"The Tiger We Need to Tame," or "studies in the role of bureaucracy and the bureaucratic mentality and how to defeat it," was extremely insightful and enlightening. Today, I believe we can further define bureaucracy; place it in a historical context, environment and chart its further demise. "The Tiger We Need to Tame" defines bureaucracy as: "Definitions of the term "bureaucracy" have filled huge books. No need to recall them all. Let us restrict ourselves to the most basic definitions. According to the Spanish Dictionary of the Royal Academy, bureaucracy means an ensemble of public servants; always the excessive influence of functionaries in public affairs; and lastly, inefficient management, hampered by paperwork, rigidity and superfluous formalities." "bureaucracy means an ensemble of public servants; always the excessive influence of functionaries in public affairs; and lastly, inefficient management, hampered by paperwork, rigidity and superfluous formalities." A standard American English definition of bureaucracy is: "administrative system: an administrative system, especially in a government, that divides work into specific categories carried out by special departments of nonelected officials." Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Both definitions wed bureaucracy to property relations and its governmental agencies as management - administrations. The English definition injects the concept of a "system of administration" (administrative system) which begs the question "administration of what?" There are only two categories of reality that can be administered; people and things, as systems. Therefore, the bureaucracy as "administrative system composed of an ensemble of public servants," is the indispensable condition for the success, stability and growth of the revolution and simultaneously the basis for the death of the revolution. The self perpetuating nature - character, of administration is impossible to activate by the individual and requires groups of people, as the revolutionary class to organized themselves in a certain way to make administration possible in the first place. This is so because of the inherent quality of social production - cooperation, requiring different people to do different things to meet society needs. Thus, administration - bureaucracy, as a social phenomenon has one foot planted in property relations as government/state (organization of people to accomplish a definite need/end) and secondly, productive forces as the division of labor in society or a specific state of development of the productive forces and its underlying technological regime. Organization involves vertical and horizontal administration or "up and down," and "side to side," administration as every factory or office worker knows. This vertical and horizontal organization as a principle, is rooted in the division of labor as fundamentality rather than the property relations, or the "revolutionary party" because there is no other way for millions of people, committing hundreds of millions of daily acts and actions, to achieve a collective end. In the first and last instance bureaucracy has its taproot in the division of labor, which since the break up of the society of primitive communism, has appeared as a product of the property relations and class rule. Class rule constructs and consolidates bureaucracy but is not the taproot of bureaucracy. Modern bureaucracy taproot sinks beneath the productive forces as an abstract category, into the historically specific configuration of the productive forces - machinery of society or is fused with an industrial form and industrial time frame references, "sitting" on cooperation. Today, as America passes deeper and deeper into revolution in the productive forces - mode of production, the industrial form of organization and consequently industrial bureaucracy is being shattered, displaced and incrementally regulated to history. Specifically, the new technological regime does not destroy cooperation but "folds it into and unto" the new configuration of industry, that is witnessed as displacement of labor and the destruction for the need of layers of individuals to administer. Little by little the phenomenon of bureaucracy end game appears, with primarily the property relations appearing as its last refuge. Bureaucracy poses itself as the gravest of danger to the revolution because it cannot be vanquished from history on the basis of revolutionary vigilance. Until a development in the productive forces occurs rendering bureaucracy historically and practically obsolete, vigilance and ideological fortitude is a premium. Cuban society does not have the material foundation for communism. Until they achieve this material foundation, which is in the distant future and bound up with either revolution in the US, or revolution through South America: preferably both, ideological firmness is the key to the revolution withstanding the tremendous pressure of the counterrevolution exerted against it. Thus, bureaucracy emerges a key battlefront because it separates the revolutionary class from the masses and then the revolutionary leaders from both, while blocking and stymieing the achievement of practical goals. These achievable practical goals are sensed and understood by the masses and their realization or non-realization verifies - is proof of, the correctness of the revolution. "The tiger we need to tame," is an excellent concept of the fight against bureaucracy. Tamed rather than destroy, because it is not possible to wipe bureaucracy from history on the basis of "furious and passionate struggles," ill conceived calls for "democratic organization of the revolutionary class," that runs counter to the principles of cooperation and collide with the indispensable vertical organization of the revolution. These ill conceived notions of democracy become the hotbed for counterrevolution and the ideological recruiting ground for primarily youngsters, whose youthfulness has not yet afforded them the opportunity to be tempered - steeled, on the basis of the principle of cooperation. The real revolutionary democratic organization of the revolutionary class is dependent upon the advanced culture of the citizens, ideology and the revolutionary leaders. The relationship that is mutual dependence between leaders, the revolutionary class and masses; culture and ideology shifts in relative weight with the deepening of cooperation; the material and technological basis of production. While all revolutionaries feel world revolution is desirable, the world is only going to go into the subjective dimensions of revolution when it is ready. In the mean time the revolution where it has achieved victory has to proceed based on an estimate of its own forces. Advanced culture does not mean "high culture," "literary studies," or "ritual custom attuned to the period of bourgeois enlightenment," but "cooperation," an awareness of the individual as producer; their ritual habit as producer and "place" in the system of production; an awareness of "why" and "how" bureaucracy poses itself as indispensable and dangerous to the revolution. Certain people convert the meaning of advanced culture into a notion of "bourgeois enlightenment;" the endless penning away at their most personalized and individual meaning of democracy and the ideological notion that all vertical leadership is inherently wrong. Certain people want to be holier than the Pope and more democratic than the popular masses, who long ago made the decision that the revolution needs leaders, which is why the leaders who come forth tend to be the best the collective will can produce at any given moment. Over and over Lenin warned that the October Revolution would pay for its ignorance and lack of culture. Rather than "bookish high culture" or anarchist definitions of the "vertical leaders," being the source of bureaucracy; or "bourgeoisie enlightenment," Lenin meant the cooperative culture the proletariat, as a class, acquires as a commodity producer and its corresponding expression in self organization. The seedbed of bureaucracy is in the division of labor. Consequently, bureaucracy as a historical phenomenon, rather than form and methods of administration, decays and withers away in unison and correspondence to the withering away of the state. The vision of American communists can be filled with optimism because with the destruction of the power of capital; the cultural conditioning of our proletariat (high brow, low brow and above all as commodity producer) when combined with our advanced means of production long ago rendered obsolete the need for certain layers of vertical government and non-government forms of organization. We most certainly do not need any vertical national agencies to tell people to go to school; to mobilize and deploy labor and direct where to build housings or what occupation the individual must choose. In the hands of the revolutionary class, no matter what forms of struggle and creative/democratic institutions are shaped, we possess the technological basis to make our society a gigantic learning and cultural institution, where laboring as we have known it vanishes in the space of a few years. Advanced culture ushers in human happiness, but both must have a basis in the productive forces and division of labor. The foundation of human happiness is contentment and its foundation is the elimination of strife. Strife as we have known it is a negative thing 40 centuries deep. Contentment grows when you are no longer troubled. Our troubles arise and arose from material scarcity. When we do away with that and its current class form as control of scarcity, we begin to build on the positive things in society. Happiness is an emotion that arises with positive contribution. This happiness can be in the form of creating a new song, raising a child, painting a picture, building an organization or neighborhood. Happiness is a social thing. The idea is to have a full life. This always demands we struggle to create the conditions for a full life, with the unbreakable understanding that individual death is not the end of life. The continuation of life is to be experienced and gleamed in the eye of ones child, any child, the eyes of loved ones and a positive outlook that really understands that the revolutionary class cannot be derailed from our long struggle for human happiness. Bureaucracy is unhappiness, strife, demoralization, bad attitude infesting the flesh and made manifest. Bureaucracy is a psychosis. The state as state, cannot cure a psychosis. In each stage of this struggle for human happiness bureaucracy appears as a drag on the revolution threatening to separate the revolutionary class from the masses and the leaders from the revolutionary class, because it ritualizes old custom, ritualizes the culture and psychology of scarcity and its behavior; blocks the attainment of practical goals, and fails to grab hold of the indispensable aspects of the culture of value relations, which changes with every juncture in the development and evolution of the revolutionary process. Victory to the Revolution. Unite or Perish. WL. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from _http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm_ (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm)
(http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=835&Item id=1) The tiger we need to tame By Luis Sexto Read Spanish Version In Cuba, people say, bureaucratic attitudes respond with a problem for every solution, with a "no" to a "yes." They dilute every initiative in papers and meetings. And they see reality through the color of their windowpanes, or from their balconies, usually high and distant from the street or the factories. Or through reports that are usually adulterated by those who do not wish their errors to be known. Therefore, any project to renew and improve socialism in Cuba -- in addition to facing the opposition generated in Miami, Washington and Madrid, and by those inside the country who try in various ways to push Cuba into capitalism -- will first have to annul bureaucratic resistance. That's because everything that appears to be a limitation of the bureaucracy's interests, its privileges, its ability to delegitimize every constructive decision and every freedom will meet with bureaucratic hostility, in the form of indifference, extremism or distortion. There is more than enough proof of this. For example, why did the countryside fill with government offices after Fidel Castro once denounced (and President Raúl Castro condemned again) the spread of the marabú weed? Not long ago, a Havana newspaper published a complaint from a reader. A train and a truck crashed at some railroad crossing and, to prevent a repetition of the accident, the local functionaries shut down the crossing with two concrete barriers. Now, if sick people need to drive to the clinic on the other side of the former crossing, 30 yards away, they'll have to make an 8-kilometer detour. Sounds like a joke, but it is an administrative decision. We see it clearly: the greatest danger of the bureaucratic mentality and norms may be that they impede the self-regulation of socialism. Usually, we do not speak about that mechanism, which we attribute to capitalism. Why does any rectification cost so much and take so long? Living organisms tend to persist in their existence; therefore, to reject reshaping and correction implies the probability of that purpose. And recent history confirms this. The so-called real socialism was born with the bacteria of self-destruction buried deep in its structure. And those corrosive germs are essentially related to the vertically rigid organization that facilitated the birth and hierarchy of a bureaucracy that, according to Marx scholars such as the Mexican Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, became a system of class -- if not in itself, then for itself, I might clarify -- and politically fed from the surpluses produced by the workers, who, paradoxically, received their salaries in the socialist organization that followed Red October. Soviet and European socialism, therefore, dissolved thanks to the bureaucratic distortions that forced political discourse to float in the air, dazzled by its own vision of itself, even as it didn't recognize reality on the streets. It will not be necessary to continue to invent enemies other than those we already recognize. In summary, the principal causes of the extinction of 20th-Century socialism, the socialism that failed, were within itself. It incubated the mentality (not to say the class) that discarded the use of power that was truly exercised by the workers in socialism by using an unbridgeable dichotomy: verticality vis-à-vis a democratic horizontality. And, let's admit it: where democracy is absent and centralism expands at the expense of both sides, bureaucracy prospers. And with it, dogma and corruption grow. Definitions of the term "bureaucracy" have filled huge books. No need to recall them all. Let us restrict ourselves to the most basic definitions. According to the Spanish Dictionary of the Royal Academy, bureaucracy means an ensemble of public servants; always the excessive influence of functionaries in public affairs; and lastly, inefficient management, hampered by paperwork, rigidity and superfluous formalities. José Martí foresaw the dangers of an uncontrolled bureaucracy that had taken over the reins of power. He branded "the bureaucratic life" as "a danger and a scourge" and hoped to see the Cuban republic free from the "plague of the bureaucrats." Evidently, the Apostle of Independence and Unifier of the Nation suspected that bureaucracy, as a representative of the people's interests, might at some time ignore those interests and protect its own interests as a group or caste. In that sense, Martí anticipated the opinions of Sánchez Vázquez and other theoreticians. Today in Cuba, the rigidity, red tape and inefficient management attributed to bureaucracy by the Royal Academy dictionary has been a sort of Fairy Godmother in reverse: everything her magic wand touches becomes a caricature of socialist aspirations. It mistreats and infects every creative achievement Fidel Castro's Revolution brought to Cuba. Adapting an image by the acerbic Italian writer Giovanni Papini, bureaucracy -- transformed into a mentality, an ideology -- holds the secret of an alchemy that turns gold into excrement. In that sense, it has been an unconscious or involuntary accomplice of the U.S. blockade. Maybe, also unconsciously, it is to bureaucracy's advantage that the blockade will endure, as a guarantee of bureaucracy's interfering and anarchical existence. In Cuba, then, an ideological and political confrontation also seems inexcusable. On the table are two cards: the survival of the Revolution, with its string of goals and aspirations still not fulfilled or deteriorated by almost 20 years of limitations; or its detour along paths that will denaturalize it. Because they are improvisational, cumbersome, limiting and alienating, bureaucratic indifference and inefficiency tend to liquidate the cause of socialism in the heart of the people. And the antidote would be the same people using more democratic spaces and controls, even in the economy. Formulas don't exist, of course, except for the now-useless ones. Socialist solutions in Cuba will have to find their own way. And, in these circumstances, that is almost paradoxical. Can bureaucracy, with its pseudo-revolutionary affectations, its reluctance to consider any new idea, execute and support a process of readjustment that is careful but bold and timely? It seems that, first, it will have to be reduced to the dictionary definition: an ensemble of public servants. That's its ideal state. But will we be brave enough to oblige it -- like the tamer to a tiger -- to walk, head low, to the corner where it belongs? Luis Sexto is a journalist and professor at the School of Communications of the University of Havana. Last week he was named recipient of the 2009 Jose Marti National Journalism Award. He writes for several national publications and has contributed to foreign publications. Now he contributes to Progreso Semanal. **************Get a jump start on your taxes. Find a tax professional in your neighborhood today. 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