An activist in the Occupy movement and a theorist of “anarchist anthropology”, he ascribes most of the evils of society to oppressive state structures. Though it provides strong support for one part of his argument, there may be a certain logic in Graeber overlooking this experience. The cult of the market has produced a society throttled by bureaucracy. In contrast, since the injection of market mechanisms into public institutions, life in Britain has become more invasively regulated than it has ever been. Established as part of the 1945 postwar settlement, they were creations of a strong state, but they were not distracted from their true functions by intrusive monitoring and shifting targets set by governments. The old-style NHS was like many of our public services. The vast managerial class that stands between the medical profession and patients today didn’t exist then, any more than did armies of low-paid contract workers. But it wasn’t a monument to wasteful and dysfunctional management, and even in narrow economic terms it operated far more efficiently than the elephantine bureaucracy it has since become. No doubt the NHS as it existed a generation ago was far from perfect. The upshot has been a compelling demonstration of his iron law in action. With this diagnosis in mind, it is surprising that Graeber doesn’t explore recent British experience, which has seen successive Conservative and Labour governments attempting to import an American model of market-driven competition into public services. This is what happens, Graeber believes, when governments insist on market solutions to every social problem: “a nightmare fusion of the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism”. In effect, such a regime defeats the purposes of the institution it is meant to regulate. Much of the red tape he came up against surrounded the American Medicare system, which he uses to show how a regime of rules can promote a condition of helpless stupidity in those who deliver the services and those who use them. A t the start of this unusual and interesting book, which is subtitled “On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy”, David Graeber states what he calls the iron law of liberalism: any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.Īn American anthropologist who is currently professor of anthropology at LSE, Graeber begins his inquiry with an angry and moving account of the horrendous form-filling he endured when he had to place his aged mother in a nursing home after she had a stroke.

Society utopia meme