act as individuals and in concert with
others. How?
For every kind of indoctrinating power-knowledge that arises, there is
also specific and knowledgeable resistance to that power by individuals
and whistleblowers at local levels. This kind of conscious, critical and
informed resistance must be encouraged and specific instances of
injustice, discrimination, negligence and one-sidedness must be brought
to light. We need to hear insider information about what is going wrong
from bureaucrats, academics and union workers who witness it firsthand
in government departments, agencies and commissions. We need to hear
from individuals in the public and civil service who recognize that what
is happening is neither good for Canada nor the world.
We also need coordinated and direct action in the streets, at corporate
headquarters, at the site of every gas-fracking, oil-sands project,
before the gates of Parliament, the White House and the UN, at the doors
of every official political-corporate climate-change gathering or trade
conference. We must internalize the truism that the essence of
possibility, of political freedom, of environmental, ecological renewal
and moral transformation begins and ends with courageous and sustained
action and activism.
The alternative is to acquiesce and accommodate, going quietly into the
darkest of nights. In the face of the real and permanent destruction
that follows the neoliberal corporate logic of growth at any cost, it is
our future world that is now at stake - and this is something we simply
cannot buy back once it has been squandered.
NOTES
1 See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews and other
Writings. Edited by Colin Gordon, Pantheon Books, New York 1972. Also
see Michel Foucault, Power Volume 3. Edited by James D. Faubion, New
York Press. Online summaries of Foucault's work can be found at the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy.
2 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
translated by Talcott Parsons, Roxbury Publishing Company, 1996. Page
182. See also, Max Weber, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
3 There are many more such institutions, departments and agencies in
Canada and the United States. The exploitation of various kinds of
natural and man-made disasters by governments and corporations is
convincingly made by Naomi Klein in her influential and ground-breaking
work The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Picador 2008
4 There are myriad examples of government regulatory agencies that, over
time, have become captive to the destructive priorities of industry and
corporate capitalism. In the United States, the Commodity Futures
Trading Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal
Communications Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration are
subject to powerful moneyed lobbyists and are overrun by former industry
workers and technocrats. In Canada The Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission,
the Department of the Environment, etc. have all been pressured to make
decisions that run against public interests in favor of corporate ones.
Regulatory capture is normally considered to be a failure of government,
but where neoliberal governments abandon political governance in favour
of economic subservience to corporate capitalist imperatives, such
capture is considered a success story.
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