Bureaucracy and Structural Violence

Extract from David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

 

“What I would like to argue is that situations created by violence—particularly structural violence, by which I mean forms of pervasive social inequality that are ultimately backed up by the threat of physical harm—invariably tend to create the kinds of wilful blindness we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures.

 

To put it crudely: it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behaviour that they themselves define as stupid—though they do do that—but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence. This approach, I think, has the potential to tell us a great deal about both how bureaucracy has come to pervade every aspect of our lives, and why we don’t notice it.

Now. I admit that this emphasis on violence might seem odd. We are not used to thinking of nursing homes or banks or even HMOs as violent institutions—except perhaps in the most abstract and metaphorical sense. But the violence I’m referring to here is not abstract. I am not speaking of conceptual violence. I am speaking of violence in the literal sense: the kind that involves, say, one person hitting another over the head with a wooden stick.



All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of violence: that is, the ability to call up people dressed in uniforms, willing to threaten to hit others over the head with wooden sticks.

It is curious how rarely citizens in industrial democracies actually think about this fact, or how instinctively we try to discount it’s importance. This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on the fact that, had they insisted on their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be required.

 

It’s almost as if the more we allow the aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic relations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm.

Actually, the very use of the term “structural violence” is an excellent case in point. When I first began working on this essay, I took it for granted that the term referred to actual violence that operates in an indirect form.

Imagine, if you will, some warlike tribe (let’s call them the Alphas) that sweeps out of the desert and seizes a swath of land inhabited by peaceful farmers (let’s call them Omegas). But instead of exacting tribute, they appropriate all the fertile land, and arrange for their children to have privileged access to most forms of practical education, at the same time initiating a religious ideology that holds that they are intrinsically superior beings, finer and more beautiful and more intelligent, and that the Omegas, now largely reduced to working on their estates, have been cursed by the divine powers for some terrible sin, and have become stupid, ugly, and base.

And perhaps the Omegas internalise their disgrace and come to act as if they believe they really are guilty of something. In a sense perhaps they do believe it. But on a deeper level it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask whether they do or not. The whole arrangement is the fruit of violence: the fact that the Omegas are quite aware that if anyone directly challenged property arrangements, or access to education, swords would be drawn and people’s heads would almost certainly end up being lopped off.

 

In a case like this, what we talk about in terms of “belief” are simply the psychological techniques people develop to accommodate themselves into this reality. We have no idea how they would act, or what they would think, if the Alphas’ command of the means of violence were to somehow disappear.

This is what I had in mind when I first began using the phrase “structural violence”—structures that could only be created and maintained by the threat of violence, even if in their ordinary, day-to-day workings, no actual physical violence takes place. If one reflects on the matter, the same can be said of most phenomena that are ordinarily referred to as “structural violence” in the literature—racism, sexism, class privilege—even if their actual mode of operation is infinitely more complex.

Here I was probably inspired most by my readings in feminist literature, which often does speak of structural violence in this way. It is widely noted, for instance, that rates of sexual assault increase dramatically at precisely the moments when women begin challenging “gender norms” of work, comportment, or dress. It’s really quite the same as the conquerors suddenly taking out their swords again.

But for the most part academics do not use the term this way. The current usage really harkens back to sixties “peace studies,” and it is used to refer to “structures” that, it is claimed, have the same violent effects as violence, even though they may not involve physical acts of violence at all.

The list of structures is pretty mush the same list (racism, sexism, poverty and the rest), but the implication is there could, for example, exist a system of patriarchy that operated in the total absence of domestic violence or sexual assault, or a system of racism that was in no way backed up by government-enforced property rights—despite the fact that, to my knowledge, no example of either has been observed.

Once again, it’s puzzling why anyone would make such an argument, unless they were for some reason determined to insist that the physical violence isn't the essence of the thing, that this isn’t what really needs to be addressed. To pose the question of violence directly would, apparently, mean opening a series of doors that most academics seem to feel would really be better off left shut.



 

Most of these doors lead directly to the problem of what we call “the state”—and the bureaucratic structures through which it actually exercises power. Is the state’s claim to a monopoly of violence ultimately the problem, or is the state an essential part of any possible solution? Is the very practice of laying down rules and then threatening physical harm against anyone who does not follow them itself objectionable, or is it just that the authorities are not deploying such threats in the right way?

To talk of racism, sexism, and the rest as a bunch of abstract structures floating about is the best way to dodge such questions entirely.”
~David Graeber, 'Utopia of Rules'



 
David Graeber is an American anthropologist, activist and author. He is a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

Find his books here:
https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp/1501143336
https://www.amazon.com/Utopia-Rules-David-Graeber/dp/1612195539
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-First-5-000-Years/dp/1612191290

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