Yes to Bureaucracy!

I have no patience with anarcho-left bullshit. That’s as true of the kind of thing David Graeber was pushing in most of his writings as anything else. Someday I am going to write my essay on the perniciousness of James Scott on academia over the last several decades too. Power requires taking the mechanisms of power seriously and the anti-liberalism left over the past three decades has really failed to do any of this. Ned Resnikoff has a great essay in Dissent on the evils of Graeberism and how Mamdani is a demonstration of how the left can hold power effectively.

With Zohran Mamdani’s ascent to Gracie Mansion, a democratic socialist is now chief executive for the largest municipal bureaucracy in the United States, meaning that he oversees the daily activities of roughly 300,000 employees. Most of these employees are what the political scientist Michael Lipsky called “street-level bureaucrats”: the teachers, firefighters, cops, bus drivers, and others whose jobs put them into direct and regular contact with civilians. But they also include the urban planners, economists, analysts, and administrators who operate behind the scenes and at the higher echelons of city government: the people who help write the city’s budget, study traffic patterns, and run grant and incentive programs.

It is this latter category of civil servants that will be tasked with turning the cumbersome machinery of city government in the direction indicated by Mamdani and his political appointees. Implementing a sewer socialist agenda in New York City will be, to a great extent, an enormously complicated technical exercise, carried out by a small army of trained technicians.

It is difficult to predict how well Mamdani will perform as an administrator. One reason to be hopeful is that he’s surrounded himself with people who have more experience than him at managing large bureaucracies. His transition co-chairs included Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, and three former deputy mayors. During the campaign, he made a point of soliciting advice from seasoned public servants like former New York transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan (no relation to Lina) and former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia.

In another positive sign, Mamdani appears to have inspired a horde of supporters to join the civil service. Two days after the election, his transition team launched a portal to solicit applications for city jobs; within twenty-four hours, they reported that they had received 25,000 résumés.

That’s good news for New York City, but it’s also good for the left—not only because much of democratic socialism’s national credibility now hinges on Mamdani’s performance as mayor, but also because his example, and the example of supporters who follow him into public service, might help to liberate the American left from one of its more pernicious—and tenacious—intellectual tendencies.

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The poverty of anti-bureaucratic politics was on full display during a 2014 conversation between two of its most influential modern advocates, on both the left and the right. Peter Thiel, another avatar of the Californian Ideology and one of the most tireless popularizers of Silicon Valley fascism, participated in a public “debate” with David Graeber, the anthropologist and public intellectual who was the left’s most prominent bureaucracy skeptic until his death in 2020. The subject of the debate, which was hosted by The Baffler, was “Where Did the Future Go?” Graeber and Thiel were united in their belief that bureaucracy killed it; as Thiel said early on, “There’s a disturbing amount I actually agree with David on here.” Through their common intellectual forebears on the New Left, Thiel’s fascism is something of a distant cousin to Graeber’s anarchism. That shared intellectual lineage may help to explain the remarkably chummy tenor of the conversation.

Graeber and Thiel diverged in their prescriptions more than their diagnosis. As Graeber told Thiel, we ought to see American democracy for what it is: “a system of organized bribery and little more.” As one of the architects of Occupy Wall Street, Graeber held to his conviction that people should self-organize into democratic structures, and then use those structures to accomplish their goals outside the suffocating grip of the state. Thiel shared Graeber’s cynicism regarding the American project and agreed on working outside bureaucratic structures to achieve shared goals, but, as a self-described “political atheist,” he dissented on the “democracy” part.

In an essay republished in The Utopia of Rules, a 2015 collection pitched against the very idea of bureaucracy, Graeber wrote that it was “becoming increasingly clear that in order to really start setting up domes on Mars . . . we’re going to have to figure out a different economic system entirely,” because bureaucratic neoliberalism was unlikely to get us there. Thiel cited this passage as his point of divergence from Graeber. “I would say, in order to get cities on Mars with domes . . . we need to start working on going to Mars.” He noted that his former PayPal colleague, a man named Elon Musk, was doing just that: he had formed a company, SpaceX, that would work toward the colonization of Mars. He hadn’t waited for a revolution; he had just done it.

In his reply, Graeber never makes the case that SpaceX won’t be able to reach Mars, only that a democratically organized society is the more appealing mechanism for getting there. But why wait around for a democratic society if undemocratic (or even antidemocratic) firms are planning trips there right now? If you’re an ambitious young engineer who believes reaching Mars in the foreseeable future is more important than doing it as part of a horizontalist affinity group, what does Graeber’s vision have to offer you that Thiel’s does not?

Watching the debate can be a chilling experience, because Thiel has the stronger argument. At one point Graeber casually notes that he doesn’t “think that creating very large scale, but fundamentally democratic structures, historically, is that hard.” But he doesn’t provide any examples, and we can safely assume that he doesn’t believe any of what we call the modern world’s advanced representative democracies count. So what you’re left with is a vision far too airy and insubstantial to withstand a barrage from Thiel’s actually existing rockets.

That whole debate sounds like a time to call in the air strike. In any case, we need an explicitly statist leftism, not some weird anti-state hippie anarchist bullshit where we are taking Elon Musk and Mars colonies seriously. Sadly, enormous parts of the broader left, especially the intellectual class, fundamentally hate not just what society has become (fair enough) but the entire structures of society (the post-work intellectuals are one example). But to actually make the lives of people better, you have to take control over these structures, not dream about a future without them that is never, ever going to happen.